the funny, fantastic French language

street talk...

2012-01-22T12:02:00.001-08:00

Here's an interesting, and local, way to improve and reinforce your precious stock of French words......

This is a map of my current place of residence, Lancaster City centre [enlarge by clicking on it, clicking twice is even better]... and there's loads of interesting street names to be translated into French. Some are perfectly straightforward [Church Street] others will take a bit of looking-up [Damside Street] and others might require a bit of imagination or adaptation [ Cheapside].

There is a Brock Street too... Brock is actually derived from Welsh [ broch = badger in Welsh] so that will be pretty straightforward, just so long as you can find out the French word for badger.

You will, of course, replace Lancaster with your own local metropolis. If you want to.

One good thing about this task is that you can do it at your own level... a beginner l can just stick to the easy ones for now.... High Street, Church Street etc, and add to them as your French improves.

Another of the good things about this exercise is that you can use these names ( inwardly maybe] every time you go into town.When you visit other places you can rename their streets too....not to mention house names, the shops etc.

So, in a few days time I look forward to a flood of emails with home-made maps of your own town or village. If you haven't got a town or village, you could make one up like Trumptonn and invent the French names yourself.

[ Thinks... Trumpton.... that could be tricky to translate ]

Well, it's music time yet again....

First, here's an interview with modern Manu... you know, the singer from Dolly... easily my top French band....

and here she is playing Goodbye live

and here is a clearer version...

and here are the words.....

Je t'envoies de l'air en souvenir
La caresse de nos palmiers perdus
Je t'envoie un sourire
Plus qu'un mal entendu

Et je dis goodbye
Je dis goodbye
Et les mots me manquent
Un peu comme toi

Devant moi les hommes regardent la mer
Et la mer leur souffle des prières
C'est ce sourire que tu n'a pas entendu

Et je dis goodbye
Je dis goodbye
Et les mots me manquent, comme toi

Je dis goodbye
Je dis goodbye
Es-ce que les mots respirent encore
de ce coté là
Est-ce que tu es là
De ce coté là

Et si tu étais là

Mais j'ai dis goodbye
j'ai dis goodbye
est-ce que les mots respirent encore
De ce coté

J'ai dis goodbye
J'ai dis goodbye

Est-ce que les mots respirent encore
De ce coté là
Est-ce que les mots respirent encore
Est-ce que les mots respirent encore
De ce coté là
Est-ce que les mots respirent encore
Est-ce que les mots respirent encore
Est-ce que tu es là

[ Merci à Muzikals d'avoir ajouté ces paroles ]

report......

2012-01-19T03:01:00.000-08:00

On one of my other language blogs recently I wrote myself a report on how I was getting on.... just like a school report really.

I did it as a bit of a joke ( hardly surprising) but thinking about it, it was better than that. Maybe taking stock of what is going on with your language learning .... its progress, your enjoyment of it, or otherwise..... is worth doing on a regular basis.

SO... here is a hastily-thought-out report on how my French is doing.After I've done it, I'm going to do another one ...but in the style used by my teachers at Wade Deacon Grammar School for Boys, Widnes. Boy, were they a nasty bunch!! Here is a picture of that august establishment....

But first, my own view....

FRENCH PROGRESS REPORT for RAY.

January 2012

VOCABULARY Ray's vocabulary is good. In fact, he is far keener on digging out obscure words than actually remembering what gender they are or learning actual sensible words that might possibly be some use. Still, enthusiasm should be praised in whatever guise it comes.

GRAMMAR Considering the fact that he has been studying French on and off for what we can euphemistically describe as " quite a while", his grammar is crap. Ray is a logical sort of bloke, a mathematician by trade, and he seems to be unwilling to learn anything which is wayward and skittish in nature... like grammar. This is understandable, but no good for somebody trying to learn French.

GETTING AWAY WITH IT. Ray gets away with this deplorable lack of systematic grammar knowledge by mainly confining his French to reading books and watching films. He apparently scoots through all the verbs and cobbles the author's intentions, plot etc by winging it. This is all very well, of course, until he actually has to speak to somebody.

STUDY HABITS Ray has a butterfly mind, and flits from subject to subject like a toy helicopter. Why has he posted nothing on this blog for ages? Because he has been learning some Welsh and Russian , that's why. Then he suddenly realises that his French is going down the pan, so he flits back. I don't see any prospect of this changing, short of death.

RESEARCH. Ray does lots of what he calls "research", but is in fact just a way of pretending he is studying and learning when in reality he is just pointing his toy helicopter in other juicier directions. Recently he has been "researching" Nabokov's use of French. He tells me that he finds it fascinating that Nabokov wrote novels in Russian and English, but none in French, yet he had a deep knowledge of French and his writings are peppered with it. This is all very well, but reading " Pnin" or "Ada" and scribbling bits in the margins hardly advances his knowledge of French very much, does it?

SPECIAL PROBLEMS PECULIAR TO HIMSELF Ray is shit scared of the Past Historic, or rather, he hates it to death. He tells me it is clumsy, ugly, and totally not needed. What, indeed, is the point of a gruesome and unattractive tense which you never use in speech? Even the silly cartoon story in La Grammaire en Claire has failed to convert him to the cause.

HOMEWORK As Ray is 62 and does not attend school, or in fact do much work at all, most of his work is homework. This is hampered somewhat by the fact that his books are stored randomly in huge heaps all over the house,and the heaps rather resemble Desperate Dan's Cow pies. He does write a lot of things down and do lots of little drawings and tables in a whole battalion of notebooks, which at least keeps him busy.

SUMMARY Ray is a wonderful person, and has many talents, but to be fair, language learning does not come easily to him. I have to say that trying to learn French,Latin, German, Spanish, Welsh and Russian all at once was never a sensible option. However, he is very keen ( on and off) and has come a long way for someone who failed French O level 40-odd years ago and wasn't even entered for German or Latin!

There you go... searing self-analysis there...very cathartic!

Here's what the report would have looked like 40-odd years back at Wade Deacon Grammar School for Boys, Widnes, Lancs...

FRENCH He does very little, and he does it very badly. He seems to spend the whole lesson waiting for a chance to make some feeble joke or other. His homework is either disgraceful or non-existent, and generally looks as though it was done in a henhouse. Does he not realise that most respectable universities require a modern foreign language as an entry requirement? There is, no doubt, some spark of sense or intelligence somewhere deep down beneath his bohemian exterior, but I am past caring.

SO... why don't you try writing yourself a report about how you are getting on...like me, you might find out things!!

This cheerful, upbeat little pop number is by Damien " Mr. Cheerful" Saez.... St-Petersbourg

Saint Petersbourg

A St Petersbourg, la neige tombe
C'est Dieu qui pleure l'histoire du monde,
Des perles qui tombent, comme si le sang du ciel,
Couvrait le siècle rouge
D'un drapeau blanc

A St Petersbourg, la neige tombe
Pour panser de coton, le pauvre monde
Mais le monde, c'est les hommes,
Les pays, les Bons Dieux
Et les perles qui tombent et qui vous montent aux yeux

A St Petersbourg, on a perdu la guerre,
Pas celle des canons, mais celle des idées,
Et y'a Olga la blonde, celle qu'on appelle Espoir
Et celle qui espère, de refaire le monde,
Un monde fait de lumière et de neige en été,
Et de soleil d'hiver et de nuit d'amour.

A St Petersbourg, moi, je n'irai jamais
Et plus je vous regarde et plus je sais,
Que je t'aime, ma princesse, mon ailleurs, mon amour,
Puisque l'âme est la richesse à St Petersbourg.

A St Petersbourg, la neige tombe
C'est Dieu qui pleure l'histoire de ce pauvre monde
Et y'a Olga la blonde, celle qu'on appelle Espoir
Et celle qui espère, de refaire le monde,
Un monde fait de lumière et de neige en été,
Et de soleil d'hiver et de nuit d'amour.
http://lyricstranslate.com

C'est divin.....

2011-10-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

To get us started, a brilliant poem by T. S. Watt....

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough ?
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through,
Well done! And now you wish perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps ?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness' sake don't call it "deed" !
Watch out for meat and great and threat
( They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not the moth in mother
Nor both in bother, broth and brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose-
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and Thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start !

A dreadful language ? Man alive
I'd mastered it when I was five.

Well... that's horrible isn't it.. they say that speaking English is like playing the recorder... easy to do badly, but very hard to do well.

And pronunciation is one of the reasons why... there are plenty of others.

[ By the way, do any of you know any poems like that about French pronunciation... please let me know if you do ]

So what about French pronunciation?

Well, it certainly isn't as fraught as English... which is good. But....( or "boo" if it's French)....

It seems to me there are three main issues...

[a] The whole business of acquiring a decent French accent at all.

[b] The mass of not-always-perfect rules about elision and pronouncing final consonants etc.

[c] All the exceptions to the above.

OK.... just getting the basic accent right... talking the way the French do...well, here's how not to do it...

It's easy to laugh!! So here's another... laughter, is, after all, the best medicine..

So why are they so awful?

I think it's two things... they lack the confidence/chutzpah/guts to just do it right... and on top of that, I suspect they just don't listen to and copy enough of yer actual French.

I bet those students can do great imitations of their teachers and their parents and their enemies... oh yes.

Listening..... imitating it... having the confidence to talk like that.

You know I keep going on about French pop songs.... listening to them, singing along, saying the words over and over to memorise them... there you go... that's how to do it.

For some reason people are happier to "do" the accent in a song format.

So do it.

And IF you want a challenge, try recording yourself reading a piece of French... just pick something from a book.. prepare it if you want... and read it. Play it back and find out what you sound like. Try to put the things you got wrong, right.

Right... that's the accent sorted out.

And the good news is, you can't be much worse than those people in the videos...

Moving on..... look at that word " divin" in the title.... the two i's are pronounced differently you know!!

You can hear Emmanuelle Monet singing this word in "Corps Salin." So they are too in the word intérim and interdit.... but in "piscine" they are pronounced the same.

This sort of thing goes on a lot in French... there are some rules, which you can look up and learn. They're in most of the bigger grammar books... Ferrar, etc.

When you look up these words in your dictionary, in some cases you will get some help... usually in the international phonetic alphabet.

The symbols used are listed in the dictionary, usually with French and English examples to let you know what they actually sound like. With a bit of care, you can work out what the word you are interested in should sound like.

There are also sites which will pronounce any French word you type in... handy!

http://www.audiofrench.com/ is one of them.

But in truth, you've got to listen to a lot of French, and let it all soak in... not passively, but actively... you got to notice these things.

The bottom line is, when/if you try that "recording yourself talking French" challenge, you could well find yourself wondering exactly what to do with quite a few of the words in any passage.... exactly how are the vowels pronounced, do I elide it with the next word, do I pronounce the last bit, what about those accents over the vowels, do I compress the middle syllable..... oh dear!!

And I haven't hardly touched on the pronunciation of imported words yet.

Anyhow, that's enough to think about for now.

Here's that Corps Salin song by Dolly... great song, moody, magnificent... but the video is just a still picture. I have made my own movie for this, but it's not loaded up yet... when it is, I will bung it in... but in the meantime, enjoy this..

That's the CD cover by the way... bloody awful!!

Well, the lyrics off the net are rubbish, so I will sort them out myself in due course... my time is up! Time for real life......

UPDATE... here we go with my very high production value lyrics video....

Nice jumper eh!!

The Fish and Chips Effect.....

2011-10-16T11:57:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a terrific book about "Language Acquisition".... it's packed with ideas and examples of good things to do, things that don't work and various methods and theories about how we actually manage to learn these hugely complex sets of "rules and words" that everybody does at least once!

[ The book is An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching by Keith Johnson]

I'll be writing about various issues from this, but the one I want to begin with is one a lot of you learners out there might recognise.

Fossilisation.

Imagine getting hold of a lot of people who are just starting to learn a "new" language, a second language, and testing them every so often to see how they are getting on.

It's been done!

Well, some people in the sample keep on improving... but some reach a certain ( generally rather poor) level and then stay there... they stop improving, and simply stay at their pretty duff level of fluency, or lack of it.

They have " fossilised."

If they do nothing about it, they will stay at this level of "pidgin" speech for ever.

Now I can recognise this in my own learning. For example, I've been learning French for a while, and can read it pretty well... but my ability to actually speak French is very poor.It's more or less fossilised at a feeble level.

Why?

Well, these studies of learners have shown that people tend to fossilise at a level where they have no incentive to get better.

