How embarassing!

I've embarked on a rather complex project of "Getting things done" for 2008, much of which revolves around trying to better schedule my time using a couple of handy To-Do Linux apps where I can track what needs doing each day. One of my daily jobs is to spend at least five minutes doing something involving learning better French, be it reading & posting to French forums, studying my language books, etc. My lesson for today was to notice, with some horror, that there was a distinct difference between à and a, which I've been using interchangeably for around six years now, because I just couldn't remember which was which.

à = to, at

a = has

Elle a un chat. Nous allons à Nantes. This means that for years, my writing has been full of "She to the cat. We go has Nantes. I to a pipe new, from my friend has Paris." This is compounded by my lack of distinction between other similar accented words, like là (there) and la (the, her)... J'ai la pipe. Elle est là bas. As compared to six years of "I have there pipe. There pipe, there wolf, there castle. The castle is the. We are going her."

It's really no wonder my French friends think I'm insane! :D

Translation Funnies

Here's a little random scene of downtown Herbignac taken back during the blue sky months, though, oddly enough, the skies are blue today too! It's been grey for so long now that it seems really weird.

My only update for today is this hilarious article by Charles Bremner. It's the definitions of popular terms, the French version! Charles' blog can always be counted on for both entertainment and insight, and it's just getting more and more interesting as the French presidential election approaches.

And So It Begins...

How will it end? In fire...

And if you've never watched the TV series Babylon 5, don't feel confused for not recognizing this quote. What this refers to is my current dedication to improving my French.

At about ten minutes a day, granted, but at least it's something, and something I make sure to do every day.

Over the past few years, I've had too many distractions and not enough free time to make anything more than disjointed, cursory stabs at learning français, and a repeating cycle had quickly become apparent: I would begin to feel settled and OK, and turn a bit of energy towards actually trying to learn some more of the language, and then some new disaster would hit and throw us month's behind on our income, forcing out all other concerns. Worse still, many of the major problems we've had have been very "French" in nature - delays of months getting parts or work done, instead of a few days... Startling bills for otherwise inexpensive supplies... Minor problems becoming huge hassles due to the overcomplicated paperwork mess here... Etc etc. Each time, I'd be left with a seething resentment of French administration or French attitudes, which would quickly translate into an absolute total disinterest in learning the language, and it would take months or a year before my disgust had settled down enough to begin to take an active interest in learning again.

Which, thus far, has been a universally reliable predictor of near-future disasters. !!

But, I'm daring the fires again. No lessons this time, though, at least not yet... Going to a lesson a week didn't help much, as I'd forget everything I learned one week by the time the next lesson rolled around. This time I'm focusing on learning to read first, a little at a time, and a little every day - coupled with consistent writing in French every day. My personal notebook is now filled with several weeks' worth of scrawlings like, "Tirez le chat!" and "Je peut lire en français, unpeu" and "Emily a beaucoup des petits oiseaux, et ils sont tout mort".

I've timed myself, and I have a consistent lesson burnout after between ten and thirty minutes - I very quickly reach the point where too much new input all begins to get jumbled up and the brain cache has a buffer overflow, dumping big chunks of the new knowledge. This, no doubt, stems from my genetic predisposition towards being monolingual - unlike Emily, I've never had a shred of interest in learning other languages, and even now, my focus and energy is entirely predicated on using the language as a tool, and the fun stuff I'll be able to do with it, rather than on any enjoyment of learning the language itself. Kind of like how everyone else in the world feels about being forced to learn English...!

What I don't get is why human language should be so difficult, and computer language so easy. I've also begun to set aside about twenty or thirty minutes a day for "personal fun time", and have started playing with the Adventure Game Studio package with the vague potential idea of writing my own PC adventure game. Or not, it really doesn't matter... I am having a fun time just learning the building blocks of the software's scripting. And I'm positively flying along - In little time I have already begun designing and importing my own backgrounds, creating hand-drawn animations, and learning cutscene animation. C'est façile!

Which really sounds unutterably geeky.................

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Here is definitive proof that not everyone in France is stylish and elegant :)

Emily salvaged this fellow from our yard. Birds nest under the eaves of our house, and chicks often fall the two story drop to the paved yard. This critter survived by miracle, probably by bouncing off a nearby bush. Emily the bird expert is now once again enmeshed in chick-rearing. The little fellow is already capable of eating on his own, and we're taking pains (despite the pics) not to over-acclimate him to humans. With luck, he'll be off and away in a matter of days.

I'd meant to post another list of France vs. USA babble, but that's got a bit derailed by the number of side projects we've had. At times of much distraction like this, my wobbly French suffers the worst. I had been taking private lessons here in town, but my professeur had to break them off because her final exams are this month, and she has to spend all month studying to get her English teaching degree. Then, there will be summer vacations, we'll be outside, it will be too hot for sitting indoors at lessons, other projects will pop up demanding attention (The long-delayed FDP Pipe of the Year is seriously beginning to lurk...) and what little progress I've made in French will fade away completely. Aside from buying groceries, I don't think I've spoken French in a month now.

