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French, 22 years later - TAC 2013 PaX

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akkadboy
Triglot
Senior Member
France
Joined 5168 days ago

264 posts - 497 votes 
Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish
Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh

 
 Message 41 of 70
11 January 2013 at 3:44pm | IP Logged 
Quique wrote:
Assimil: Did lesson 39, and took dictation from lesson #9.
New words: garde-manger (larder), toile d'araignée (spider's web), serrure (lock), fouiller (to search), linge (linen), craie (chalk).

I was surprised by the accord (invités) in this sentence:
Il nous a invités à déjeuner vendredi prochain.

I googled a little bit, and it seems to be a real can of worms, with grammarians and linguists disagreeing.

I'll simply ignore it :-)
As of now, I just don't care about the correctness of Les arbres que j’ai vu planter and Les arbres que j’ai vus fleurir.

Just in case you care one day :-)
The rule of thumb is that the past participle following avoir agrees in number and gender if the direct object is place before :
il a invité ses amis but les amis qu'il a invités/il nous a invités

But when the participle is followed by an infinitive, it agrees in gender and number only if the object is also the doer of the action.
Consequently, in Les arbres que j’ai vu planter, there is no agreement because the trees do not plant themselves.
On the contrary in Les arbres que j’ai vus fleurir, the action of blossoming is performed by the trees so the participle agrees in number and gender.
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tastyonions
Triglot
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United States
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1044 posts - 1823 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Spanish
Studies: Italian

 
 Message 42 of 70
11 January 2013 at 11:58pm | IP Logged 
^ That's very helpful! Thanks.
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Quique
Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
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183 posts - 313 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English
Studies: French, German

 
 Message 43 of 70
12 January 2013 at 6:49pm | IP Logged 
Thank you, akkadboy. I'll try to remember that rule of thumb.

Assimil: I did lesson 40, and took dictation from #10.
New words: tract (pamphlet), éventaire (stand), primeurs (fruit and vegetables) , filet, pilule (pill)

While FwT is cleary ahead in grammar, NFWE uses faster recordings.

Tintin: Time to get back to this bande dessinée! I read Le Sceptre d'Ottokar.
Some of the new words: sceau (seal), parier (to bet), s'écrouler (to fall down), carreau (pane), scélérat (heinous), bégayer (stammer).









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Quique
Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
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Joined 4442 days ago

183 posts - 313 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English
Studies: French, German

 
 Message 44 of 70
13 January 2013 at 8:34pm | IP Logged 
I just ordered these two bilingual books:
First French Reader: A Beginner's Dual-Language Book
French Stories / Contes Français (A Dual-Language Book)

These also look good, but they'll have to wait:
Short Stories in French: New Penguin Parallel Text
French Short Stories 1 / Nouvelles Francaises 1: Parallel Text (Penguin Parallel Text)

All the above have original French text on one page, and their English translation on the other page, so you don't need to go back and forth to the dictionary.

Besides, the original texts are FUNBUN (For Natives by Natives), not dumbed down language.

The first two books are anthologies of classical writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Baudelaire, Proust, Camus, Maupassant... I can't wait to get them!


Assimil: Did lesson 41, and took dictation from #11.
Lesson 41 in FwT was La Marseillaise, the French National Anthem! I knew the first verse, but I had never read the whole thing. Pretty revolutionary.

Some new words: étendard, mugir, épeler.

Linguaphone: I did lesson 7.

Les Schtroumpfs: There are many more French/Belgian comics besides Tintin. I read Les Schtroumpfs noirs, published in the US as The Purple Smurfs (an example of political correctness gone mad).

This comic book contains 3 stories. The plots are much simpler that in Tintin, but I was surprised by the amount of vocabulary they have.

Some new words: marais, barrage, gué, faineant, perche, jadis, ellébore, balai, bûche











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emk
Diglot
Moderator
United States
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2615 posts - 8806 votes 
Speaks: English*, FrenchB2
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 Message 45 of 70
13 January 2013 at 9:17pm | IP Logged 
Quique, how do you get those awesome scans of your BDs? I've been trying to replicate them, first with a flatbed scanner, and then with a primitive version of the DIY Book Scanner, and I still can't find a way to get great scans without being hard on the spines.

Any advice you could offer would be greatly appreciated!
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Quique
Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
cronopios.net/Registered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4442 days ago

183 posts - 313 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English
Studies: French, German

 
 Message 46 of 70
13 January 2013 at 10:21pm | IP Logged 
emk wrote:
Quique, how do you get those awesome scans of your BDs? I've been trying to replicate them, first with a flatbed scanner, and then with a primitive version of the DIY Book Scanner, and I still can't find a way to get great scans without being hard on the spines.

Any advice you could offer would be greatly appreciated!

I'm afraid that, in your country, the way I get those scans would be against the law :-(

But the thick Tintin volume I have would certainly be falling apart if I had tried to get those scans from it.
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fezmond
Groupie
Korea, South
Joined 4686 days ago

72 posts - 78 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Korean, French

 
 Message 47 of 70
14 January 2013 at 6:44am | IP Logged 
I'm also around a similar point with NFWE, just about to start lesson 36 today but I'm sure you have much better understanding than me. I'll try and get some Smurfs in French as right now Le Lotus Bleu (Tintin) is a little hard for me.
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Quique
Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
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Joined 4442 days ago

183 posts - 313 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English
Studies: French, German

 
 Message 48 of 70
15 January 2013 at 6:34pm | IP Logged 
Assimil: I did lessons #42 (revision) and #43, and took dictation from lesson #12 and #13.
Some new words:
Et n'oublions pas les artisans tels le menuisier, le plombier ou le maçon. = And let's not forget the craftsmen such as the joiner, the plumber or the builder.

Reading:
While I was in my hometown for X-Mas, I looked for the materials I used when I learned French in school and high school. I found four little books we used for reading.

Two of them were in français facile (easy French):

Michel Strogoff by Jules Verne, adapté en 1200 mots par Dominique Bihoreau
Maigret tend un piège by Georges Simenon, adapté en 3500 mots par Charles Milou (there is a newer edition with CD)



I already read Michel Strogoff. There were words that I didn't know, but I could understand most of them in context. The grammar was simple. For instance it used the imparfait and the passé composé, but not the passé simple. It also used the futur tense, but not the subjonctif.

I started the second one, which is more advanced, but not enough to stop a French native to review it in these terms:
Quote:
un livre réecrit avec un minimum de mots dans le but de rendre la lecture "facile" !!! facile? mortelle, ennuyeuse, fade... Comment veut-on inciter qui que ce soit à lire avec des phrases d'une telle briéveté, et des mots insipides?
Pauvre Simenon!


I'm for FUNBUN (For Natives by Natives), so this will probably be the last adapted text I read (I think that the two other books I used were targetted to French children).
And in a few days I should receive the two bilingual readers I mentioned a couple of days ago, with passages by the best French writers (Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Baudelaire, Proust and so on).



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