So if all you need is to be able to " get by" then you tend to get stuck at the " just managing" level. This is sometimes called the " Fish and Chips" effect... because if all you need is to be able to ask for fish and chips, then that's where you will stay.

So why to other students NOT fossilise... why do they continue the hard task of language acquisition?

[a] Because they need to improve their language slills all the time... for instance, they could be in the "target language country" and doing a professional job... every day they will need to talk to their team, to deal with new vocabulary and new language structures... they are constantly a long way from the fossilisation comfort zone.

[b] Because they don't just want to learn "fish and chips" competency. They want to " integrate" with those around them... to truly be a full part of the language community and be indistinguishable from native speakers... they just can't afford to fossilise!

You can see from this exactly why my French speaking has fossilised... I never get to use it.. or hardly ever. On the other hand, my reading has not fossilised because I am reading more and more demanding French.

SO... what do I do about it?

I need to have incentive.... and the opportunity to actually do more talking... reading out loud instead of silently, talking to and arguing with the television and radio,watching more French films ( and arguing with the people in them) talking to myself, joining a conversation class/group , finding native speakers to talk to, using interactive learning materials....... the list goes on...

SO... plenty to think about there, if fossilisation is an issue for you!

In the meantime, here's Rose with the charming Comment C'était Déjà.

It has a fine video, which adds to the pantheon of " walking-along-and-collecting-a-motley-crowd films.... hope you like it...

Thanks to lyricsmania for the words....

Lyrics to Comment C'était Déjà :

Tourne-disque qui crépite au loin
Sergeant Pepper sur un dimanche matin
On s'rappelle jamais trop bien
Les souvenirs auxquels on tient

Comment c'était déjà
Comment c'était
Quand ça f'sait rien quand on tombait
Un peu de rouge sur les g'noux
Un peu de rouge qui soignait tout
Isn't she lovely comme si c'était moi
Les cheveux longs, les ch'mises en soie
La moto, les tiges qu'il fumait
Les dessins qui s'envolaient
Et toi tétais même pas née
J'étais heureuse moi tu sais
Trois petits tours et puis trente ans
Un, deux, trois soleil on est grand
Sauf que d'être grand moi j'ai pas l'cran
La machine à coudre qui ronronnait
Les bouts de tissu à nos pieds
Tout avait un sens et c'était d'jà ça
Comment c'était déjà
Et le monde comme un tourniquet
Ne s'arrêtait jamais d'tourner
Et la vie sentait bon l'embrun
Les cyprès du parc Chambrun
Et toi t'étais même pas là
J'étais heureuse moi déjà
Trois petits tours et puis trente ans
Un, deux, trois soleil on est grand
Sauf que d'être grand moi j'ai pas le cran
Et toi t'étais même pas née
J'étais heureuse moi tu sais
Trois petits tours et puis trente ans
Un deux trois soleil on est grand
Sauf que d'être grand moi j'ai pas le cran
Mais où s'en vont finir leurs jours
Les beaux rêves, les grands amours
Où s'enfuient donc ces bouts de temps
Ca s'ra comment dis
ça s'ra comment?

[ These are Comment C'était Déjà Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]

the relief of Cricket !

2011-10-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

Have you tried using google translate? It's dead easy to use, and you can have a lot of fun with it.... and it can often make you feel rather superior when it makes a complete pig's ear of a bit of French.

Let's let it loose on some actual French ............

To start with something very straightforward, here‘s a couple of lines from Nancy Pickard’s “ Jenny et les Dingues. “

Elle tressaillit, souleva ses béquilles et s'éloigna de moi en clopinant. Je demeurai sur place, embarassée, incertaine, et un peu effrayée par l'incohérence totale de son comportement.

And here is what Google Translate makes of it…..

She started, raised his crutches and hobbled away from me. I stood there, embarrassed, uncertain, and a little frightened by the total inconsistency of his behavior.

So that’s a reasonable start for GT!

Here’s a bit of Maigret… it’s from “ Félicie et la” …..

C'est un coup dont je me souviendrai, je vous assure. Celui qui a trouvé ça! Il se glisse entre deux taxis, ou dans n'importe quel coin d'ombre.Il tire. Au même moment, la voiture démarre et, comme de juste, tout le monde s'imagine que l'assassin est dedans; on se précipite à sa poursuite, tandis que notre homme a eu le temps de prendre le large ou peut-être même se mêler à la foule.

And here is the partially successful translation…....

This is a shot I will remember, I assure you. The one who found this! It slips between two taxis, or in any dark corner. He draws. At the same time, the car starts and, just like everyone thinks the killer is inside, they rushed after him, while the man had time to take off or maybe even mingle with the crowd.

[ The “just like everyone thinks” isn’t quite what he means, but it isn’t too bad is it? ]

So, a sterner test… here are a couple of sentences spoken by the eponymous heroine of “Zazie dans le métro”

Si vous continuez à gueuler comme ça, y a un flic qu'est capable de se ramener. Tout ça ne me rend pas mon tonton, on va encore dire que j'ai voulu faire une fugue et ce sera pas vrai.

…and this is how it was translated…

If you keep yelling like that, what is a cop can be reduced. All this does not make me my uncle is going to say I wanted to run away and it will not.

Obviously, once speech slips into the vernacular, Google translate becomes unreliable… in other words, it doesn’t cope with it very well.

Now when I did a similar translation test with some Welsh, it really really came unstuck with poetry!

So I thought I would try some French poetry and see how it coped…

Let’s try it with a bit of Catherine Pozzi….. here’s a bit from “ Ave” …

Par l'univers en mille corps brisée, de mille instants non rassemblés encore, de cendre aux cieux jusqu'au néant vannée, vous referez pour une étrange année un seul trésor,
vous referez mon nom et mon image de mille corps emportés par le jour, vive unité sans nom et sans visage, coeur de l'esprit , ô centre du mirage très haut amour.

And here is its wonderful / woeful translation…

By the world body into a thousand broken a thousand times not yet gathered, ash winnowed to heaven to nothing, you refer to a strange year one treasure, you refer my name and picture of a thousand bodies carried away by the day Long live unity nameless and faceless, the heart of the mind, O the center of the high mirage love.

As you can see, it's got a lot of the words right, but the "feel" of the poem has been lost completely... rather as you would expect. A machine has no chance with stuff like this.... imagine trying to translate The Waste Land using a translation machine.. it's almost beyond the reach of a skilled human translator.

Just for a laugh, let's have a go... this is just after the start of the first section, The Burial of the Dead... here's the English version...

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

and here is what Google translate makes of it...

Quelles sont les racines qui l'embrayage, ce qui poussent les branches
Sur ces ordures pierre? Fils de l'homme,
Vous ne pouvez pas dire, ou deviner, car vous savez que
Un tas d'images brisées, où le soleil tape,
Et l'arbre mort ne donne pas d'abri, le cricket aucun soulagement,
Et la pierre sèche aucun bruit de l'eau. seuls les
Il ya l'ombre sous cette roche rouge,
(Venez à l'ombre de ce rocher rouge),
Et je vais vous montrer quelque chose de différent soit
Ton ombre au matin marchant derrière vous
Ou votre ombre au soir, la hausse de vous rencontrer;
Je vais vous montrer la peur dans une poignée de poussière.

You can amuse yourself by going through a whole chain of languages... so I took this French version of the Waste Land through Welsh.... Latin.... Spanish and back to English again and finished up with this...

You can leave the roots, which branches to grow
Trash of the stone? Son of man,
You can not say or guess, for you know
A set of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree is not the ceiling, but no relief of Cricket
And the dry stone no sound of water. only
Network under the shade of a rock
(Come to the shade of the red stone)
And I will show another
In the morning you walk after your shadow
Or your shadow in the night coming to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Now that has a loveliness all of its own!

Ah... the relief of Cricket!! And I rather fancy that "network under the shade of a rock."

Well... that's enough mucking around for one day... let's listen to the excellent Holden and their open-air rendering of " Je dois m'en aller"........ I wonder where they are.

and here's the words, apparently...

Je dois m'en aller Lyrics
Holden

Je suis venue le genoux à terre les cheveux en arrière
Mais les paupières me tombent aussi
Vas-tu me laisser cher incompris
Je te l'ai dit
Je t'aime bien mais je dois m'en aller

On s'est saoulé de vin et de mots on s'est mis K.O.
Mais les sirènes m'appellent aussi
Vas-tu me laisser cher indécis
Aujourd'hui
Je ne t'en veux pas mais je dois m'en aller

Je t'ai vu faire le coléoptère t'élever dans les airs
Oh mais les cerp-volants me parlent ainsi
Je les écoute et je les oublie
C'est ainsi
Il se fait tard et je dois m'en aller

Je suis déjà sur une autre planète le coeur et la tête
Mais les boulevards me manquent aussi
Vas-tu me laisser toi qui respire
Qui m'inspire
Je n'y peux rien si je dois m'en aller

SOME NEWS... next week [Thursday 20th ] on BBC4 at 11:50 pm there is going to be a French comedy program on.... so there.

FOOTNOTE... here's what google Translate did to those song words...

have to go Lyrics
Holden

I came to the knees down the hair back
But my eyes also fall
Will you leave me much misunderstood
I told you
I love you well but I have to go

We got drunk with wine and words we started KO
But the sirens call me too
Will you leave me much undecided
today
I do not blame you but I have to go

I saw the beetle to raise you in the air
Oh but cerp flying and talk to me
I listen and I forget
thus
It's getting late and I have to go

I'm already on another planet the heart and head
But I miss the boulevards as
Will you let me you breathing
inspires me
I can not help it if I have to go

Ils croient que c'est finis !

2011-10-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

Watching French football... with French commentary.... is another good way to listen to real French.... it's often pretty fast, but they tend to use a lot of stock phrases, and much of the vocabulary is predictable too.

It's fun too, if you like football.

Some of the clips I'm going to show you are quite long... if you only watch one of them, watch the last one which also has some discussions/arguments at the start ( and the end) rather like we get on Match of the Day here in the UK.

To get started, here's some highlights from a France-Spain match, with excited french commentary.. listen out for " la frappe!!!" in this one...

and here's another excited commentary on the highlights from a Lyon-Marseilles match...this is gripping stuff... " et ensuite, un touché magnifique! " ..well, I think that's what he says. A nail-biting finish too, with " une grosse minute..".....

Here's more for you....Marseille v. Caen.... la capitaine montre l'exemple...

This one is a commentary/résumé of a St.Etienne- Marseille match...stacks of French here.. peut-être bon présage....

and here's a terrific footy conversation/argument+ actual match clips... " résumer Rennes-St Etienne. This is real French in action... listen out for " l'attaque plurielle de Rennes"...

Well... wasn't that all entertaining and instructive folks... and of course you can go over and over these , understanding and picking out more each time.

But now, it might be music time..

This lovely piece of music is a version of an Alain Bashung song, performed by the remarkable Ina-Ich……. The song is La nuit je mens…

And here are the words….
La Nuit Je Mens Lyrics

On m'a vu dans le Vercors
Sauter à l'élastique
Voleur d'amphores
Au fond des criques
J'ai fait la cour à des murènes
J'ai fait l'amour j'ai fait le mort
T'étais pas née

À la station balnéaire
Tu t'es pas fait prier
J'étais gant de crin, geyser
Pour un peu je trempais
Histoire d'eau

La nuit je mens
Je prends des trains à travers la plaine
La nuit je mens
Je m'en lave les mains
J'ai dans les bottes des montagnes de questions
Où subsiste encore ton écho
Où subsiste encore ton écho

J'ai fait la saison
Dans cette boîte crânienne
Tes pensées
Je les faisais miennes
T'accaparer seulement t'accaparer
D'estrade en estrade
J'ai fait danser tant de malentendus
Des kilomètres de vie en rose

Un jour au cirque
Un autre à chercher à te plaire
Dresseur de loulous
Dynamiteur d'aqueducs

La nuit je mens
Je prends des trains à travers la plaine
La nuit je mens
Effrontément
J'ai dans les bottes des montagnes de questions
Où subsiste encore ton écho
Où subsiste encore ton écho

On m'a vu dans le Vercors
Sauter à l'élastique
Voleur d'amphores
Au fond des criques
J'ai fait la cour à des murènes
J'ai fait l'amour j'ai fait le mort
T'étais pas née

La nuit je mens
Je prends des trains à travers la plaine
La nuit je mens
Je m'en lave les mains
J'ai dans les bottes des montagnes de questions
Où subsiste encore ton écho
Où subsiste encore ton écho

La nuit je mens
Je prends des trains à travers la plaine
La nuit je mens
Je m'en lave les mains
J'ai dans les bottes des montagnes de questions
Où subsiste encore ton écho
Où subsiste encore ton écho...

