Hmm… October has come and gone, and I seem to have fallen out of the habit of posting a weekly language learning log. Some mix of travel, work, illness, and pursuing other hobbies has disrupted my daily routine. Also, reading and writing takes up a lot of time, crowding out exercises and listening. Here’s an incomplete list of what I’ve been up to this month.
J’ai fait…
VPdF Niveau perfectionnement: 13 exercises on words for exemplars and comparison.
GPdF Niveau perfectionnement: 9 exercises on past participle agreement with être and avoir.
I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
J’ai fait…
GPdF Niveau perfectionnement
12 exercices sur Pronoms relatifs composés: duquel, auquel, dont, etc.
I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
J’ai fait…
GPdF Niveau perfectionnement
Chapitre 29: Pronom sujet neutre ou impersonnel
Chapitre 30: Le commentaire. L’identification et la description.
I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
J’ai fait…
GPdF Chapitre 4: Les Temps de l’indicatif.
Les Passés
Mettez les verbes au passé composé, puis imaginez une suite à cette histoire.
GPdF Chapitre 5: Le Subjonctif
Emplois du subjonctif.
Répondez en utilisant le subjonctif selon le modèle.
J’ai lu …
La Nuit des temps, de René Barjavel, pp 238 – 410.
I’ve often heard the advice that it’s a mistake to learn vocabulary words in isolation, either as memorized english translations of French word or as memorized French synonyms of a French word. Better, says the recommendation, to remember a sentence that uses the target word so that you learn it in context. I’ve found this advice hard to implement, as I have difficulty remembering whole sentences, especially for the full range of words I’m trying to learn.
But this technique may be more viable for grammar rules. This morning I was doing an exercice on the words tout, toute, tous, and toutes. One of the examples shown was an excerpt from Césaire de Heisterbach, who chronicled the siege of Béziers (between Narbonne and Montpellier) in 1209. It contains this well known (if often re-attributed) passage:
«Comment distinguer les hérétiques des catholique», se demandait-on lors de la prise de la ville de Béziers où vivaient de nombreux cathares, en 1209.
«Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens», répondit Arnaud Amaury, légat du pape Innocent III.»
“How shall we distinguish the heathens from the catholics?”, they wondered upon capturing the city of Beziers which, in 1209, still housed many Cathars.
“Kill them all, God will know his own,” replied Arnaud Amaury, the representative of Pope Innocent III.
Ah yes, a classic in the annals of tactics. Bloodshed aside, the point of this passage was illustrate that the word tous, when used as a pronoun meaning “everyone, all of them”, comes after an imperative verb, and also after any direct object there may be. Thus «Tuez-les tous» and not «Tous les tuez», «Tuez-tous-les», etc. Moreover, because «tous» is a pronoun here you pronounce the final “s” rather than leaving it silent as you would in «Tous les deux» or «tous les gens» where it is an adjective. That makes this Béziers passage less than ideal as a canonical example. Even if I overcame my qualms about memorizing a passage about killing heathens, there’s no hint to help me remember to pronounce that final “s”.
Fortunately for me, there preamble to the exercise gives a second example that is right up my alley: a Georges Brassens song excerpt!
De Pierre à Paul en passant par Félicien Embrasse-les tous, Embrasse-les tous Dieu reconnaîtra le sien Passe-les tous par tes armes Passe-les tous par tes charmes Jusqu’à ce que l’un deux les bras en croix Tourne de l’oeil dans tes bras
From Peter to Paul, by way of Félicien Kiss them all, kiss them all God will know his own Dazzle them all with your wiles Favor them all with your smiles Til one of them faints in your arms Swept of his feet by your charms
I love the reference that Brassens makes in this song, and I am thankful to the authors of this grammar text for drawing my attention to it. I vaguely knew the “Kill them all and let god sort it out” line, but didn’t know the particular french structure of it, nor did I think of it when I first herd the Brassens song. I thought he was just doing his usual anarchy-and-free-love thing. But it’s a great bit of literary jiu-jitsu to add in his anti-clericalism and turn the Church-inspired slaughter into an endorsement of promiscuity. That said, if you look past the sentimental and nostalgic music, there’s still a bit of misogyny to these American-in-2020 ears
Anyway, from a pedagogical view point I like this example is a better fit for me. It has the advantage that it is a song with music, which makes it easier for me to remember, and also that I can listen to the recording of Brassens singing it and pronouncing the final “s”.
