In the course of refining the curriculum for a course of private lessons for me this summer, one of the French teachers I’m working with told me «N’hésitez pas à établir une liste des points de grammaire que vous voulez réviser, des sujets que vous voudriez aborder, etc.» (“Don’t hesitate to make a list of grammar rules that you want to review, subjects you’d like to tackle, etc.”). My grammar is pretty rusty, so I wasn’t sure how to respond to this question. “Who is wise? One who knows that they doe not know what they do not know.”
Fortunately, I am a collector of French books and study materials. On my 2018 trip to Roye, I bought out the bookstore in nearby Compiègne. OK, not literally. But I did pick up a trio of reference books published under the title «Bescherelle Francais Coffret». They cover verb conjugations, spelling rules, and grammar. Bescherelle is a names that’s been a leader in French grammar for over 150 years — Louis-Nicolas Bescherelle is the namesake here. I have no idea whether any part of his original work or organization remains in the modern editions, but his name sells, and tradition is tradition.
So, if I’m asked to make a list of the points I want to review, I figure I might as well see what points there are, and then put them into various buckets (“know cold”, “rusty”, “could use review”, “new to me”, etc.). Of course, the book is 320 pages long, and is meant as a reference work. After all, who sits down and reads a grammar book from the beginning?! Well, anyone who knows me will not be at all surprised to learn that the answer is “David”! To offer an example of this, part of my job at work is to be intimately familiar with the standards of good style for writing computer code in the Python language, and to confer onto other Google engineers certification that they have sufficient command of these style rules to write Python code without additional supervision.
I started a few days ago on page one, and it’s wonderful. When I say my French grammar is terrible, what I really mean is that I once knew all these rules cold and have either forgotten them or lost the ability to apply them automatically. But reading the first 30 pages of the book is a pleasant exercise in systematic linguistics. The book starts with basic notions: word (lexical and grammatical), part of speech, word group, locution, sentence, text, discourse. It pauses to articulate the distinction between a sentence and an utterance (or more generally an enunciation), as well as the difference between significance and sense. Then it moves on to functions of word groups (subject, object, exposition, etc.), and the relationships between clauses, sentences, and paragraphs within a text.
I don’t know that it was at all helpful in responding to the teacher’s request for a list of grammatical points to be covered in this summer’s course. But it was entertaining. I think I’ll keep reading and see what I think of the next 30 pages.