Author's note... the picture at the top is from Zig et Puce, a well-loved French comic which ran to only 6 issues ( I think)...so perhaps it was not appreciated at the time.

Here's a little bit about them...

Zig et Puce viennent en tête des nombreux duos de la bande dessinée francophone : Quick et Flupke, Spirou et Fantasio, Blake et Mortimer, Johan et Pirlouit, Astérix et Obélix, Valérian et Laureline... Entre eux, il n'y aura jamais de premier et de second rôle, ni d'opposition de caractère bien tranchée. Ils sont deux, tout simplement, indissociables - et bientôt trois, puisque dès la quinzième planche de leur première aventure ils adoptent le pingouin Alfred (après avoir d abord tenté de le capturer pour s'en nourrir). Le volatile s'attirera une formidable sympathie populaire, dont les causes demeurent difficiles à analyser. Ses maîtres n'en prirent pas ombrage. Leur petit monde s'enrichira encore de trois autres figures récurrentes : la petite Dolly (nièce d'un milliardaire, elle inspire à Zig de tendres sentiments), le cheval Marcel et le professeur Médor -les deux derniers plus intéressants que l'insipide demoiselle.
Fabuleuse odyssée que celle de ces deux gamins de Paris, sans attaches familiales et sans le sou, décidés à faire fortune en les mondes connus et inconnus, de l'Ethiopie, l'Australie et les Indes jusqu'aux contrées imaginaires de l'Atlantide et de la Marcalance, sans oublier une excursion sur Vénus. Dans la lignée des globe-trotters, entre la Famille Fenouillard et Tintin, ils font figures de champions.
Certes, sous le crayon de Saint-Ogan, le monde apparaît comme une collection de lieux communs et d'images d'Epinal, charriant tous les stéréotypes et préjugés de l'époque. Peut-être est-ce le prix à payer pour un récit qui va toujours très vite et qui accumule les invraisemblances ? Zig et Puce ne se posent quelque part que le temps de vérifier ce que chacun croit savoir. Ainsi, quand un sous-marin les dépose sur la côte du Japon, ils n'ont que le temps de négocier un kimono et d'être victimes d'un tremblement de terre - et les voilà déjà repartis à bord d'une voiture qu'ils gagnent à la loterie.

[I spent a while looking up that word Marcalance which occurs in the cartoon I posted. Silly me]

Les religieuses immurée.....

2011-10-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

The other day me and the Librarian toddled up into the Lake District.... right up to the Northy bit where the tourists don't go.

We went there to go and see Richard, one-time lead guitar of both of our fantastic bands.... Blank Czechs and the Walled-Up Nuns. I was the utterly terrific bass player of course... bass-playing and maths go together you know. I am sure that Richard would agree that I wrote their most popular song... "Ammunition." Well, I'm fairly sure.

Well, that was all a long time ago, but since then Richard has done a remarkable thing. He's become a fluent Gaelic speaker. He even teaches it.

To say that I am impressed would be a total understatement. It's not as if he lived up there or anything.... he's been on a few courses and " Gaelic Weeks" or whatever but most of the time it's been all his own work.

SO.... I was keen to glean from this fountain of wisdom exactly how he managed to become so good whilst having very little opportunity to speak the language conversationally.Because, of course, I am on pretty much the same boat, but with French instead of Gaelic.

Mind you, he does have a reasonable age advantage over me. Bah.

It turns out he did much the same sorts of thing that I'm doing.... and he still does.

[a] He listened to lots of courses on tape etc.

[b] He tried to use the language wherever he could....

[b1] .... at home

[b2] ..... whilst driving or walking around the town

[b3] ....... translating boring meetings into Gaelic.

[b4] .........talking back at the radio or tele

[b5] ........... describing things and people as he went around.

[c] He got hold of interesting books and magazines.

[d] He learned patterns of sentences and then changed them for different uses.

[e] He memorised words by all the standard methods.

Basically, all of the things I've been banging on about on the blog.

I was fairly pleased that he didn't come up with anything that I hadn't thought of... but thinking about it, it would have been good if he had.

He liked my mobile phone idea..... well, I think he did... he might just have thought it polite to do so.

I know that I am not temperamentally suited to language learning... I will list my deficiences in this area at some future point!.... I was certainly utterly utterly crap at it at school, in French, Latin and German.I'm versatile me.

In some ways, I am pretty amazed how much I have done in these twilight years of mine.

Not half as amazed as my French, Latin and German teachers would be however. Ciel!

Still, it did make me appreciative of the advantages I've got in learning French compared to Gaelic... here's a little list of all those things I can benefit from that your average Gaelic learner probably can't.... reasons to be cheerful, if you like..

There's loads of interesting, even brilliant, French films to watch.

French music is utterly inspiring and lovely.

The resources for learning French are , in general, abundant and excellent.

French novels, cartoon books, graphic novels, poetry etc are readily available.

You can buy French newspapers with reasonable ease.

There's loads of French resources on the net.

It's probably a lot cheaper to holiday in France than in Northern Scotland.

Warmer too.

You often hear French on news items on the TV and radio.

You can listen to loads of french-language radio stations online.

You are far more likely to meet French speakers than Gaelic speakers.

Well, you get the idea!

Right then... let's have some blasted music. Something cheerful and uplifting is what we want..... we'll try Dolly/Manu and Comment taire... not really a video though.

and here's a fine acoustic version ... still just a still though...

but here's the words..she seems to sing it a little bit differently in places from what it says on the CD sleeve notes, so I've tweaked them a little...any corrections will be welcomed.

Title: Comment Taire
Artist: Dolly

Comment faire
Comment dire
Comment taire
Taire les mots les souvenirs
Revenir en arrière
Je veux revoir ton sourire
Comment faire
Pour te dire
Les mots écrits sur ton visage
Revenir en arrière
Je veux revoir ton sourire
Tu as toujours su me donner l'espoir
Et je n'ai plus peur de trouver juste un peu de courage
Te donner le meilleur
Je vois les signes les présages
Je vois les signes tu es mon plus beaux paysage
J'apprends lire entre les pages
Je veux revoir ton sourire...
Je veux revoir ton sourire...
Enfin te voir mon sourire
Tu as toujours su me donner de l'espoir
Et je n'ai plus peur de trouver juste un peu de courage
te donner le meilleur
Comment faire
Comment dire
Comment taire
Taire les mots les souvenirs
Revenir en arrière
Je veux revoir ton sourire...
Je veux revoir ton sourire...
Je veux revoir ton sourire...
etc....

UPDATE.................
[a] I hope I got the title right up at the top... should it have been murée ?
[b] I've been reading a fascinating book about language acquisition... no doubt I will be writing more about all that at some point...
[c] Yes, I know I missed last Thurday, and I know this is a day early. I'm a pragmatist, rather than a perfectionist....

météomédia....

2011-09-18T11:16:00.001-07:00

Here's a load of French weather forecasts for your delight... and truly delightful (not) is this "fake" French weather forecast... the bar is set a tad low here I would surmise.... surely there are much much livelier and more interesting ways to introduce that sort of stuff??

In the same vein, here's a jolly French weather song...

Right then.... why would we bother with French weather forecasts? Well, they're in French for a start.

Then, of course, they use a somewhat limited vocabulary which you will soon pick up, even though the shows generally go at a hell of a pace.

Plus, your understanding is helped a bit by the gestures and general arm-waving that goes on over the maps....

And, talking about the weather fluently is a good thing as it's what people do as part of their conversation.

Plus... it's real, fast French...you'll want to get used to that!

[ It has to be said that, as far as youtube is concerned, there is only one thing they are interested in as far as weather forecasts in any language are concerned... you will soon guess what it is]

Here we go then..... get your interpreting skates on folks...

That was pretty fast French!!.. but you can pick out lots of phrases as she whizzes through it.... so here's another...

another rapid-fire forecast with a different sort of map...

I know.. you're all wondering if ALL French weather forecasters are female.... well, they might be...... here's a neat forecast... it predicts the end of the world..

There's a whole series of those on youtube.... but now back to the mainstream but with much more rudimentary maps...

Blimey and cripes... here's a BLOKE...

Some Quebec weather for you... the blokes have disappeared again...

and here's Quebec yet again... pretty fast this...

And this one might be the fastest of the lot.... awesome!!

In addition to all this, there are LOADS AND LOADS of "school project" weather forecasts all over youtube which are funny for all the wrong reasons! The accents are really atrocious... what is going on?

Actually, I can't resist showing you one... this is no better and no worse than all the others to be found...

QUESTION OF THE WEEK... seeing as how the French words for hair and horse are so easily confused, what is the French word for horsehair?

{Obviously, I know the answer... it's crin.... could that be linked to crinoline I wonder?)

Having said that, here's KYO with Dernière Danse...neat video... and certainly a hint of Saez in that voice.....

Artist: Kyo lyrics
Title: Une Dernière Danse

J'ai longtemps parcouru son corps
Effleuré cent fois son visage
J'ai trouvé de l'or
Et même quelques étoiles
En essuyant ses larmes
J'ai appris par coeur
La pureté de ses formes
Parfois, je les dessine encore
Elle fait partie de moi

{Refrain:}
Je veux juste une dernière danse
Avant l'ombre et l'indifférence
Un vertige puis le silence
Je veux juste une dernière danse

Je l'ai connue trop tôt
Mais c'est pas d'ma faute
La flèche a traversé ma peau
C'est une douleur qui se garde
Qui fait plus de bien que de mal
Mais je connais l'histoire
Il est déjà trop tard
Dans son regard
On peut apercevoir
Qu'elle se prépare
Au long voyage

Je veux juste une dernière danse,
Avant l'ombre et l'indifférence
Un vertige puis le silence
Je veux juste une dernière danse

Je peux mourir demain
Mais ça n'change rien
J'ai reçu de ses mains
Le bonheur ancré dans mon âme
C 'est même trop pour un seul homme
Je l'ai vue partir, sans rien dire
Fallait seulement qu'elle respire
Merci d'avoir enchanté ma vie
Avant l'ombre et l'indifférence,
Un vertige puis le silence,
Je veux juste une dernière danse

J'ai longtemps parcouru son corps
Effleuré cent fois son visage
J'ai trouvé de l'or
Et même quelques étoiles
En essuyant ses larmes
J'ai appris par coeur
La pureté de ses formes
Parfois, je les dessine encore
Elle fait partie de moi

Une dernière danse.

(Merci à Elisa pour cettes paroles)

[ These are Une Dernière Danse Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]

Opinion de betterave !!

2011-09-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

A bit ago I made a damned good case for all of you to read Amélie Nothomb's brilliant book " Péplum."

Here is the author...

I'm glad I didn't get those two pictures mixed up anyway.

One of its main attractions... apart from the brilliant central theme, the clever interplay of ideas, the terrific pageturningness etc, is the simple fact that it is all speech.... a sort of extended argument between two people... like a two-handed play in fact.

A lot of the snappy answers, insults, put-downs etc went into my amazing and truly useful notebook... the Observer's Book of French.

So... I thought I would treat you to a selection of these verbal gems... some trivial, some useful, some total flights of fancy, some weird, some idiomatic, some to send you rushing to the dictionary.... but all interesting.

[1] Cela n'a pas de sens

[2] Vous n'en savez rien

[3] Soyez certain que votre jugementne nous interesse pas.

[4] Je n'avais pas d'illusions sur ce point.

[5] Cela m'émeut.

[6] C'est un peu vague... j'aimerais plus de détails.

[7] J'ai du mal à vous croire.

[8] Baratin !!

[9] Quel charabia !!

[10] Vous me surestimez.

[11] C'est un cauchmar.

[12] Rentable !!

[13] Raillez, raillez !!

[14] Ciel !!

[15] Opinion de betterave.

[16] Si vous essayer de me le dire, je me bouche les oreilles.

[17] Vous me faites marcher !!

[18] Comparison sans aucune valeur.

[19] C'est un aporie ce que vous me racontez.

[20] Qui peut le plus peut le moins.

[21] Quelle faut de goût.

[22] Enfantin !!

[23] Allons..... un peu de sérieux, voulez-vous ?

[24] Où est le mal ?

[25] Laissez-moi deviner...

[26] Arrêtez, avec votre folklore à deux sous...

[27] Je suis bouleversée !!

[28] Alors, ne niez plus.

[29] Cessez ces enfantillages.

[30] Et pour cause.

[31] Et hop !!