It so happens that I know another Brassens song, even more ribald, which shows the contrasting pronunciation of «tous» when used as an adjective «Tous les gars».
Quand Margot dégrafait son corsage Pour donner la gougoutte à son chat Tous les gars, tous les gars du village Étaient là, lalala la la la Étaient là, lalala la la la
When Margot would unclip her blouse To let her cat nurse from her breasts All the men, all the men of the village Would come hooting and howling Lalala la la la!
If you listen to the whole song, Margot is presented as a simple (but wise?) shepherdess, innocently thinking that the men are there to see a cute kitty-cat that she had adopted when its mother was lost. The men are happy to let her think whatever she like so long as they get their daily peep show. The women of the village are none too happy about it, though, and end up organizing themselves and beating the cat to death. Margot is distraught by this turn of events, takes herself a husband, and from then only shows her charms to him only. Echos of Il était une bergère if you think about it (translation).
And just in case you thought it was only men who sang ribald Brassens songs, here’s a recording of Patachou singing the same song. Recall that Patachou (née Henriette Ragon) is the cabaret nightclub singer who discovered Brassens in 1952, first singing his songs on stage and later getting him up on stage to perform them himself. According to her account, she convinced him to sing because some of his songs were told in the first person by an obviously male character, and presenting audiences with a woman singing them was too much of a stretch.
Finally, I can’t resist including this all-instrumental version of Brave Margot, posted just a few months ago by a classical guitarist
I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
L’Invité de 8h20: Le Grand Entretien (FranceInter)
Pierre Rosanvallon : “Il y a un désir d’égalité, que chacun soit reconnu dans sa singularité”
Atiq Rahimi, écrivain et réalisateur, et Jean-Pierre Filiu, historien. Afghanistan : “Maintenant les islamistes, les djihadistes partout dans le monde, se disent que c’est possible”
“10 à 11% des enseignants pas vaccinés” affirme le ministre Jean-Michel Blanquer
Gérard Larcher, président du Sénat, sénateur LR des Yvelines, est l’invité du Grand entretien de France Inter.
Bruno Le Maire : “le pass sanitaire n’a ralenti ni la consommation, ni la croissance”
Le 7/9 par Nicolas Demorand , Léa Salamé (FranceInter)
I’m going to try doing some simple French exercises daily as a supplement to consuming organic language (reading books and articles, listening to podcasts, watching videos). Exercises were a big part of how I learned French in high school, but I haven’t done much with them in the past 10 years. Maybe the habit of a little each day will be helpful.
I randomly picked a source of exercises from my shelf: Grammaire progressive du français (niveau avancé). Long ago I had written in the answers to the first few exercises, so I’m starting with Chapitre 2: L’Adjectif. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
GPdF Chapitre 2: L’Adjectif
La Place de l’adjectif
Qualifiez chacun des éléments soulignés. Mettez cet adjectif à la place qui convient.
Ajoutez un adjectif de votre choix.
Faites pour chacune des phrases une paraphrase explicative comme dans l’exemple.
Trouvez des adjectifs et placez-les comme il convient pour terminer cette description.
GPdF Chapitre 3: Les Négations
Les Différentes négations
Donnez le contraire.
Répondez avec la négation qui convient.
Complétez ce texte avec les éléments donnés en utilisant des renforcements de la négation.
Faites des phrases négatives avec les éléments suivants comme dans l’exemple.
GPdF Chapitre 4: Les Temps de l’indicatif.
Le Présent
Récrivez les phrases en utilisant la forme «être en train de» quand c’est possible.
Complétez le texte en choisissant le verbe qui convient.
Utilisez le présent à la place du futur pour rendre le texte plus vivant.
GPdF Chapitre 5: Le Subjonctif
Formation et caractéristiques
Récrivez selon le modèle.
Faites le portrait de l’homme ou la femme de votre vie en utilisant le subjonctif.
J’ai regardé …
C’est une autre histoire with French closed captions.
One last day of vacation, one last lesson with Sofia to close out the series. The focus of our final session was code-names – not the award-winning word game by Vlaada Chvàtil, but the actual French legal code and the actual geographic names of places. We also did some grammar and some writing.
