The verb franchir means to go across some limit, either a physical obstacle like a wall or gate, or a metaphorical boundary like a city line or national frontier. It can also mean to break some social norm, or cross some notable threshold like a $100 a barrel for oil.
The verb affranchir means to give someone or something their independence, to free a serf, or a slave, or a colony. The reflexive form s’affranchir can also mean to free oneself of a constraining condition – fear of flying, or living according to societal norms.
When I was researching the meaning of the word un machin yesterday, I came upon a video by an outfit called Français Authentique. They have a YouTube channel with many, many videos, largely about learning French as it is spoken informally among friends and family. I listened to an hour’s worth of them during my morning walk today and really enjoyed them.
As far as I can tell, it’s a one-man operation that Johan Tekfak has been running for 10 years. On the website he sells self-published educational materials (audio recordings, written exercises, etc.) as well as live group classes run over video conference. He seems to be in the process of expanding to a larger online education platform, that integrates social media, discussion forums and interactive exercises.
But the YouTube channel is what interests me today. It offers several hundred short videos, all in French, ranging in length from one to twenty minutes. The ones I’ve watched are from two playlists, Vidéos courtes and T’as 5 minutes? Each video in these lists reviews the proper usages of a handful of words or expressions. They’re also available as Podcats. I plan to listen to a whole bunch more — good lightweight listening to accompany walks.
Here’s some of the expressions that I’ve heard presented. From the “Shorts” series:
piger is a familiar way of saying comprendre, “to understand”. «Je n’ai rien pigé» = I’m totally lost.
c’est du lourd means “that’s awesome”, “that’s high quality”.
s’éclater means “enjoy immensely” or “take great pleasure in”. It has nothing to do with éclater, which is “to explode”.
Allez! is an ordinary conjugation of the verb “to go”, but the video calls out four significations of this interjection: “Go team!”; “C’mon say yes”; “I’m sick of this. Let’s go already.”; “We’re ready to depart, off we go”.
c’est enfantin means “that’s child’s play”, simple, easy.
courir sur le haricot is a slang expression that means to annoy, or aggravate (énerver, ennuyer, agacer, embêter). The key to understanding the origin is that haricot is an antiquated word for the big toe. So this is “stepping [running] on your toe[s]”. The conjugation is tricky: «Tu me cours sur le haricot» – the possessive is done as a direct object of the verb, not a change of the article on le haricot.
que dalle is slang term that means “absolutely nothing at all”.
Yesterday’s mail brought a new issue of L’avant-scène théâtre, dated 1 Décembre 2020. It features the full text of the play Un pas après l’autre by Fabio Marra. I’m not sure why it came just now, six months after the cover date, but at least the website is consistent: it declares that the product is available to purchase only starting 2021-07-02.
Theaters in Paris reopened with limited capacity on May 19, after a six month closure. With nothing new on stage, L’avant-scène théâtre suspended publication of new issues but allowed subscribers to request items from the back catalog. I recently received and read the February 2020 issue containing Marie des poules: Gouvernante chez George Sand, but haven’t had time to write up a post about it. In the meantime, I’ve started another Maigret novel, so the play will have to wait. I’ll get to it though – vacationing for several days over the July 4 holiday should give me plenty of time for reading. As they say, un pas après l’autre…
Update 2021-06-21: I finished this 135-page book in just three days, but collected many unfamiliar vocabulary words. It’s taking me some time to enter and research them. Vocab list coming in a post later this week.
I couldn’t sleep last night (2021-06-18), so I started the next Maigret novel in the series, La tête d’un homme (1931). It’s pretty quick going – in 3 hours or so I read 60 pages, which is a little under a half of the novel. I’m noting unfamiliar words and expressions as I go, but I’ll hold off from posting them until I’ve finished the book.
The story has an entertaining setup. Chapter 1 sees Maigret, a judge, and a prison official lurking in the shadows of a prison courtyard while an inmate effects an escape. We learn that, unbeknownst to the prisoner, the escape was arranged by Maigret himself as a way to test his hypothesis that the man is innocent of the crime for which he’s been condemned to death. Something about the evidence in the case has been nagging at Maigret, and he’s convinced the others to go along with the charade in hopes of tracking down the real culprit. Maigret guarantees that all will be well, and offers to resign should something go awry. Naturally, the escapee slips through the police surveillance and Maigret has only 10 days to save his career and find the convicted man… or perhaps the actual criminal instead.
Like many of the early Maigret books, this one has a lot of scenes in bars and a lot of river activity. So I’m dusting off my remembrances of chopine, juché, and acajou, as well as of péniches, remorqueurs, débardeurs and the like.
No, not that débardeur…
…this débardeur
All that’s left of this noble profession seems to be a T-shirt style.
It turns out that there are many other meanings of dos d’âne: it describes a style of desk, a method of bridge construction, and a topographical feature (rolling hills).
Of course, one cannot look at the sign on the right without thinking of this famous hat … er, I mean snake.
I would love to go to France this year, but making plans in 2020 or early 2021 to travel in later 2021 was a risky business. Both the US and France seem to be doing pretty well with Covid at this point, but that was far from predictable 6 months ago. All things considered, I decided to stay put this summer and travel only late in 2021, or more likely not until 2022.
So I’ve been looking into constructing a French-themed “staycation” this summer. The plan is to set aside a few weeks for intensive study, reading, writing and listening. I’ll take the time off from work, minimize domestic chores, and enjoy myself. Of course, not buying airplane tickets or paying extra for lodgings gives me a lot of leftover vacation budget, which I’m hoping to redirect towards getting professional instruction into the mix. And since my motto is “why do it when you can overdo it?”, I’m aiming for something like 20 hours per week (!).
I did some new research and dug up some of my past research on this, and have made successful contact with two vendors. The first is creatively named “A Breath of French Air“, and looks to be a sole proprietorship run by Virginie Bordier, who recently moved from France (Annecy?) to the US (Arizona). I swapped a couple of emails with her and am scheduled for a meet-and-greet tonight. If that goes well, I’ll likely do a week of intense study with her in late July. The second is Institut Linguistique Adenet in Montpellier, France. They primarily offer on-site immersion experiences for teens and adults, but also run online group classes through level C1 and private lessons. I sent them an inquiry this week and learned that the 6 hour France / Boston timezone offset rules out any of their group classes for me, but they did offer to arrange private lessons at a discounted bulk rate. I’m pursuing this further.
I spend a lot more time on my French hobby than I do writing this blog. My posts until now have been multi-paragraph affairs, along the lines of the 800-word newspaper column. As a result, it takes me a fair amount of “activation energy” to sit down and write an article, and somewhat more to finish an article. I have half a dozen abandoned posts lying around, and a dozen more sketched out in my head whose first words I never even put to paper (pixel). But I like the actual doing of the French hobby too much to do less of it in order to do more blog writing.
So I’m going to try an experiment with microblogging. Rather than (or, ideally, in addition to) writing medium- and long-form articles, I’m also going to make very short posts on my French hobby. I’ll try to avoid the “just ate a Hot Pocket” level of trivial detail, but the goal is to form a kind of diary of my daily French activities. These posts will more focus on the raw substance of what I do rather than on context, analysis, judgement, connection, or completeness.
It will no doubt take me some iteration and tinkering to get the technique right. A long stream of irregular, undifferentiated posts? A post per day with multiple updates? A post per week with updates? A post per undertaking (grammar exercises, TV series, books)? Who knows. I’ll start somewhere and see what happens.
