Summer Lessons Day 11: Concordance des temps, Langage familier

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).

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:

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.