The grammar section touched on the timeline of indicatif verb tenses and how they can indicate the relationship between the action being described and the present moment (or more precisely, the moment where the narration is situating itself). So the plus que parfait comes before the passé composé. The passé récent, présent, and futur proche are all considered as “present-ish” moments. And the futur comes further along in time, with the futur antérieur sneaking in between the present and the future when one needs to talk about sequenced future events.
Mille bornes ou temps borné?
There’s one more commonly used indicative tense I haven’t listed, which is the imparfait. I’ve heard the distinction between the imparfait and the passé composé described in many ways: the passé composé is for one-time actions, while the imparfait is for habitual past actions; the imparfait is for descriptions while the passé composé is for events; the imparfait is for continuous action in the past; the imparfait is for background scenery while the passé composé is for the focus of a narration, the plot. But Sofia gave me a new one that I find helpful: the passé composé is a bounded tense (un temps borné), while the imparfait is an unbounded tense (non borné). If you don’t know (or don’t wish to indicate) when an action finished, use the imparfait. Note that the present is implicitly an unbounded tense, while both plus que parfait and futur antérieur are bounded tenses, as they are only used when you need to indicate an event that has finished before some other event you wish to mention (either past or future relative to now). I don’t know why borné is a more helpful concept to me than “continuous”, but it does give me a new lens for the imparfait / passé composé distinction.
Coding on a Sunday
After the grammar, we watched another montage of “man on the street” interviews (a «micro-trottoir») asking how people felt about working on Sunday. Traditionally most everything is closed on Sunday in France. Originally this was to reserve it for religious observances, but with la laïcité this historical basis has been de-emphasized. The opinions featured in the clip varied, and I expected to be asked to write several paragraphs about my views. But this day’s lesson had a twist on the timed writing exercise: instead of having 25 minutes to write at length in response to a prompt, I had 25 minutes to read a complicated document and then summarize it in under 80 words.
I have a fair amount of experience reading French fiction, and I’ve also read and listened to a decent amount of French news articles, but I haven’t done much with reading more official French documents. Digesting the opening 20 paragraphs of this government-issued review of the laws and regulations surrounding Sunday hours for salaried workers was a comparatively experience. I’ve done something similar when I opened a bank account in France eight years ago and again when I investigated traveling there this summer amid Covid, but that’s about it.
Here’s an example of the text, beginning with an excerpt from the actual Code itself:
Un salarié ne peut travailler plus de 6 jours par semaine : au moins un jour de repos (24 heures auxquelles s’ajoute un repos quotidien minimum de 11 heures) doit lui être accordé chaque semaine et, en principe, le dimanche (repos dominical). Toutefois, le principe du repos dominical connaît plusieurs types de dérogations qui peuvent, selon le cas, être permanentes ou temporaires, soumises ou non à autorisation, applicables à l’ensemble du territoire ou à certaines zones précisément délimitées, etc.
Le fait de méconnaître les dispositions du Code du travail relatives au repos hebdomadaire et au repos dominical est puni de l’amende prévue pour les contraventions de la 5e classe. Les contraventions donnent lieu à autant d’amendes qu’il y a de salariés illégalement employés. Les peines sont aggravées en cas de récidive dans le délai d’un an.
The text is not fundamentally difficult but it is definitely a different register of language than news reporting. Most of the work is in untangling the nuances that are built into the law, though there is also some specialized vocabulary whose meaning I had to deduce on the fly from context. I imagine the comparable English section of Massachusetts state law would have the same feel.
Summarizing 20 paragraphs in 80 words does not leave a lot of room for fancy constructions or even many modifiers. I ended up writing 110 or so naturally and then trimmed it back to reach the limit. We did a quick joint editing afterwards. Here are the two drafts.
Version originale
En général, la loi de travail dit que le dimanche soit un jour de repos pour les salariés. Mais il y a plusieurs exceptions: certains établissement qui s’occupent des besoins de public ou qui bénéficent de travail en continue peuvent obliger leurs salariés à travailler le dimanche. Autres entreprises définies peuvent rester ouvertes le dimanche avec les salariés à volontés. En outre, il y a une dérogation temporaire pour ces entreprises qui luttent contre la Covid-19 en n’importe quelle mesure.