The gap to conversational-level French seems larger than ever. Worse, we've actually, finally met a few people here in town that we share a lot of interests with, but can't talk to... or at least I can't, and that successfully cramps our entire socializing. But, I realize how long and how much hard study would be needed to reach the point of actually being able to participate in after-dinner chatter, and just don't see myself having the time (or money!) to invest in such education when so many other, more-pressing issues are at hand. Grrr...

On a tangent, socializing here is still something we can't quite get a grip on anyway. We can't invite French people over for dinner because they'll hate the food we make, so they invite us over and probably wonder why we can't return the fun. In the US, dinner wasn't the point of a gathering, usually - we might go for dinner but that was just a marker on the road to everyone ending up in the den laughing. Also, there was movie watching, which I'm not sure is even done here (Friends would phone us up, we'd go over for dinner and a rented movie afterwards). Meal times seem to prohibit this, with the French eating so much later that by the time dinner and dessert is finished and everyone has talked for a while, it's often midnight! I can't imagine inviting any of our French friends over for movies and popcorn - I suspect they would find it weird. Or perhaps not, I don't know - Like my lingual abilities, my window into French casual life remains extremely small, very tight, and very focused.

But in the meantime, there is plenty to keep us busy!

Turnabout is Fair Play

Yesterday I posted a joke about how French people speak English. Thankfully, my French friends all found this funny rather than insulting, and have not stormed the house with torches (yet). Since I got away with that, I will try offering up a really funny link about our German friends too!

Amidst all this language silliness, I should note that tomorrow I start official regular French lessons with our village friend Claudie, which I hope will be a help in my mangling of français. A little at a time...

For fairness and equal humor for all, here are some of my favorite jokes about Americans:
_________________________

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in 0 gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 C.

The Russians used a pencil.

_________________________

Q: What do Americans call a TV set that goes five years without need of repair?

A: An import.

__________________________

Q: What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages?
A: Tri-Lingual.
Q: What do you call a person who speaks two languages?
A: Bi-Lingual.
Q: What do you call a person who speaks one language?
A: American!

Joke of the Day

"Bonjour!", dit les hommes aux FumeursdePipe.

Who, I suspect, will never speak to me again after I post this joke. But, I want to stress immediately that this was sent to me by a French person, so don't blame me!! :)

Un petit test proposé lors d'un entretien d'embauche...

Trois personnes sont convoquées pour un  entretien d'embauche en Angleterre.

Au moment de tester leur maîtrise de la  langue anglaise, le recruteur leur
dit :

"Faites-moi une phrase avec les 3  mots suivants :green, pink, yellow. "

C''est d''abord le Belge qui se lance :

"I wake up in the morning, I eat a yellow banana, a  green pepper and in
the evening I watch the Pink Panther on  TV".

C''est ensuite au tour de l''Allemand :

"I wake up in the morning, I see the yellow sun, the  green grass and I
think to myself: I hope it will be a pink  day".

Enfin, le Français s'avance et dit :

"I wake up in ze mornink, I hear ze phone: «green.....green...green»... And
I pink up ze phone and I say  «Yellow?»"

Meanderings through the dictionary

At right: Bonnie, Trev and I prepare to brave the Breton winds and visit La Roche-Bernard. Note my toboggan....

"No translation of an event, concept, or experience from one language to another can be made without distortion. It matters not how quickly the translation occurs or how dedicated and skilled the translator is. There are no absolutely accurate translations, and no absolutely identical meanings given to words of different languages."
from Resurrection: myth or reality? by John Shelby Spong