And that's only a small selection. Go on... read it !!

Well now.. this is "oddball" French singer Michel Polnareff with a distinctly odd video for the song " La poupée qui fait non"

and here are the words.....

La Poupee Qui Fait Non lyrics

C'est une poupée qui fait non, non, non, non
Toute la journée elle fait non, non, non, non
Elle est, elle est tell'ment jolie
Que j'en rêve la nuit
C'est une poupée qui fait non, non, non, non
Toute la journée elle fait non, non, non, non
Personne ne lui a jamais appris
Qu'on pouvait dire oui
Sans même écouter elle fait non, non, non, non
Sans me regarder elle fait non, non, non, non
Pourtant je donnerais ma vie
Pour qu'elle dise oui
Pourtant je donnerais ma vie
Pour qu'elle dise oui
Mais c'est une poupée qui fait non, non, non, non
Toute la journée elle fait non, non, non, non
Personne ne lui a jamais appris
Qu'on pouvait dire oui
Oh, non, non, non, non
non, non, non, non
Ell' fait non, non, non, non

[- From: http://www.elyrics.net/read/m/michel-polnareff-lyrics/la-poupee-qui-fait-non-lyrics.html -]

And here, apropos of nothing, is a rather odd video of a trip around Annecy with stunningly inappropriate background music. My only connection with Annecy is that my first, one and only French pen-friend lived in Annecy about 80 billion years ago.. I wonder if he is that old bloke wandering down the alley? He was called Henri-Pierre Arrouet... if you're out there, H-P, hi from ray!!

IMPORTANT NOTICE.... well, not all that important... I'm going to try to write something every Thursday.... just to keep me on the straight and narrow and not disappearing for decades at a time.

Thursday is by far my least favourite day, so it will give me a goal... a purpose... a reason for Thursday to exist.

We'll see!

What works, and what doesn't....

2011-09-10T04:34:00.001-07:00

I've only got one target today... I have recently been looking at a rather unusual but very relevant and interesting site.

It's about language learning, but it's not about any particular language.

It's all about general ideas, processes, motivation, things that work and things that don't, how NOT to learn a language, how to make effective progress...and so on.

And, as far as I have read it so far, it's all very helpful and very reassuring advice.

It's called Baby Steps to Fluency ... I've put a link to it in the sidebar.

I'm sure anyone learning a language will find it most interesting and useful.

That's it for today really... so here's Diam's.. I've not put anything by her on here for a while.... so here is Diam's in concert singing SOS... it's the only reasonable video I could find, but the audience are so brilliant and seem to know all the words... a really fantastic atmosphere...it more than makes up for the poor quality of the recording. Whatever one might say about her choice of stage outfits, it's a hell of a song!!

Here's a really useful video of the words....

...and here are the written words... plenty of them too.

SOS lyrics
Diam's

SOS SOS
SOS SOS
SOS SO-est-ce que tu pleurs

Petite histoire d'une soirée calme
Dans la froideur de Décembre
Est-ce le fruit du hasard
Ou est-ce que Dieu était présent
Y a comme un arrière goût de larmes
Quand je parle de toi
C'est comme un appel aux armes
Mais j'ai envie de foutoire
Comme un désir de foutre en l'air
Chacune des soirées que je passe
Tu me torture, j't'ai dans la chaire
quand je les vois et qu'ils me chassent
Toi que j'admire de m'avoir laissé
Au profit de ta droiture
Dieu que ma plume aimerait te blesser
Si tu m'écoutes dans ta voiture

Je veux te toucher, je veux t'atteindre
Je veux que coules sur tes joue ces larmes
Et la crainte que je ressens chaque jour où tu n'es pas là
Toi, ton être, ton âme, ta voix de miel
Je sais que tu me regardes hier je t'ai vu dans le ciel
Je vois ton dos, je vois ta nuque,
Je vois tes lèvres dans mon ombre
Ton charisme et ta carrure
Qui étaient mes armures dans ce monde
Je les ai perdus
Dieu que la vie est terne sans mon

Que s'éteignent toutes les lumières
Car depuis toi je suis aveugle
Alors malgré le temps qui passe
L'amour, les hommes qui me chassent
Moi dans ma tête y en a que pour toi
Je marche sur tes traces quoi que je fasse
Je rends à l'être aimé ses lettres de noblesse
Où que tu sois sur la planète, je t'adresse ce SOS

SOS
SOS oh SO-est-ce que
SO-SOS SOS SOS SO-SO-est-ce que tu pleures dans le fond tout comme moi

SOS
SOS oh SO-est-ce que
SO-SOS SOS SOS SO-SO-est-ce que tu pleures dans le fond tout comme moi

A l'heure qu'il est je me demande
Si tu repenses à mon regard
Celui-là même qui te mangeais
Et qui te mettais en retard
Celui-là même que tu combattais corps et âme
SO-est-ce que tu penses à moi
Dans les bras de ta femme
Je l'espère, ouais c'est pêché
Mais c'est plus fort que moi
J'ai tente d'te détester
Mais moi la haine je ne sais pas
Tu me connais mieux que personne
Malgré mon passé chez les hommes
Je reste ta poupée
Celle qui t'aimais des heures au téléphone
Je n'aie pas changé non non
J'ai juste repris la route
Celle qui m'éloigne de nous
Celle qui me tue à coup de doutes
Aurais-je dû lutter et te bouger
Te forcer à m'épouser
Te pousser au divorce
Et mon amour te le prouver
Aurais-je dû mais tout cela est si délicat
Aurais-je supporter d'être celle qui te conduis chez l'avocat
Aurais-je pu vivre des amours
Sachant qu'elle pleure quand je t'aime

Que s'éteigne le temps
Je ne peux pas vivre en ces termes
Alors malgré le temps qui passe
L'amour, les hommes qui me chassent
Moi dans ma tête y en a que pour toi
jJe marche sur tes traces
Quoi que je fasse je rends à l'être aimé
Ses lettres de noblesse
Où que tu sois sur la planète
Je t'adresse ce SOS

SOS
SOS oh SO-est-ce que
SO SOS SOS SOS SO SO-est-ce que tu pleures dans le fond tout comme moi

SOS
SOS oh SO-est-ce que
SO SOS SOS SoS SO SO-est-ce que tu pleures dans le fond tout comme moi

Dans cette froide soirée d'hiver
J'ai ton coeur dans le mien
Je pense à toi hier
Je pense à toi demain
Alors je rappe ce qu'il me reste
Des souvenirs et des chaînes
Car je suis liée à ton être
Et je le chanterais sur scène

Que s'éteigne la lumière
Que le public soit avec moi
Seras-tu là devant là scène
Quant ils chanteront pour toi
Pourrais-je te voir parmi les gens
Pleurer des larmes de raisons
Toi qui priera pour que ma chanson
Ne passe jamais sur les ondes

Toutes les femmes qui se respectent
Ont déjà connu l'interdit
Mais si je t'aime à en crever
C'est que Dieu me l'as permis
J'suis en contrat avec des regrets
Que tu le veuilles ou non
Depuis toi je vis en retrait
Toute seule dans ce monde

Depuis toi je me sens belle
Dans tes yeux je me sens légère
Petite reine sans toi je règne
Mais le château est désert

Qu'on éteigne la musique
Je ferais comme si t'étais là
Et si Dieu entend tes prières
Je finirais a capella

SOS
SOS oh SO-est-ce que
SO-SOS SOS SOS SO-SO-est-ce que tu pleures dans le fond tout comme moi

SOS
SOS oh SO-est-ce que
SO-SOS SOS SOS SO-SO-est-ce que tu pleures dans le fond tout comme moi

SOS
SOS oh SO-est-ce que
SO-SOS SOS SOS SO-SO-est-ce que tu pleures dans le fond tout comme moi

SOS
SOS oh SO-est-ce que
SO-SOS SOS SOS SO-SO-est-ce que tu pleures dans le fond tout comme moi

SOS
SOS oh SO-est-ce que
SO-SOS SOS SOS SO-SO-est-ce que tu pleures dans le fond tout comme moi

SOS
SOS oh SO-est-ce que
SO-SOS SOS SOS SO-SO-est-ce que tu pleures dans le fond tout comme moi

(Merci à Camille Urgin pour cettes corrections)

[ These are SOS Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]

Aren't you even more impressed with that audience now?

As an afterthought, here's Diam's live in a very well-recorded performance, but with a totally dead audience.....the diametric opposite of the video above... it's that lovely Enfant du désert song...

Immortels.....

2011-08-31T05:44:00.001-07:00

Here's 2 things I found recently in different ways.

First off, trying to sort all all the stuff in this so-called office/attic/dump at the top of the house, I found a book that I hadn't seen for ages. It's one of the first French books I got after I decided to learn French ( amongst other things) after that trip to Lithuania.

It's " Amour et sparadrap" by the inimitable " Exbrayat."

That's " Love and sticking-plaster" in yer actual English.

At the end of the back page blurb it says... " Amour et sparadrap, un roman policier rempli d'humour, mené à un train d'enfer."

Well, I wouldn't know, because I bought it at such an early stage in my learning process ( almost zero) that I couldn't read it and soon couldn't find it either.

The second thing I found is much much more recent...well, I've had the book for ages, but only just gone back to it and remembered its French Connection.... it's Terry Jones' book, Chaucer's Knight.

This is a really really gripping book about how nobody "got" what Chaucer was doing with his portrayal of the Knight in the Canterbury Tales. Or rather, everybody got it completely wrong. It's one of the most brilliant books I've ever read... a " Desert Island discs" -type book.

So what's the French connection, you might ask.

Well, Chaucer lived in a world where French was the language that all the posh/educated people spoke. Chaucer wrote it in English but "thought" it all in French. He was one of the first authors to do this... to write a learned work in English rather than French or Latin... maybe he was the first.

As it happens, this was changing, and changed during Chaucer's own life.

Anyhow, Terry Jones ( yes, THAT Terry Jones ) has to consult and use loads of Old French poems and documents as he works through the book, and he has put the relevant bits of a lot of them in a huge reference section at the back.

And they're very interesting... they're in odd-looking but mostly decipherable French... and they will, if you like, lead you on to get some of the widely-available Old French poetry and have a go at it... even if only to appreciate where current French came from.

Let's not forget that French, and to a greater extent Spanish, are Latin, changed and tweaked about over the centuries. You could, if you could go back in time, make a chain of speakers from classical Latin, step by tiny step, right up to present-day French. So there!

More of this sometime in the future.... meanwhile...

This is the terrific Dominique A... remember Le Courage des Oiseaux? ... well, here he is again with " Immortels."

here's the words...

Immortels Lyrics
Dominique A

Je ne t'ai jamais dit
mais nous sommes
immortels.
Pourqoui es-tu parti
avant que je
te l'apprenne?
Le savais-tu déjà?
Avais-tu deviné
que des dieux se cachaient
sous nos faces
avinées?

Tous les baisers reçus
savais-tu
qu'ils duraient?
Qu'en se mordant la bouche
le goût en revenait?
Et qu'il y avait du sang
qui ne sècherait pas?
Tu me donnais la main
pour boire de ce sang là

Je ne t'ai jamais dit
Mais nous sommes immortels
immortels
immortels.
As-tu pensé parfois
que rien ne
finirait?
Et qu'on soit là ou pas
quand même on y
serait
Et toi qui n'es plus là
c'est comme si
tu étais
plus immortel que moi
mais je te suis de près.

Je ne t'ai jamais dit
Mais nous sommes immortels
immortels
immortels

refreshingly inexpensive.......

2011-08-09T11:45:00.001-07:00

Today I want to recommend a terrific Amélie Nothomb novel.... Péplum.

That's it up there... though my copy has a far superior cover than that sludgy thing.

And why is it so good .......

[a]... it is one long giant conversation...... so it is packed with handy,useful,clever sentences for you to use in real life. Bonus!

[b]... seeing as it is a conversation, the horrible useless and clumsy PAST HISTORIC is conspicuous by its absence. Wizard.

[c]... the central idea, the "McGuffin" I suppose, is breathtaking.... it usually is in her books.... witness the incredible idea behind Mercure for example. Blimey and cripes!

[d]... it's quite a short book. That can be good.

[e].. the interplay of ideas is truly wonderful.

[f] ... it's refreshingly inexpensive on amazon.

Just to show you I'm not kidding, here's a review by somebody else....

This book is a great and witty conversation between an evil scientist and a young writer and it happens in the future. It faces all the irony of our days and is like a funny worst case scenario of what might happen if we don't change our culture. As usual with this author it's a book you cannot stop reading and the conversation is really quick and smart. I love this book, I think it might be one of Amelie Nothomb's best, and if you read it you will know the real reason why the Vesuvius erupted on Pompei...