Version corrigée
En général, le code du travail dit que le dimanche doit être un jour de repos pour les salariés. Mais il y a plusieurs exceptions: certains établissements qui s’occupent des besoins du public ou qui produisent en continue peuvent obliger leurs salariés à travailler le dimanche. Les autres entreprises évoquées peuvent rester ouvertes le dimanche avec les salariés volontaires. En outre, il y a une dérogation temporaire pour ces entreprises qui luttent contre la Covid-19 de quelque façon que ce soit.
Name That Rue
Speaking of Sunday, you might know that it is named for a prominent celestial body, as is Monday. Other days are named for the Norse gods Tyr, Wotan, Thor, or Freya. But who decided these things? Do these names represent the diversity of who we are as a society today? And what if the actions of these Norse gods are no longer acceptable to our modern mores – shouldn’t we stop honoring that one weekly?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlVhJsgTuqs
These questions seem a bit academic in thinking about days (nobody is about to mount a serious campaign to rebrand Saturday as Parvatiday), but they are very much in play in France when it comes to street names. French streets are old, and many are named after people who did very bad things – ruthlessly slaughtered people in Africa, traded in slaves, mistreated poor workers, abused women etc. And behavior aside, the vast majority of honorees are old European white men. So there is a French movement to rename some of the streets that currently glorify some pretty bad people and a parallel movement to name newly constructed streets for people who belong to underrepresented groups. For example, among French streets named for people only 10% or so are named for women. I imagine it’s not much different in the US.
I’d say it was all Greek to me, but that’s not expression. When something is incomprehensible they describe it with «c’est de l’hébreu» or else «C’est du chinois». Maybe the French already decided that honoring the Greeks in this way was problematic …
Wednesday’s lessons were with Sofia once again, and as before we covered a ton of ground. We reviewed that bête noir of advanced grammar the Concordance of Tenses, and also looked at indefinite determinants. We also did a bit of reading comprehension around French beliefs in pseudo-sciences and bogus medicine. But the majority of the time was spent on oral comprehension of more difficult language: fast, informal, mumbled, and even (gasp!) Québecois! Oh, and we did another timed writing exercise to round it out.
Grammar first: when I hear “indefinite determinant”, I usually think of a matrix with a mix of positive and negative eigenvalues. But that’s not what we studied during the lesson. Instead we looked at words like “some”, “few”, “most”, “all”, or “no” – words which give a vague sense of quantity without being specific: “Few children like spinach”. If you think about it for a moment, it’s obvious to English speakers that there’s a natural order of these: “no” < “few” < “some” < “most” < “all”. There’s likely other words you could fit in there somewhere as well (e.g. “several”, “many”).
How about in French? That was the subject of the mini-lesson on indefinite determinants. French has the added wrinkle of using different words for singular concepts and plural collections. Here’s the rough ordering for singular quantities:
{aucun, nul, pas un} < {un, l’autre} < {quelque, quelconque} < certain < maint < { chaque, tout }
For plural quantities, there’s other words like «divers», «différents», and «plusieurs» that figure in the mix as well. I didn’t quite catch all the nuances on when to use the singular version and when the plural version, but interesting and worth more study.
After the grammar work it was on to oral comprehension. We started with a video about the painting “Orpheus and Eurydice” by Peter Paul Rubens. The original is in the Prado museum in Spain, but YouTuber Manon Bril has a poster on her apartment wall. When she made this video, Bril was still a PhD student in modern history and writing a thesis on the portrayal of Athena in the 19th century (explained in only 180 seconds here). But she already had a side gig of making videos about famous artwork. Her style is irreverent, fast, choppy, and with a lot of asides, so it’s a decent challenge to understand. I was helped by the recent popularity of the musical Hadestown, though it took me forever to figure out that “AH-dess” was the French pronunciation of Hades (“HEY-dees” in my dialect).
Next up was a long journalistic piece about whether Instagram photos, and specifically the wide spread use of photo filters and photo manipulation apps like Facetune, are driving people to make more changes their actual bodies. Apparently, ordinary people are not only getting unhappy that they don’t look like the glamorous celebrities they see on TV or the internet, they are getting unhappy about not looking like the modified selfies that they themselves create and post to social networks. Having gotten used to the doctored photos, they now go to the doctor to augment their bodies. That all sounds pretty terrible to my ears, but it sounds even worse when explained in a thick Québecois accent. And worse still, when discussed by Québecois students at community college with bad microphones and no training in communications. Quite a listening challenge for me.
