Prepositions and Conjuctions

Check out the Les Conjonctions lesson on french.about.com.

• autant : en même quantité, au même degré, egalement, as much, as many, in proportion (d’autant)
• cependant : pendant ce temps, il signifie plus fréquemment néanmoins ou toutefois, while, meanwhile, nevertheless
• d’ailleurs : d’autre part, en outre, more over, besides
• jadis : il y a longtemps, formerly, long ago
• pourtant : malgré cela, néanmoins, yet, nevertheless, still, though
• tandis que : pendant que, au lieu que, while

Verbs

• avouer : convenir, confesser, reconnaître que l’on est coupable d’une faute, to confess, to admit
• demeurer : rester, avoir sa demeure, to live, to abide, to stay, to reside, to remain
• dérouler : développer ce qui était roulé, etendre peu à peu, to unroll, to unfold
• eclater : faire explosion, se briser par éclats, briller, produire un bruit éclatant, se manifester soudainement, to burst, to explode, to break out (se briser), to splinter (se fragmenter)
• (s’)écrouler : tomber, s’abattre, to collapse, to break down
• (s’)éloigner : mettre loin, aller loin, se séparer, to remove, to put off, to discard, to move away
• (s’)empêcher : mettre obstacle à, gêner l’exercise de, s’abstenir de, se retenir de, to prevent, to hinder, to impede, to preclude
• epaissir : rendre plus épais, devenir plus épais, to thicken, to deepen
• épargner : employer avec modération, supprimer, faire l’écomonie de, traiter avec indulgence, dispenser de, to save, to economise, to spare
• parvenir : arriver à destination, atteindre un but, to arrive, to reach, to get to, to come to, to attain

Adjectives and Adverbs

• davantage : plus, plus longtemps, more
• éteint : qui n’existe plus, qui ne brule plus, sans eclat, extinguished, extinct, (figurative) dull

Expressions

• à peine : presque pas, hardly
• autant dire que : you might well say that
• autant que : as much as
• d’autant plus : all the more
• d’autant mieux : all the better

The exam is comprised of four parts: oral comprehension (listening, in other words), written comprehension (reading), written production (writing) and oral production (speaking and iunteracting with others). Each section is allotted between 25 and 45 minutes, depending on complexity and the entire thing takes about 2 hours to complete.

The format and level of the exam accords to the Common European Framework for Languages, which lists six levels of language competency from absolute beginner (A1) to complete mastery and fluency (C2) at a level that many native speakers do not achieve. The level of my exam is B1 or “independant.” It’s description is this:

Can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. Can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an area where the language is spoken. Can produce simple connected text on topics which are familiar or of personal interest. Can describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes & ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans.

Unlike the previous language exams I’ve endured (such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon), this exam concentrates on your ability to use that language in “real world” situations rather than simply your knowledge of the grammar. Defining problems and solving tasks using the language seems to me a better way of testing language competence than conjugating verbs.

For example, one of the tasks in the reading portion involved the task of picking a novel for a friend who has certain tastes. You have to choose which of four book blurbs meet the criteria. The language tasks here are to read and understand the requirements then to read and evaluate the information presented in the book blurbs. Sounds simple, I know, but the subtlety of the language used in the book blurbs makes it quite tough to puzzle out.

By the end of all of this, I was drained but I’m quietly confident that I’ll pass.

The real problem is that I’m still not as fluent as I would like to be. I still have trouble understanding French films because the language spoken is anything but “clear standard input” and the dissonance between what’s said and what’s put in subtitles warps my brain at times. Slang and the contractions and usage in daily street life still escape me although (thanks to my French IM buddies) I’m improving. I can think in French and I have dreamt in French – supposedly these are key signs of fluency. But I’ve come to believe that no one can truly understand a language or have any real degree of fluency without living it daily and for several months at a time.

Because I have no plans to live and work in a French-speaking country in the near future (Kathi won’t allow it), I intend starting another language and after much debate, the choice falls to Italian. I’ll keep up with my French by attending all the event I can at the Alliance Francaise, reading French history and comics, and chatting with my froggy mates here and overseas.

The question now becomes which language will I tackle next? Two candidates have become front-runners: Italian and Mongolian. That’s right: Mongolian. (Stop looking at me like that.) I can’t decide which to choose. Help me puzzle this through.

Italian: The Case For:

• There’s a logical progression from my previous study of Latin (which I’ve largely forgotten) to the Romance languages of today such as French and Italian.
• Being able to compare how a grammatical concept in Latin has morphed differently into French and Italian will be dead interesting from an academic point of view.
• It makes for a great excuse to travel to Italy and wallow in the ruins, sit in street cafes drinking coffee or grappa and lurk in the dark corners of the multitude of museums there.
• A lot of the rapier fencing manuals I read in translation are Italian. Someday, I may be able to read them in the original. If this proves anything like my experience with French, it’ll open a whole new world of understanding.
• I’m dead interested in, especially, Renaissance literature and the history of the Renaissance.

Italian: The Case Against:

• It’s another Romance language. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Inflected with local periphrastic differences. Yawn.