SO... rush out and buy it and read it AND learn lots of the dialogue and use it as appropriate.

Having made my point and earned the everlasting friendship of Ms. Nothomb, here's a bit of music.

It's AqME and their catchy little number, À Chaque Seconde.

Terrible outfits though!

Lyrics to À Chaque Seconde :
D'un seul coup sans prévenir une évidence
Elle se tient là si proche de moi
À chaque pas je sens battre de plus en plus
Mon coeur si fort qu'elle peut l'entendre
Chaque battement qui rugit que pour elle
Sans qu'elle sache
Mes sentiments mais est-ce bien ça?

{Refrain:}
Comme si à chaque seconde
Je succombais à tort
Comme si rien d'autre au monde
Me paraissait si fort

Si magique si facile si périlleux
Pour lui dire les troubles qui me hantent
Elle sourit me regarde et m'aime peut-être
Je l'espère... Je laisse faire
Comme elle veut
C'est elle qui prendra mon âme et ma vie
Je n'espère plus je n'attends plus

{au Refrain}

Et si fragile {x2}

{au Refrain, x2}

Et si fragile
Me paraissait si fort
Et si fragile

Je ne crois plus au destin
Je ne crois plus en rien
Tant de fois j'ai souffert
... En vain

[ These are À Chaque Seconde Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]

Panique au Village !

2011-06-18T11:32:00.000-07:00

Last night I saved a French film from Film4.... it was "Panique au Village." I sat down and watched the first 15 minutes or so this morning... it's brilliant! That's the "cast" up there.

Here's a trailer .....

As you can see.... it's inventive, funny, fast-paced, silly....

PLUS... it's stop-motion using little plastic models, like the ones you buy as "cowboys" and "indians" when you are a kid... at least, I did, but that was back in the 1950's..... they make the film with them as the stars... and a plastic toy horse as well.

Priceless!

Drawbacks.... they speak very fast, with some cartoony accents, which make it tricky to catch all the French.... the version I got has English subtitles ( rather small) , it's actual English title is A Town called Panic.

The trick with subtitles is, you stick a bit of card over them with sellotape when you're ready. But you all know that.

Here's some more of it....

and more...

I expect a lot of you out there know about it... but just in case, rush out and get it.

Music time... and this piece of music is " Une sorte d'eglise" by Daran... it has more than a hint of Saez about it.... nothing wrong with that.It has a great video with it too... a "quest" sort of thing....

Here's the words...

Voici les paroles ou lyrics de Une sorte d'église interprétées par Daran :
Je voulais pour nous deux bien mieux qu'une croyance
Alors je t'ai trouvé une sorte d'église
Dont les murs ne sont pas couverts de faïence, ni de marbre
Les vitraux je les brise, les piliers sont des arbres
L'autel est un rocher tapissé de lichen
On y parle, ni pardon, ni péché
On n'y fait pas l'commerce de douleurs et de peines
On n'y adore ni Dieu ni Diable
Mais la beauté des corps et le sort qui a mis ton amour dans mes veines

Je nous veux sans frontières, sans limites et sans lois
Je veux te respirer, te vivre et vivre en toi
Et croire qu'avant nous tout ça n'existait pas

Nous deux, nous méritons bien plus haut qu'une voûte
Alors je t'ai trouvé une plaine sans routes
Et sans autre limite que les points cardinaux
Et sans traces que celles de nos chevaux qui absorbent l'espace
Au sommet d'une colline j'allume une flamme
Pour qu'on sache qu'un homme une femme
Fêterons sous la Lune la nuit de l'origine
Sacrifice au bohneur de leurs âmes, au futur de leurs fils
Ici les Dieux s'adorent sans aucun artifice

Je nous veux sans frontières, sans limites et sans lois
Je veux te respirer, te vivre et vivre en toi
Et croire qu'avant nous tout ça n'existait pas (x2)

Et croire qu'avant nous tout ça n'existait pas (x2)

[This just confirms our suspicions that blokes play the guitar to attract women... it seems to have worked in this case. ]

I'm going to be away for about a week....it is going to be no fun, and I expect I will get very wet and fed up. But I will be back.

ragot!

2011-06-16T02:40:00.000-07:00

Another weird and wonderful way to stretch your French a bit is to try to translate newspaper headlines.

And I don't mean the dead boring ones like " International Monetary Fund to charge Greece 18% interest on Bailout loans."

No... I mean the tabloid ones... short, sharp, blunt, cheeky, daft, alliterative, punning!

There are tabloid headlines to suit all ability ranges...although they can require a bit of thought and creativity as well.

In the interests of in-depth research, I went out a while ago and shelled out a whopping 30p on a copy of the Sun... I told the Librarian what I had done and she said that she understood, but it shouldn't happen again.

So here is selection of what that Monday's Sun had to offer... .. in a handy easy-to-difficult-to-near-impossible format

[a] TYPE 1... short and sweet... fairly straightforward

... May Hotting Up
...Lotta Lolly
...Singer Turns Up In Coffin
...Tack Attack
...Doom Lens
...Off With Ex
...You're Fired!
... Rich Richer
... Drunk Driver, 9
... Ultimate Betrayal

[b] TYPE 2.... a bit of thought needed here...

...Plane Stupid ( about the government scrapping Spy Planes )
...Hotel for Nudes
...Dannii was Axed ( about Dannii Minogue getting kicked off X Factor)
...Kelly Rowland Lined Up ( about her potential replacement)
...Payback Time ( about getting banks to pay back some of what WE are owed!)
...Lotta Lolly ( This is actually about expensive gold-encrusted ice lollies)
...Hard-Up Fergie ( about Sarah Ferguson being poor)
...Rise of the Yobettes ( drunken young ladies in town centres)
...Betterflies ( about last year's good weather boosting butterfly numbers)
...Look Fabulass just like Pippa ( Pippa's amazing rear)
...United Front ( Fergie under attack from all sides)

[c] TYPE 3... Not easy... hard to get the right " feel" in another language...

...We Blue off Steam ( about the boy-band Blue on Eurovision)
...We're Buck ( about Buck's Fizz on Eurovision)
...Loony Toon ( about Newcastle player Nile Ranger with a gun in an advert)
... It Moss Be The Queen ( about Kate Moss arriving in a helicopter)
...James N'Pat in big Spat ( James Corden + Patrick Stewart argument)
... Freeze a jolly good Fellow ( People being statues in City Centres)
... It's the Stuff that Screams are made of... ( Man City Cup Win...) which leads us on to..
...Bulls are totally out-foxed ( Bradford Bulls Rugby League team that is)

[d] TYPE 4... Football Headlines... in a world of their own, almost untranslatable !

... Van-tastic ( Van der Vaart scores to beat Liverpool)
... Bent Over ( Darren Bent scores 2 to beat Arsenal)
...Zend of the road ( Bolo Zenden quite Sunderland)
...Hope and Gory ( Hope for Wigan, looks nasty for Birmingham)
...They're Hairoes ( Paul Scharner of West Ham dyes hair blue for finall home game)
...Fans victim of some Vowel play ( PNECRISIS appeared on Countdown... Preston North End)
...Poshing his Luck ( Peterborough ( Posh) still in with a chance)
...Mission in Action ( Fergie still wants more goals)
...Kid Owen is just Boot-iful ( Owen Farrell boots Saracens into R U play-offs)
...Oh Walter Way to Go ( Walter Smith, Rangers Manager, finally leaves )
...Gunner be hard now for Arsene ( Arsene Wenger with tricky final matches)

There's a lot of thinking and head-scratching there for a measly 30p.And the good thing is, now every time you open a newspaper you can try to sort out the headlines in French....with the added bonus that you will be so busy, you won't read the awful tidings that go with it.

I always used to wonder what they meant when "they" said that Horace ( Latin Poet) was " untranslatable". Surely, I thought to myself, languages are just codes, and we can decode them.

Now I am older and wiser I realise that if languages ARE a code, then they are subtle, flexible, interactive and constantly changing codes.

A few thoughts about some of those headlines..

* How DO you cnvey the flavour of that 'n in James N'Pat ?

* The Plane/Plain pun...can you do a similar thing in French? Might you have to change the adjective to another one where the trick can work?

* The Blue/Blew pun... you can't change Blue because that's their name.. so you would probably have to find a similar-sounding French verb and make a pun with that.but I can't find anything suitable.... though in German you might do something with blasen... to blow ?

* Freeze/For he's ... the pun doesn't seem to work very well in French... you would probably have ot search around for another popular line that you could pun with.

*Can you find a French version of the Fabul-ass pun, can you do it with a different but similar-meaning word?

* What exactly IS the French for " out-foxed"?

These are just a few of the myriad questions translators have to deal with when changing stuff like this from one language to another, and trying to get the right "feel" to the translation as well.

The thing is, while you are looking up all the various adjectives, verbs, nouns etc plus all the alternatives you might use, you are using the dictionary like mad and learning and using new words in a fun way.Result!

I look forward to getting some feedback on possible translations for some of thse headlines.

So, while you are thinking about all that, here is the very moody " Un million de lézards" by a band with the unlikely name of Aston Villa....

and here's them singing it.......

I like it!

Here's the words... from the lyricstime site...

Rapporte-moi d’où tu iras,
Tout c’qu’il y a de bien en nous,
Des signes d’intelligence rare,
D’où sortent ces nuages trop lourds.
J’ai souvent dû faire la route
Des chemins qu en savent long
Sur notre époque trouble,
Sans jamais poser de questions.
Comme c’est con.

Un million de lézards
Pour un milliard de raisons
Un million de lézards
Pour un milliard de raisons
Un million de lézards

Rapporte-moi d’où tu iras,
Un truc qui fait battre nos cœurs
Allez va donc voir sur Mars,
Si l’existence est mieux ailleurs
Ici le bonheur tourne a vide.
De prières en télévisions.
Dans quel chaos se cache-t-il ?
C’est pour nos filles est nos garçons,
La mission…

Un million de lézards
Pour un milliard de raisons
Un million de lézards
Pour un milliard de raisons
Un million de lézards

Rapporte-moi d’où tu iras,
De prières en télévisions,
Des signes d’intelligence rare,
C’est pour nos filles et nos garçons
J’ai souvent dû faire la route
Des chemins, qui en savent long
Sur notre époque trouble,
Sans jamais poser de questions.
Comme c’est con.

an argument with a vicar...

2011-02-02T03:00:00.001-08:00

OK........... we've looked at various ways to listen to French... and I haven't even touched on films, French TV, Michel Thomas etc.I will at some time.

Of course, if you are lucky/southern/live in big cities... you can hear quite a bit of French just wandering the streets.

Up here in gloomy wet Lancaster we don't hear much French around the (small) city. Although we hear some Polish, the occasional Spanish ( student exchange?) ,Gujerati and its relatives, a little German sometimes,there's hardly any French to be heard.

As I've just come up with a remarkable new way to practise speaking French, I'm going to tell you about it.

It was my idea.... but you might think it is mad...so be it!!

In the good old days, if you wandered the streets talking to yourself people would cross the road to avoid you, or maybe do something worse.

However, we can all wander the streets talking to ourselves now... as long as we are holding a mobile phone up to our ear.

Aha!

It doesn't even need to switched on, it can be completely kaput, bust, knackered... it could even be a Mars Bar at a pinch.

Maybe that's going a step too far....

With this terrific de-nutcasing device you can wander the streets talking french for as long as you like.

If you prefer leisure,or are as old and decrepit as me, you can plonk yourself on a handy bench or wall and sit there chatting away.

You can describe the passers-by, you can enthuse about the architecture, the weather... or best of all, you can talk about yourself... the good old 1st person singular.

You can have a loud argument with an imaginary friend/enemy/bank clerk/librarian/vicar/builder... the possibilities stretch out....

What fun!

And it's free too..... but whatever you do, remember to keep that mobile up to your ear.

You might even pull in a few French-speakers while you are at it ( as long as your description of them was OK) and then you could speak real French to a real French speaker. Double bonus.

Now I know some of you will think this is a silly idea.... fair enough.

I'll tell you what though... you might be horrified to realise all the things you don't know how to say..... ouch.

It can be a shock. Or a challenge.

Right then... having given this terrific wheeze to the world... time for music. What with all this talk of modern contraptions like mobiles, I should find something popular that lots of people like... so here's Brasco + Sarah Riani and a big-ballad/rap fusion type thingy... D'une Blessure... it's got over 7 million hits on youtube....

and here are the words in handy video format...