After discussing what I did and didn’t understand from the Instagram story, it was time for written production! Same conditions as before: 25 minutes, no tools or reference works, 250 words. The prompt was «Selon toi, qu’est-ce qui construit l’idéal de beauté d’une société? Penses-tu que notre idée de la beauté a tendance à s’harmoniser? Pourquoi?» (“In your opinion, who dictates the notion of beauty in a society? Do you think our ideas of tend to converge? Why?”) Here’s my response, together with Sofia’s corrections (I didn’t do any further self-correction after the 25 minutes were up).
Version originale
Quand on parle de la beauté, on pense souvent des idées, ou philosophiques ou artistiques. Mais en outre il y a aussi des phenomène moins raffinés: la puissance politique, la commerce, et la communautarisme. Un partie de ces dynamiques pousse en direction d’harminosation, mais une autre part pousse vers la diversité.
Dans les société aristocratiques, les nobles ou les gens de haute classes s’ornent avec les vêtements distincts, les perruques, le maquillage, etc. C’est un manière d’afficher leurs richesses, mais ça devient un standard pour la beauté. Souvent les gens dans la classe moyen essaient d’imiter cette mode soit pour faire entrer dans la société de la classe haute, soit pour emprunter pour eux-même le parfum de pouvoir. Évidement les nobles et les riches sont tous beaux, et ainsi cet imitation des nobles pèse vers l’uniformité de l’idéal.
En revanche, il y a souvent des mouvement politiques en opposition et dont le sentiment contrarien jaille au niveau aesthetique. Donc ils forment leurs propres idéal de beauté qui existe justement pour les differencier avec les élites. De cette manière chaque communauté genère une nouvelle idée de la beauté.
Enfin, au fond de tout est toujours l’argent. Les commerçants ont deux strategème possible. On peut déclarer: «Vous devez acheter ceci et cela pour être beau, tout le monde le fait.» Ou …
Version corrigée
Quand on parle de la beauté, on pense souvent à des idées, soit philosophiques soit artistiques. Mais en outre il y a aussi des phénomènes moins raffinés: la puissance politique, la commerce, et la communautarisme. Une partie de ces dynamiques pousse en direction de l’harmonisation, mais une autre part pousse vers la diversité.
Dans les sociétés aristocratiques, les nobles ou les gens de la haute bourgeoisie s’ornent avec des vêtements distincts, des perruques, du maquillage, etc. C’est une manière d’afficher leurs richesses, mais ça devient un standard pour la beauté. Souvent les gens dans la classe moyenne essaient d’imiter cette mode soit pour faire entrer dans la société de la classe supérieure, soit pour emprunter pour eux-même le parfum de pouvoir. Évidemment les nobles et les riches sont tous beaux, et ainsi cette imitation des nobles pèse vers l’uniformité de l’idéal.
En revanche, il y a souvent des mouvements politiques en opposition et dont le sentiment contraire rejaillit au niveau esthétique. Donc ils forment leurs propres idéaux de beauté qui existent justement pour les différencier des élites. De cette manière chaque communauté genère une nouvelle idée de la beauté.
Enfin, au fond de tout est toujours une question d’argent. Les commerçants ont deux stratagèmes possibles. On peut déclarer: «Vous devez acheter ceci et cela pour être beau, tout le monde le fait.» Ou …
You don’t have to look too closely to notice I made tons of errors around the masculine / feminine gender of nouns. Sofia says the best way to practices that is with any of innumerable online quizzes. Just a few minutes each day, she proposes. I prefer to be lazy and just read and listen a whole bunch more, but she’s probably right.
Last order of the day: identify and understand spoken slang! I found this pretty much impossible. Here’s a short sketch about a patient who visits the doctor to try to get an excuse note for work, when in fact he’s perfectly well. The doctor sees this everyday and tries to make the visit as onerous as possible. Here’s just a small sample of the words and expressions that I was supposed to catch, but which totally went over my head:
«se bouger le cul»: se dépêcher «un branleur»: un fainéant «la flemme»: un manque d’envie «s’être blindé»: avoir réviser sur un sujet
Note that «blindé» by itself just means “very rich”, which is not the same as «s’être blindé»
It’s always good to know one’s limits, and I’ve pretty clearly hit mine. I guess that’s what separates a student in a C1 French course from a student ready for level C2.