Mongolian: The Case For:

• It’s not a Romance language. Hell, it’s not even Indo-European. It belongs to the wholly different Altai language family whose members include Turkish, Uighur, Mongolian and possibly Korean, Japanese and Finnish, depending on which linguists you choose to believe.
• It will be a real challenge to learn because it’s so different from Indo-European with such features as vowel harmony and being agglutinative rather than inflected or periphrastic in nature.
• I like the image of me riding across the steppes of Central Asia speaking the language of Genghis Khan with the locals.

Mongolian: The Case Against:

• Dude, seriously?
• When the hell are you ever going to get to practice speaking, listening, reading or writing Mongolian? Are you ever going to travel to Mongolia?

The festival was pretty good and from what I hear there’s a few movies which I really should have seen. I think the festival organisers need to look at how they bill the films. Both this year and last year suffered for woefully inadequate and in some cases completely misleading film blurbs.

Here’s the low-down of my festival:

Coupable (Guilty): Complete rubbish. There is really nothing to recommend this film at all. Why on earth was it included in the program? Imagine all the magic realism of Amelie but, instead of being about the innocent and love-lorn, it concentrates with close-ups that hang around forever on the pathetic and desperate. The tag line, which is proclaimed on the movie poster in huge letters much bigger than the actual title is “sans péché, point de sexualité et sans sexualité, point d’histore” (without sin there is no sexuality and without sexuality there is no story). Maybe this was intended as a warning because as a description of the film it’s 100% correct on both counts.

Nes en 68 (Born in 68): A long film which reminded me, both stylistically and in terms of its treatment of the subject, of all those Kennedy-Miller mini-series about Australian history. It follows a bunch of students who join the worker riots in Paris in May 1968. They survive the mess and have kids who grow up to hate their hippy parents. I guess the message of the film is that each generation resents their parents for the state of the world passed down to them.

For me, the best thing about this film was chatting (in French, of course) with the woman sitting next to me who (I thought was putting the moves on me until she) said she was there in 1968. Wow. In the riots? No, she was there but was too scared to participate because they were really violent events and that she was too concerned with passing her uni exams.

Cash (Cash): An overly-complex caper film that doesn’t take itself too serious and is an awful lot of fun. There’s plans within plans, wheels within wheels. None of them make too much sense and possibly none of them should. This is a film which plays with audience expectations and knowledge of other caper film while managing to remains fairly tight and stylish and keeping the audience interested in the quirky characters. Well worth a look although it’s generally been panned by critics in the English-speaking world.

Un Coeur Simple (A Simple Heart): Very different to expectations. From the blurb, I expected a film about class-struggle and a battle of wills between two strong and determined women, one living upstairs and the other downstairs. What I got instead was a very nuanced character piece about dealing with grief. Her-Upstairs is cold but not calculating while Her-Downstairs is simple-minded but with a seemingly unlimited capacity for endurance. They both deal with lost loves, dead children, unsupportive family, social approbation, decline in health. Definitely not a film for everyone but very, very good.

JCVD (JCVD): Oh! My! God! Best film EVA!!1!!OMGBBQ! Ok, I agree that was a little over the top. This is only the second greatest film ever made (The first and greatest is, of course, Casablanca). Again, this is not a film for everyone. It’s very Brechtian in its approach using such theatrical techniques as replaying the same scene from the point of view of different characters, breaking out of the action and speaking directly to the audience, showing a character’s vision of what should happen(ed) followed by a look at what actually happen(s/ed). I guess it should be obvious that the film plays with the image of Van Damme as determined by his films compared with the “true” Van Damme as a person with real, important and pressing personal problems. And finally, fuck me, the man can actually act.

A friend (who shall remain nameless because the MPAA owns the Echelon network) has just downloaded a DVD two-pack on his and my other favourite hobby at the moment, painting wargaming figures. Unfortunately for him, they’re both in French. Yay me! Now I have a series of short “lessons” on miniature figure painting in French. I’ve only watched a bit over half an hour of the first DVD and I’m dead impressed at my ability to pick up words I’ve never known before – either because they are technical figure painting terms or just manners of expression that don’t occur often in the conversation of non-gamers such as shading and highlighting, paint and ink washing techniques, and – best of all – I now know that a scabbard is le fourreau. There’s an awful lot of learning that will happen watching these DVDs.

The DVDs are put out by Kraken Editions, a French gaming company who create figures and skirmish-level combat rules for a fantasy world not dissimilar to that of another company involving battles and carpentry tools (hint, hint). The French game is called Alkemy and the rules and a bunch of play-aids are available as a (legal) download from their site in various languages including French and English. The figures look dead cool. I’ve got to explore this world as a possible new black hole into which I can throw away my hard-earned cash.

I guess the lesson here is that you should look for ways of engaging in other pursuits that you enjoy that just happen to use the language you are trying to learn. In this way, you pick up the language almost as a by-product of furthering your other hobbies.

Saturday, Peter Ball and I saw Nouvelle Vague at the Brisbane Powerhouse. Wow! Does the awesomeness ever stop! If you ever get a chance to see these guys, do it.