Let's see you all out there making good use of those dud mobiles.

le plus haut volcan...

2011-02-01T04:05:00.000-08:00

Continuing with my theme of "listening to French" we come, of course to songs.... how could we do without them!!??

For me, listening to songs ( French and Spanish) is a beautiful thing to do anyway... but if you can find breathtaking songs to learn, they will stick with you up there in your mind and be a lasting resource to draw from.

If you do more than just listen they are a rich source of grammar and vocabulary too. Just about any French song will bring up several features of grammar, and will no doubt bring new words your way.... and help your pronunciation too.

I've featured loads and loads of songs and performers on this blog, for that very reason. Many of those songs whizz round in my head whenever I want them to.

As I've been listening to and playing Camille recently, I got her CD " Le Fil" and it's excellent.... mostly sung in clear French ( important!) and with interesting and quirky songs and sounds.

The "thread" referred to in the title refers to the one long note that plays throughout the whole CD. don't worry.. it's fine! On the CD cover this "thread" is passing in front of her.

Here's one of the songs from the CD.... a lovely dreamy,sleepy song...

and here's the words...

La Jeune Fille Aux Cheveaux Blancs lyrics ( From: http://www.elyrics.net/read/c/camille-lyrics/la-jeune-fille-

Je suis à l'âge où l'on ne dort nulle part
les seuls lits d'où je rêve sont des quais de gare
j'ai loué un placard pour mes robes d'hiver
j'ai tué les parents

Oh ! je veux partir sur la seule route
où il y a du vent
je suis la jeune fille aux cheveux blancs

Mon amoureux dit qu'il ne me connaît pas
il vit loin de tout il vit trop loin de moi
sur le plus haut volcan que l'amour ait éteint
il reviendra demain

Oh ! je veux partir sur la seule route
où il y a du vent
je suis la jeune fille aux cheveux blancs

... on my radio

2011-01-21T12:19:00.000-08:00

Another great way to getting used to conversational, everyday French is to listen to the radio... French radio in fact.

I have put a link in the sidebar which gives you direct audio access to loads and loads of French radio stations.... but I find the News/Culture/Sport stations are best if you want lots of talk.

You can't miss the link... it says RADIO in big capitals.

The key thing with this is... you must listen actively... passive listening has been shown to be no good at all...so listen purposefully..

...... ideally, try to understand the lot!
...... learn to unravel those common phrases that come up all the time.
...... tape 5 minutes worth of radio... then try to work it out... listen to it several times.. what key words let you down... what verbs did you miss etc.

...... see how words are pronounced.... you might be surprised.

In short... don't just let it wash over you while you do something else...listen closely, just as you would if you were really listening to someone in front of you... and try to understand as much as you can, or to at least grab the actual words they are saying.

Remember, those lucky native speakers have been doing this for their entire post-baby lives, and are therefore quite good.

They also get to practise more every day of their lives.

You therefore have a bit of catching up to do.

Daunting, isn't it?

Having cast you into deep gloom, here's a bit of idiosyncratic music to lift your spirits.... Camille and Ta Douleur plus a smashing video.
[Update... EMI have blocked the video I chose, so here is a fine live version of Ta Douleur instead...]

and here's the words....

Lyrics to Ta Douleur :
Lève toi c'est décidé
Laisse-moi te remplacer
Je vais prendre ta douleur

Doucement sans faire de bruit
Comme on réveille la pluie
Je vais prendre ta douleur

Elle lutte elle se débat
Mais ne résistera pas
Je vais bloquer l'ascenseur...
Saboter l'interrupteur

Mais c'est qui cette incrustée
Cet orage avant l'été
Sale chipie de petite soeur ?

Je vais tout lui confisquer
Ses fléchettes et son sifflet
Je vais lui donner la fessée...
La virer de la récrée

Mais c'est qui cette héritière
Qui se baigne qui se terre
Dans l'eau tiède de tes reins ?

Je vais la priver de dessert
Lui faire mordre la poussière
De tous ceux qui n'ont plus rien...
De tous ceux qui n'ont plus faim

Dites moi que fout la science
A quand ce pont entre nos panses ?
Si tu as mal là où t'as peur
Tu n'as pas mal là où je pense !

Qu'est-ce qu´elle veut cette conasse
Le beurre ou l'argent du beurre
Que tu vives ou que tu meurs ?

Faut qu'elle crève de bonheur
Ou qu'elle change de godasses
Faut qu'elle croule sous les fleurs
Change de couleur...
Je vais jouer au docteur

Dites moi que fout la science
A quand ce pont entre nos panses ?
Si tu as mal là où t'as peur
Tu n'as pas mal là où je chante !
Lève toi c'est décidé
Laisse-moi te remplacer
Je vais prendre ta douleur

Doucement sans faire de bruit
Comme on réveille la pluie
Je vais prendre ta douleur

Elle lutte elle se débat
Mais ne résistera pas
Je vais bloquer l'ascenseur...
Saboter l'interrupteur

Mais c'est qui cette incrustée
Cet orage avant l'été
Sale chipie de petite soeur ?

Je vais tout lui confisquer
Ses fléchettes et son sifflet
Je vais lui donner la fessée...
La virer de la récrée

Mais c'est qui cette héritière
Qui se baigne qui se terre
Dans l'eau tiède de tes reins ?

Je vais la priver de dessert
Lui faire mordre la poussière
De tous ceux qui n'ont plus rien...
De tous ceux qui n'ont plus faim

Dites moi que fout la science
A quand ce pont entre nos panses ?
Si tu as mal là où t'as peur
Tu n'as pas mal là où je pense !

Qu'est-ce qu´elle veut cette conasse
Le beurre ou l'argent du beurre
Que tu vives ou que tu meurs ?

Faut qu'elle crève de bonheur
Ou qu'elle change de godasses
Faut qu'elle croule sous les fleurs
Change de couleur...
Je vais jouer au docteur

Dites moi que fout la science
A quand ce pont entre nos panses ?
Si tu as mal là où t'as peur
Tu n'as pas mal là où je chante !

[ These are Ta Douleur Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]

...and here's a video of the words....

random thought..... sometimes she looks a bit like the young Todd Rundgren

..and here is the news..

2011-01-20T02:34:00.000-08:00

Carrying on my theme from last time... listening to real French.... another good way to do this is by accessing newsclips... there's loads on youtube, and I've put a link in the sidebar to France24, a lot of which is french-language newsclips.

Plus points... News broadcasts are nice little capsule tasks, not too long... you can play them over and over, write stuff down.... though the french can be a bit fast at times.

So... here's a quick sample of the sort of thing you can easily find...

Here's Melissa Theuriau in several newsclips... there's stacks of her on youtube, I wonder why? ( Note the little logo bottom right..)

...and here's a newsclip about Sarkosy being drunk....

Here's some news about Zimbabwe's apparently lawless society...

....and here's some news from NewsFrance2 about the best job in the world

... just for a sly laugh, here's one VERY MANY "news" broadcasts which students all over America are doing for a project. They're awful... the pronunciation is appalling... who is teaching them... robots from outer space?

I could devote a whole article to those... they would make you feel good because their standard of french is pretty awful. Just think... they've probably rehearsed all this too!

and to round things off, here's that Melissa agian..she's all over the net...

Swifty moving on, here's the wonderful Diam's with " Venus"

and here's a singalong video with the words... or should that be hip-hop-along

and here's the words from the lyricsmode site...

Diam's
Venus lyrics
J'ai le sang qui bout,
Le cœur qui boume,
J'ai le sang qui bouge.
T'es sorti d'où toi et ta belle bouche ?
Y avait des signes et ça ne trompe pas.
Rare de nos jours de trouver un homme qui ne trompe pas.
Tu m'as tapé dans l'œil j'en ai perdu la vue,
Sapé dans le neuf j'en ai perdu ma rue.
T'as donné de l'amour à ma plume,
Moi qui suis si dure d'habitude, j'en ai perdu mon amertume.
Plonger dans ton cœur devenait une évidence,
Sur ton corps immense qui fredonnait un air pour que j'y danse.
T'étais si doux, t'avais tout pour me plaire,
Tout pour que je tombe mais aussi tout pour me perdre.
Quand j'y pense j'en perds repères et vigilance,
Et seul ce silence ici me rappelle ta présence.
T'es sorti d'où, toi et tes valeurs ?
T'avais mis où mon mal être, mes mots, mon mal et mes malheurs ?
Des gestes lents en guise de langage,
Un zeste de langue et je restais là, sans languir de nos voyages.
Sans longueur notre histoire n'est pas comme la leur,
La nôtre a l'allure de love, mais s'est éteint ta douleur

J'ai le sang qui bout,
Le cœur qui boume,
Cet amour trop tabou.
T'es sorti d'où toi et ta belle bouche ?
J'voulais te parler mais j'en ai perdu la voix
Faut dire que ton amour n'était pas très dur à voir.
J'te disais : "Un jour on fera des enfants, des bouts de toi"
Enfin et dans le fond j'taurais dis : "Fais-moi en plein."
Tu disais "Je suis droit parce que mon fils doit l'être,
Et puis j'ai la foi parce que ma fille doit naître."
Tu me parlais religions et croyances,
Collision, trilogisme et clairvoyance.
Ainsi je t'ai donné mon cœur, mon corps et dans mon camp
T'as baisé sans rancœur une femme pour cinq minutes de bon temps.
T'as foutu en l'air deux ans de vie commune,
T'as failli me pousser au meurtre, moi qui suis pourtant sans rancune.
T'avais le pouvoir dans ton futin,
Tu voulais tout avoir et tes conquêtes surtout ton butin,
En baisant cette fille tu m'as baisée aussi, ton amour était nocif,
Moi qui rêvais que de nos fils.
Tu m'as offert une histoire sans fin,
Aujourd'hui je sais que l'amour n'est pas une histoire sans fin.
Prenez garde à ce sentiment qui étouffe,
Moi je pensais revivre, mais j'en ai perdu mon souffle.

The Milk-Eyed Mender...

2011-01-19T12:05:00.000-08:00

A great way to boost your French and your vocabulary and grammar is to try to put song titles and album titles into French.
It's got lots of plus points.... you can do it anywhere as you have a healthy stock of titles up there in storage.... you can make them as easy or as hard as you like.... you can do it while you are driving, or in a meeting, or watching paint dry, and it's a nice, self-contained small but interesting "capsule-task."

By the way, album titles in general seem to be a bit more enigmatic and considerably harder to translate well.

Here's a few suggestions, categorised and sorted especially for you...and reading my selection, you will realise how truly ancient I am...

[A] Ought to be dead easy...just one word really..

Toad
Relish
Happy
Moonlight
Wow
Ironic

[B] Still one word, but rather more thought needed...

Revolver
Uninvited
Fullhouse
Lionheart
Powderfinger
Jungleland
Rudderless

[C] Adjectives and nouns..

Little Shoes
Available space
The Sensual World
Sweet thing
The littlest birds
Soft as chalk
Big Yellow taxi
Parallel Lines
Blue Horse
The ninth wave
Southern Man
Another day
Another Green World
Stupid girl
Deeper understanding
Big stripey lie
99 Red Balloons
Shooting Star

[D] noun lists ?

Something/Anything
Cram, crab, cockle, cowry
Peach plum pear
Atom Heart Mother
Rubberband Girl
Love and Theft

[E] Possession and other uses of "of"

Candy's room
The Song of Solomon
Angels of the silences
Constellation of the heart
Most of the time
Shake your hips
Me and my woman
Summer Days
Don't push your foot on the heartbrake
King of Pain
Moments of pleasure
Heart of Gold

[F] Verbs..

You learn
I was hoping
Cry a while
Hanginaround
Anna Begins
Maybe I'm amazed
There goes a tenner
Racing in the street
Rust never sleeps
Squeezing out sparks
Running up that hill
Girls just wanna have fun

[G] Imperatives

Let it loose
Stop breaking down
Ring them bells
Eat the music
Walk this way
Kick out the jams
Paint it black

[H] Trickier stuff

The Milk-eyed Mender
An end has a start
Nevermind
Underture
Here Come the warm jets

I put a couple of album covers up to show that that these really do exist.

Of course, you can extend this to book titles, films etc.... but albums & songs are an almost inexhaustible source that you can think about anywhere/anytime.

Now it's Coeur de Pirate and Nicola Sirkis at a concert for Haiti, singing "J'ai demandé a la lune"....

How lovely is that! It was originally an Indochine song...here's the words..