I'm (this is Emily, by the way) reading an odd combination of things just at the moment: the above mentioned book, subtitled 'A Bishop's Search for the Origins of Christianity'; the second collected volume of the graphic novel The Ultimates, recommended to me by my spouse, who usually guesses right about what I'll enjoy reading; and Wonderful Brittany, a book (in English!) about the chunk of land we now live on that a thoughtful friend found for us. Along, of course, with near-daily dips into the Bird Guide to Europe and the French-French dictionary that I finally broke down and bought myself before Christmas. It makes for a pleasant hodge-podge of ideas in which to marinate my brain.
Looking up something in the French dictionary can often lead to an Internet-like linking experience: I look up a word, find that the definition holds a word I don't know and can't guess from context, so I look up that word, and so on, until I have entirely lost sight of the original question and have to go back to whatever I was reading to find where I started. In one of these perambulations I found myself at the top of the page in the 'Ts' reading 'toast' (as in English, something one either eats or drinks, depending on the occasion), 'toasteur/toaster' (also as in English, the apparatus for turning one's bread into charcoal), and 'toboggan', which diverges from the English definition by being not the thing on which one slides down the hill, but instead the track on which one puts the thing that slides. Either that, or an apparatus for conveying items from one level to another. I stopped at that point, puzzled, and have not yet checked this with an actual French speaker (the average person tends to get a slightly wild-eyed look when accosted by a total stranger asking odd questions about random French words).
The word 'toboggan' in English has a fond, if muddled, association for me; it gained a new aspect not long after I married Trever, when, on a cold and wintry day, he asked me where his toboggan was before we set out on a walk. "Where's your what?" I confusedly replied, thinking that he had taken leave of his senses, as there was no snow on the ground. Until then, for me the word had been either a noun denoting a sort of sled, or a verb denoting the action that took place on that sled, as in 'tobogganing down a hill' (and landing in a bush, because there was no way to steer the darned thing). Either way, that clearly had not been what Trev meant, but after some discussion I learned that a toboggan was a knit cap, and we turned out the closet shelf together to save his ears from freezing. Sadly, that hat evidently didn't make it to France, as you can tell from the photo above, where I am the one wearing the fuzzy green hat and Trev's ears are forlornly unprotected.
Obviously, our life in France is often lived 'in translation' so when I read the above quotation it struck me rather more forcibly than it might otherwise have done. My French is in a worse state than usual thanks to having spent the last several weeks speaking English almost exclusively, but even when I'm in my top form I wonder about whether I'm choosing the best words to convey what I want to say. But of course, I wonder this in English was well, and reading Bishop Spong's quote threw me back to a conversation my father and I had about 25 years ago. I have no idea now how we got started, but it was a discussion of communication (I am the child of two sociologists, and I think the habit of inquiry is communicable, no pun intended). In the course of the conversation, we decided that all communication between human beings is of necessity a translation, even if they speak the same language, because the words spoken/written by one must be heard/read and understood by the other. And there is no guarantee that what is meant will be what is understood. This was a rather startling idea to me and one that has stuck with me over the years. Sometimes I wonder if I should bother to work on my French! But if I'm daunted one day, I'm sure that the next will find me digging through the dictionary again on the track of some word that has inspired me.....

It's CriSp!

Long, thoughtful posts are on hold for the moment while we work frantically on finishing up new pipes to try and get caught up with our money, but I wanted to toss out this one bit of inexplicable Frenchness that still leaves me baffled - the refusal? inability? confusion? over the proper pronunciation of the word "crisp". When we bought our microwave, the sales lady pointed out that it had a "crips"-ing function... presumably meaning that it could transform your TV dinners into minature LA gang members, if required. We looked at the front of the thing, and it clearly said "crisp" on it, but she kept saying "crips". At the time, we assumed that she just had a speech impediment, but over the course of three years of habitation here, we've found that everyone French says "crips" when they pronounce "crisp". Even the TV ads do it, and it's really weird to hear a professional announcer mispronouncing such a common word. I expect that the French get an equal cringe whenever they hear English TV referring to PariS instead of Paree, but that's just the anglicized pronunciation of the word - correct as the language goes. The S and P letters aren't inverted (to my knowledge) in other French words, which leaves me wondering whether this strange quirk is some bit of French y00thspeak that has crept into daily lingo.
Probably a lot more meandering than that bit of silly fluff was worth....

I don't eat tongue

Grocery shopping here has gotten much easier over the past three years. When we first arrived, every trip to the supermarket was a small nightmare - aisle after aisle of stuff all tagged with incomprehensible French names (When you can't read the text at all, it's amazing how much drain cleaner looks like window washer looks like dishwash detergent). The organization here still seems bizarre to me but we've gotten used to it, and just accept odd things like putting half the chips on one side of the store with the nuts, and the other half on the opposite side in their own rack. It turns out that our local SuperU does carry popcorn after all (caramel popcorn, though.. all we ever seem to find here are sweetened forms of popcorn, never the buttery salty stuff) BUT the popcorn is logically placed in the vegetables area. With another selection of nuts, which for some unknown reason are not allowed to associate with all the nuts in the other aisle on the opposite side of the store. Ah well... But I digress. For the longest time, I was nearly totally incapable of shopping. I could find the colas and the beers and the chips and the frozen food area, but anything specific was a no-go - I'll leave it to Emily to describe my facial expression when asked if I could run to SuperU to pick up some hand cream, some fresh shrimp, and some veggies. I thought I'd grown past this, and begun to learn my way around, but Saturday I found I was still unsafe to shop. A quick run to Netto for chips and "something inexpensive and canned" brought me to some handsome cans of "Langue de boeuf" in various tasty looking sauces. I know now that boeuf = beef and the can picture showed nice thick slices of meat slathered in thick sauce, so I thought, "Excellent, looks delish and maybe I've found a new cheap food".... only to come home with two test cans and be met with a wide-eyed expression of fright from my wife. It turns out "langues", which I'd assumed just meant "slices" or something, actually means "tongues". I'd brought home two cans of sliced tongue. To quote Buffy the vampire slayer, "There's just not enough Yuck in the world". I was prepared to toss the stuff, but Emily, who has never wasted the last drop of sauce in the bottle in her life, determinedly cooked them up and ate them for lunch the next day. Her report? Tasty, excellent sauce.......and a very disturbing texture........

Speaking of disturbing things, our October movie of the day is Arachnophobia, a slick little B movie from 1990 about mutant spiders invading a small town. Definitely a movie to give one the itchies. John Goodman chews scenery like mad as the town exterminator, a character who brought back many fond (?) memories of the various HVAC contractors I worked with back in the days of having a "real" job.