For those who don’t know, Nouvelle Vague are a French band who take punk and new wave songs (early 1980) and re-interpret them as bossa nova, the dominant hip style of the French new wave (early 1960s). “New Wave” in French is “nouvelle vague.” Geddit?

Among the classics that got the bossa nova treatment were:

• Love Will Tear Us Apart (Joy Division)
• Guns Of Brixton (The Clash)
• Making Plans For Nigel (XTC)
• Too Drunk to Fuck (Dead Kennedys)
• Dance With Me (Lords of the New Church)
• Dancing With Myself (Generation X)

The highlight of the concert was the sweet solo guitar aria version of God Save the Queen (Sex Pistol) sung by the little French moppet, Melanie, who apologised to the people in the audience whom she singled out as having no future. “No future for you. I’m so sorry.”

There were two other aspects of the concert which interested me: the audience and the support act. The audience were firmly divided into two parts. There were the hip young crowd, all dressed in an appropriated memory of 1970s fashion showing off their best tattoos. The other section of the audience were old buggers like me who can remember (just) dancing to these songs when they were first released.

The support act was Megan Washington who follows strongly in the musical family known as “quirky arts girl with a piano.” Not bad. For me, her best song was the story of the last gorilla in Berlin Zoo and the woman who became his celebrity stalker of eight years – apparently it’s based on a real story.

It has plenty to recommend it as a version of the classic star-crossed lovers: Jews versus Arabs, street car racing through Casablanca instead of public duelling, a radicalised Muslim brother who would make a very good Tybalt, nightclubs, a guy whose homosexuality is an open secret who makes a perfect Friar Lawrence and post-sundown family feasting during Ramandan. But the writer doesn’t even try to figure out a way to bring Jews and Arabs together at the end of the film. That would stretch suspension of disbelief a little too far.

Modern Casablanca, as depicted in this film, looks nothing like the Hollywood back lot shown in the 1942 movie named after the city. Minarets and sky blue domes? Check. Walled gardens based around water features? Check. Lying out in the sun on the flat stucco rooftops? Check. 1980s glass and steel in the CDB? Check. Wide palm tree lined streets? Check. Looks like a lovely place to relax as long as the nightclub knife fights and drag racing along the tourist strip occurs less frequently than depicted.

There’s dialogue in both French and Arabic throughout the film and sometimes it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other starts. The cross-pollination between the two languages is obviously immense and on-going. This leaves aside the fact that the French spoken in the film is very colloquial and tres argotique.

The thing I’m discovering now is that subtitles on French films are really starting to bug me. Firstly, the words of the subtitles are (necessarily) different to the words spoken. Secondly, when I can understand what’s being said, I comprehend it a fraction later than I than I do the subtitles. The dissonance this creates just plain confuses me.

On IMDB, the demographics of voting for this film is very interesting. The film scores highest with women in all categories under 30 years old – not surprising – and scores lowest with blokes in the same age categories – also not surprising. What amuses me no end is that on the 45+ age category, these trends are reverse. The blokes love it and the women hate it. I’m sure there’s a deep philosophical point to be made here but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it is.

French Oddity #1: entretenir

I've always understood this word to mean 'maintenance.' If we break it into its roots, we get entre which carries the sense of 'between' or 'among' and tenir which denotes supporting, keeping or holding. Therefore, entretenir = 'among support' ~= 'maintenance.' It's not a clean translation into English but it's clean enough to understand the logic behind it.

This word also means 'conversation.' WTF? How are these two senses linked? They're not. Just accept it.

French Oddity #2: se passer

This pronominal verb is always used to ask questions such as qu'est-ce qui se passe? or 'what's happened?' (Literally: what is it that has passed by?) The denotative meaning centres around ideas of that which passes by or that which has occurred. Adding a de (of) to the end changes things completely. I would have imagined that this little particle carries the sense of 'about' as it does elsewhere in the language. Thus qu'est ce-que se passer de XXX? should mean 'What happened about/with XXX?'

Does it? Of course not. Se passer de is completely idiomatic and means 'to do without.' WTF?

OK. So it's odd but now we know we can always recognise it and compense, right?

You really are new at this, aren't you.

Usually, the de is hidden behind the demonstrative pronoun en (of it) in the formation s'en passer, which makes it next to impossible to spot.

All this goes to explain my confusion when watching ads for Tefal cookware during the French Film Festival. Their slogan is Comment s'en passer?. I couldn't understand why they would use 'by what means does it go past?' as a corporate slogan. To me, that sounded like the slogan of a transport company. It was only when the idiomatic rubbish above was explained to me that I could understand the English translation of the slogan: 'can't live without it' (literally: how to do without it?)

And people have the temerity to call English difficult to learn!

Hier soir, dans ma leçon française, je vois dans ma texte la question là:

“Completez cette phrase: je irais au concert de Mickey 3D avec toi si ….

Eh?!?! J'ai deux de leur CDs dans mon joueur numérique. Je suis au courant!

(I could have said I was learning French from a hot Parisian babe – photos – but no one would have believed me)