Lyrics to J'ai Demandé à La Lune :
J’ai demandé à la lune
Et le soleil ne le sait pas
Je lui ai montré mes brûlures
Et la lune s’est moquée de moi
Et comme le ciel n’avait pas fière allure
Et que je ne guérissais pas
Je me suis dit quelle infortune
Et la lune s’est moquée de moi

J’ai demandé à la lune
Si tu voulais encore de moi
Elle m’a dit "j’ai pas l’habitude
De m’occuper des cas comme ça"
Et toi et moi
On était tellement sûr
Et on se disait quelques fois
Que c’était juste une aventure
Et que ça ne durerait pas

Je n’ai pas grand chose à te dire
Et pas grand chose pour te faire rire
Car j’imagine toujours le pire
Et le meilleur me fait souffrir

J’ai demandé à la lune
Si tu voulais encore de moi
Elle m’a dit "j’ai pas l’habitude
De m’occuper des cas comme ça"
Et toi et moi
On était tellement sûr
Et on se disait quelques fois
Que c’était juste une aventure
Et que ça ne durerait pas
J’ai demandé à la lune
Et le soleil ne le sait pas
Je lui ai montré mes brûlures
Et la lune s’est moquée de moi
Et comme le ciel n’avait pas fière allure
Et que je ne guérissais pas
Je me suis dit quelle infortune
Et la lune s’est moquée de moi

J’ai demandé à la lune
Si tu voulais encore de moi
Elle m’a dit "j’ai pas l’habitude
De m’occuper des cas comme ça"
Et toi et moi
On était tellement sûr
Et on se disait quelques fois
Que c’était juste une aventure
Et que ça ne durerait pas

Je n’ai pas grand chose à te dire
Et pas grand chose pour te faire rire
Car j’imagine toujours le pire
Et le meilleur me fait souffrir

J’ai demandé à la lune
Si tu voulais encore de moi
Elle m’a dit "j’ai pas l’habitude
De m’occuper des cas comme ça"
Et toi et moi
On était tellement sûr
Et on se disait quelques fois
Que c’était juste une aventure
Et que ça ne durerait pas

[ These are J'ai Demandé à La Lune Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]

talking like the clappers...

2011-01-16T11:30:00.001-08:00

A big problem for us learners is... how to get to listen to actual French... let alone to have conversations ( we'll come to that later).

Well, there's quite a few avenues to explore, and one is... the vast array of interviews available on sites like Youtube.

The advantages.... you can pick interviews with people you like,,, so you want to know what they are saying... they are usually brief... plus you can play them over and over, picking up more each time and unravelling all those runtogetherwords.

As a taster, here's some I located earlier..

Here's Damien Saez in a brief interview....

and here's that Diam's talking clearly for us learners...

in sharp contrast, here's Beatriz Martin from Cœur de Pirate talking like the clappers..

Boy, can she whizz through those sentences... here's her again... mind you, she's had to wait an age for the question to finish!

and here's Zazie trying to get a word in edgeways up against a real motormouth interviewer..

There's loads of this stuff out there... politicians, sports celebrities, reality TV nonentities, members of the public, union leaders...

What have I been doing all this time? Well, to stay in context, one thing I have done is read almost everything that Amelie Nothomb has written. Interesting to say the least.

Music time returns.... and it's a lovely song by Luciole called J't'oublierai
... I can't find a live version of this so this will have to do for now.

These words are from the parolesmania site..

Artiste Titre
Paroles J't'oublierai
Luciole
J't'oublierai
Aussi sûr que cette immensité devant laquelle je me trouve est là bien présente
J't'oublierai
Aussi sûr que les sons les doigts du violoniste sur son instrument
J't'oublierai
Aussi sûr que le printemps vient après l'hiver, après la pluie le beau temps, après le fleuve l'océan
J't'oublierai
Oui... mais

Oui même si les hasards sont parfois si heureux
Si on ne s'y attend pas quand on tombe amoureux
Si le vent incertain part comme il vient
T'oublier ça vaut mieux oui c'est mieux pour demain
Alors j't'oublierai

J't'oublierai
Aussi sûr que toi et moi faisait nous
J't'oublierai
Aussi sûr que sont doux les baisers dans le cou comme une caresse légère, frisson qui effleure tout doucement ton cœur du bout des lèvres
Aussi sûr que la course du temps m'usera lentement
J't'oublierai
Oui... mais

Oui même si c'était bien oui même si c'était beau
Ta main au creux de ma main
Ta peau contre ma peau
T'oublier c'est certain me lavera de tous mes maux
Et puis si j'arrive pas à oublier tout ça
Les dents de ton sourire je les garderai au fond de moi dans des bulles de soupir
Rien qu'un drôle de souvenir

Trois petits tours et puis s'en va

Je t'oublie

C'est sûr que j'aimerais me souvenir de toi

Je t'oublie

Ça y est tu n'es plus là

2010-09-16T02:49:00.000-07:00

Hello, it's me... I've been a bit out of action because my monitor has almost collapsed and usually shows an almost dark picture... very odd. But the occasional clout sometimes gets it working and just at this moment it is, so I'm posting some music I saved a few days ago and bunging it out while can.

I've finished Mercure now, and a gripping story it is too. Also, I've taped a French film, Home, and am going to watch it very soon. Also, I hope my monitor is going to improve or be replaced or something.

Here's that nice Noir Desir......

That's Noir Desir playing La Fleuve....well, here it is on the Ukelele !

and here's the words... but no blasted accents again... I will have to try to fix them..

Son ombre glisse et sa semelle claque
Charlie caresse le trottoir
Il n'a que les os, l'esprit et la peau
Charlie va danser ce soir
allez Charlie
tiens-toi droit
c'que c'est beau
quand elle coule
la riviere de sang chaud
La ils se tiennent au fond
Le temps et le son
Pour la vie, sweet little blues
Accroche toi aux plis
De la melodie
Qui ne sait pas qui elle suit
Charlie, Charlie
les filles fondent
vieux salaud
la elle coule
la riviere de sang chaud
Le coeur dans les tempes
La tempete au ventre
Charlie sort et se perd
Dans le dedale des rues
Ou un taxi le prend
Sur son capot d'argent
maintenant dans l'eau sale
elle traine sa bouche pale
au fond du caniveau
ou elle coule, ou elle coule,
ou elle coule, ou elle coule,
la riviere de sang chaud

More lyrics: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/n/noir_desir/#share

I'm sorry, I'll read that again........

2010-09-16T02:26:00.000-07:00

Isn't this a lesson to us all....admittedly, in Latin, but whatever language you are learning you are going to need to get that grammar right!

I bet he wished he had read over that graffito just one more time.

And here is the moral of all that.... whatever you are reading, read it twice... at least

Why?

First read.... stumble along, look up various words and bits of grammar, get the idea of what is going on.

Have a rest.

Second read.... firm up the whole thing... have you remembered the new vocabulary.... are you confident with the bits of grammar you weren't sure about, the idiomatic usages, the unusual constructions....

You get the idea. Reading it a second time not only makes sure you really know what the passage means, it will hammer home a bit more all those things you didn't know too well when you came across them the first time.

Even better.... read it again!

Currently I am reading Mercure by Amélie Nothomb. It's superb, a really gripping page-turner. But, eager though I am to turn that page and find out what on earth is going to happen next, I am trying to be a good lad and read each bit over again, write down grammar points, new or forgotten words, interesting phrases I can use ( in that Observers' Book of French of mine).

Now here's a lovely little song, and it's got very clear subtitles so you have no excuse at all not to sing along... it is Mélanie Pain and Ignore Moi

What a happy song!

..big bald guitarists, simple stunning songs..

2010-09-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

Last time I was suggesting that you should have a " party piece" ready in case anyone asks you to " say something in French." Here's Charles Baudelaire with the one he always used, " Obsession".

It's a good one... short, impressive, very very French if you saee what I mean. Here are the words...

Grands bois, vous m'effrayez comme des cathédrales;
Vous hurlez comme l'orgue; et dans nos coeurs maudits,
Chambres d'éternel deuil où vibrent de vieux râles,
Répondent les échos de vos De profundis.

Je te hais, Océan! tes bonds et tes tumultes,
Mon esprit les retrouve en lui; ce rire amer
De l'homme vaincu, plein de sanglots et d'insultes,
Je l'entends dans le rire énorme de la mer

Comme tu me plairais, ô nuit! sans ces étoiles
Dont la lumière parle un langage connu!
Car je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu!

Mais les ténèbres sont elles-mêmes des toiles
Où vivent, jaillissant de mon oeil par milliers,
Des êtres disparus aux regards familiers.

My very first article featured this band, Noir Desir and here they are again with a fine live version of Bouqet de Nerfs.

Bouquet de nerfs

Here are the lyrics, which are also accompanied by a line by line translation by somebody or other!

Bouquet De Nerfs
Bunch of nerves

Journée de la pleine lune
A day of full moon
Au sommet de la dune
At the peak of the dune
A caresser de loin ton chien
To caress your dog from afar

T'oublies or not t'oublies
You forget or you don't forget word play with Shakespeare's "to be or not to be"
Les ombres d'opalines
The shadows of opal glass
au rendez-vous suivant, j'attends
At the following date, I'm waiting
Au fond d'une autre limousine
In the back of another limousine
Qui ne vaut pas plus cher
Which isn't more expensive
Que ce bouquet de nerfs
Than this bunch of nerves

A frôler la calanche
Touching the cliff
Les étendues salines
The spacious salt pits
A perte de vue on s'imagine en Chine
As far as you can see, you believe you're in China

Trompe la mort et tais-toi
Betray death and be quiet
Trois petits tours et puis s'en va
Three little tours and then it goes away
J'opere tes amygdales
I operate your tonsils
Labyrinthiques, que dalle
Which are like a labyrinth, all Greek
Ne m'est plus rien égal
Everything does matter to me now
Je sais je n'ai offert que des bouquets de nerfs
I know that I haven't offered anything but bunches of nerves

Rubis de Sade et jade, déja je dis non
Rubins of Sade and jade, I already say no The Marquis of Sade is the founder of sadism
Diamant, c'est éternel
Diamants are forever
Des fleurs, des bouts du ciel immense
Flowers, big bits of heaven

La liste des parfums capiteux
The list of capital frangrances
Capitalistes c'est bien bien
Capitalists are good good
Mais olfacultatif
But facultative
Liste en boule, au panier
List in the head, in the basket
Finalement j'ai offert quelques bouquets de nerfs
Finally I offered some buches of nerves

Agendas donnez-moi
Agendas, give me
De vos dates a damner
Some of your dates to damn
Tous les bouddhas du monde
All the buddhas in the world
Et la Guadalupe
And Guadalupe

S'il arrive qu'un anglais
If it's just an English who arrives
Vienne me visiter
He should come to visit me
Dans la métempsychose
In the metempsychosis
Je saurai recevoir je peux lui en faire voir de la sérénité
I will know how to receive, I can make him see the serenity in it
Et meme lui laisser un certain gout de fer
And even let him a certain taste of iron
Et ce bouquet de nerfs
And this bunch of nerves

Classy stuff... and the second song in my new series, " Big Bald Guitarists playing Simple Stunning Songs" in case you didn't get the title.

Go on then... say something in French

2010-09-12T02:45:00.000-07:00

" Go on then...say something in French"

Whenever someone finds out that you are learning French, this is what they usually say. It falls on your ears like a bucket of rat vomit.

Well.... best to have something ready.

It's a win-win thing... you get to learn off by heart some striking/dramatic/exciting/mysterious/important/amusing bit of french which will stay with you forever... and they get to hear it and be impressed.

As I said... win win all round.

But what? Well, lots of those songs I have been treating you to have terrific and effective words, and the fact that they are a song as well make them easier to learn.

Then there is poetry. French poetry has been rumoured to be impressive. Yes.

Here's a bit from Apollinaire's Les Fiançailles...

J'ai eu le courage de regarder en arrière
Les cadavres de mes jours
Marquent ma route et je les pleure
Les uns pourrisent dans les églises italiennes
Ou bien dans de petits bois de citronniers
Qui fleurissent et fructifient
En même temps et en toute saison
D'autres jours ont pleuré avant de mourir dans des tavernes
Où d'ardents bouquets rouaient
Aux yeux d'une mulâtresse qui enventait la poésie
Et les roses de l'électricité s'ouvrent encore
Dans le jardin de ma mémoire.

Pretty impressive eh? Very T.S. Eliot don't you think?

anyway, more ideas about "party pieces" later. For now, some tough old music from Dominique A ... the strangely titled " Le Courage des Oiseaux."

and here's a rather lovely acoustic version, just to prove that, as Paul Simon once said, a song is anything that can walk by itself.

and here are the words. This is a fine song which has been widely covered on Youtube, even to the extent of videos showing you how to play it.

Dieu que cette histoire finit mal
On imagine jamais très bien
Qu'une histoire puisse finir si mal
Quand elle a commence si bien

On imagine pourtant très bien
Voir un jour les raisons d'aimer
Perdues quelque part dans le temps
Mille tristesses découlent de l'instant

Alors, qui sait ce qui nous passe en tête
Peut être
Finissons nous par nous lasser

Si seulement nous avions le courage des oiseaux
Qui chantent dans le vent glace

Tourne ton dos contre mon dos
Que vois tu je ne te vois plus
Si c'est ainsi qu'on continue
Je ne donne pas cher de nos peaux

Parfois, qui sais ce qui nous passe en tête
Peut être finissons nous par nous lasser

Si seulement nous avions le courage des oiseaux
Qui chantent dans le vent glace

Si seulement nous avions le courage des oiseaux
Qui chantent dans le vent glace

jeune et con

2010-09-10T23:21:00.000-07:00

I went into Sedburgh and Kendal today, ferrying the Librarian etc around. Naturally I trawled a few junk shops and got a few books, plus a map.... the Michelin "Environs of Paris" map ... very cheaply.

I really love maps, and, of course, have put them to good use in my language-learning too.

Basically, you just trundle around the map , and try to find out what the place-names mean. It works for any language... Welsh, Russian etc.

I can promise you that any new words you pick up this way will stay in your memory pretty well.

There's a place on the Environs map called " Les Poêlées" and in the dictionary Poêle means a stove or pail if it's masculine and a frying-pan if it's feminine.

Another spot is called " Monceau" which is a heap or pile... you can't help wondering why!

Some place-names you just can't track down, some are a bit enigmatic.... here's a place called "Ossemeaux" and " ossements" means "remains"... is this the slightly altered meaning?

Anyhow, you can see that this is an interesting and absorbing way to while away the odd hour or so and learn some odd words while you're at it.

Incidentally, peoples' names are good for this too. did you realise, for example, that the Russian president's name, Medvedev, is actually Russian for a bear.I am amazed that the press have never picked up on this!

Good luck with your place-name research, and please let me know of any really odd ones.

Remember to click on these maps to blow them up...

On with the music... it's that nice and idealistic Mr.Saez with the stirring Jeune et Con....

and here's the live acoustic version..very nice..

Top stuff, and here dear readers are les paroles...

Encore un jour se lève sur la planète France
Je sors doucement de mes rêves, je rentre dans la danse
Comme toujours, il est huit heures du soir, j'ai dormi tout le jour
Je me suis encore couché trop tard, je me suis rendu sourd
Encore, encore une soirée où la jeunesse France
Encore, elle va bien s'amuser puisqu'ici rien n'a de sens
Alors on va danser, faire semblant d'être heureux
Pour aller gentiment se coucher mais demain rien ira mieux

Puisqu'on est jeune et con, puisqu'ils sont vieux et fous
Puisque des hommes crèvent sous les ponts et ce monde s'en fout
Puisqu'on est que des pions contents d'être à genoux
Puisque je sais qu'un jour nous gagnerons à devenir fous
Devenir fous, devenir fous...

Encore un jour se lève sur la planète France
Mais j'ai depuis longtemps perdu mes rêves, je connais trop la danse
Comme toujours, il est huit heures du soir j'ai dormi tout le jour
Je sais qu'on est quelques milliards à chercher l'amour
Encore, encore une soirée où la jeunesse France
Encore, elle va bien s'amuser dans cet état d'urgence
Alors elle va danser faire semblant d'exister
Qui sait? Si on ferme les yeux on vivra vieux

Puisqu'on est jeune et con (jeune et con)
Puisqu'ils sont vieux et fous (vieux et fous)
Puisque des hommes crèvent sous les ponts et ce monde s'en fout
Puisqu'on est que des pions contents d'être à genoux
Puisque je sais qu'un jour nous gagnerons à devenir fous
Devenir fous, fous, fous...

Encore un jour se lève sur la jeunesse France
J'ai perdu mes rêves, je connais trop la danse
Je sais qu'on est quelques milliards

Encore un jour se lève sur la planète France
Mais j'ai depuis longtemps perdu mes rêves, je connais trop la danse
Comme toujours, il est huit heures du soir, j'ai dormi tout le jour
Je sais qu'on est quelques milliards...
À chercher l'amour.

More lyrics: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/s/saez/#share

What a powerful song.

2010-09-03T11:14:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back from sunny Northern Ireland, where of course I scoured the junk shops for foreign-language books. There are loads of them around Botanic Station if you ever have the opportunity to visit.

One book I got was actually one I already have... but this one was in better condition. It's a book of "Ghost"/ Creepy stories by Mérimée called La Vénus d'Ille et autres nouvelles.

These same stories, plus or minus others of his, apprear in various combinations in different collections.... as you can see in my pictures.

The one I read first, and the best in my opinion, was the title story. It is genuinely scary are very comparable to the ghost stories of M.R. James in terms of scariness and atmosphere.

The stroy is also reminiscent in style with "The Monk" and similar gothic tales... that's another really scary story too by the way.

Well, today's bit of music is that Dolly again, and the excellent Parti pour une heure...

and here are the words..I've corrected quite a bit of these, but there are still some bits I haven't worked out + there are no accents at all! They came from the lyricsmode site but I can't complain becasue it is hard to work some of them out.

Je me fous des histoires
Qui tiennent debout , prennent de la place
Qui bouffent l'espace et sentretiennent
Si l'on s'attaque
Tu tais parti pour une heure
Je connais le refrain par coeur
Comme on peut se moquer de tout
Moi tu sais je men fous et je la
Voulais tu faire en sorte
Que je n'en devienne que plus forte
Mais saches que je ne me soucie plus que de moi
Jai de vous le regard
Les poches vides et les nulle part
Le ? du hasard
Et mes departs manquent de courage
Mes yeux se ferment trop souvent
Je vois des figures et d'autres fissures
On me devisage mais qui me rassure
On me soulage
Tu tais parti pour une heure
Je connais le refrain par coeur
Moi tu sais je m'en fous et je l'avoue
On dit que les jours sont meilleurs
Je connais le refrain par coeur
Comme on peut se jouer de tout
Tu sais moi je m'en fous
Et je l'avoue
Se moquer de tout
Et je mens et je l'avoue
Tu tais parti pour une heure
Je connais le refrain par coeur
Comme on peut se moquer de tout
Moi tu sais je m'en fous et je l'avoue
Comme on peut compliquer sa vie
Comme on peut s'en jouer aussi
Tu sais moi je m'en fous
Et si ca revient au meme
Tu sais je prefere
Me moquer de tout
On dit que les jours sont meilleurs
Je connais le refrain par coeur
Comme on peut se moquer de tout
Moi tu sais je m'en fous et je l'avoue

More lyrics: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/d/dolly/#share

..the play's the thing..

2010-08-17T05:08:00.000-07:00

I've already banged on about how useful PLAYS are to the language learner.... they're (almost) all speech, so none of the accursed Past Historic, they're usually pretty quick to read, they're usually full of memorable lines ( we hope), you can sometimes get videos of the plays being performed..... it's win-win all the way.

You can even perform them in the privacy of your own home.

Now, the first plays I read are for real beginners.... and they're apparently unavailable and/or cost a fortune on Amazon. I wish I hadn't sellotaped a silly cover onto my copy.

It's a collection of playlets written for school kids which went along with an ancient French course, rather ground-breaking in its time, called the Tavor Audio-Visual Course.

Anyhow, they are perfect for those starting French. Each little play is short, full of interesting talk and funny too.

It's called Faisons du Théâtre and its by Harry Levy. My copy cost 40p!

Get it if you can..... if you are in the early stages of learning French. Or even if you aren't. I bet there are hundreds of copies of this little book mouldering away in Language Dept cupboards all over the country.

The next one I read was Topaze by Pagnol ... a proper long play, but interesting, occasionally funny and widely and cheaply available. I recommend it.

Then I read Les Mains Sales by Sartre. I suppose I thought I would look clever, but I didn't like it at all.... boring, predictable, horribly polemic and pseudo-intellectual. Give it a miss folks.

Then I read Intermezzo by Giraudoux. Now this is an interesting one.... quite short, and weird/mystical with a sort of ghost as an important character... or is it? Read it and find out... it's a good-un.

Then I thought I would go back to intellectualism and read En Attendant Godot which is the French version of Waiting for Godot. It varies somewhat from the English version.... Becket wrote it in both languages. It's a good one... read it folks.

well, I am once again going to be away for a little while, so it's music time at the Grand Ol' Opry..

This rather moving duet is Manu from the wonderful band Dolly plus Indochine.Ms. Manet looks very sad don't you think?

and here's the words so you can... and should... join in...

(Nicola Sirkis / Dominique Nicolas)... Tes Yeux Noirs
Hey, viens la, viens avec moi, ne pars pas sans moi
Oh! Oh! Oh! Viens la, reste-la, ne pars pas sans moi
Hey, tu prends tes vetements, tu les mets sur toi
Eh, cette nuit, dans ce lit, t'etais si jolie...
Mais qu'est-ce qui brille sur nos regards
Ce sont tes yeux noirs
Un corps muscle, des cheveux courts
Tu ressembles a un garcon
Et je sens ta peau meme sans lumiere
Les serpents sont legendaires
Ou vas-tu, les yeux noirs
Tu t'en vas vers nulle part
Allez, viens la, viens avec moi, ne pars pas sans moi
Hey, viens la, reste la ne pars plus sans moi
Hey, tu prends tes vetements tu les mets sur toi
Hey, cette nuit, dans ce lit, tu es si jolie...
On se reverra tous les jours des notre retour
Prends tes vetements, he, tu as froid
Et mets-les sur toi
Mais tu cries dans l'eau meme en hiver
Et brillent tes yeux noirs
Ou vas-tu quand tu pars
Dans la rue, vers nulle part
Allez, viens la, viens avec moi, ne pars plus sans moi
Allez, viens la, reste la, ne pars plus sans moi
Hey, cette nuit, par ici, tu es si jolie
Hey, tu prends tes vetements tu les mets sur toi...
Allez, viens la, viens avec moi, ne pars plus sans moi
Allez, viens la, reste la, ne pars plus sans moi
Hey, tu prends tes vetements tu les mets sur toi
Hey, cette nuit, dans ce lit, t'etais si jolie...

Well... isn't that just a lovely, delicate song... beautiful piano part too.

flying off the handle with a bee in your bonnet

2010-08-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

Chewing the fat this morning with a friend, I realised I had got hold of the wrong end of the stick ...he nearly flew off the handle, so I had to bust a gut to get things on an even keel again. Another fine kettle of fish I had go myself into.

We use these strange idiomatic expressions without even thinking about it.... and you don't realise it until you find yourself talking to someone for whom English is not their first language. They can be brilliant and fluent in English, but idioms can stop them dead in their tracks, put a cat among the pigeons and completely put the mockers on the conversation.... if you see what I mean!

There are quite a few books of French idioms, some pictured above. I've got 101 French idioms... the good point of this is that it had pictures you can store in your mind to help you remember them .The duff point is, it uses a whole page for each one, so you only get 101 of them. However, it does have ,for each one, a story which uses the idiom in context. To be honest, a picture you have invented yourself tends to stick better, as I have mentioned before... better still if it is funny, rude, outrageous or all three.

The Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French includes a lot of idiomatic usages too... a really good book.

The Collins I have not seen, and there were no reviews on amazon.

The Street French series I also do not have, but they are well received on Amazon.

The Genevieve "Merde" books have quite a lot of idioms too, mixed in with the slang etc.

I have another, for which there was no picture so I've done one myself... Everyday French Idioms by Lupson and Pelissier. This has over 500 idioms with key words, and a short sentence to show how it is used.

A big drawback with most of the idiom books I have seen is that you can only use them in one direction.... French to English. You can't look up , for example, an idiom which is the equivalent of "slinging your hook."
However, the Everyday French Idioms" one does have this sort of reverse index at the back.

BUT... the real problem is that there are loads and loads of these idioms, so how do you remember them?

My advice is...

[a] Rather than reading the Idiom books, pick them up as you come across them in your reading or film-watching.

[b] Have a Theme Week, where you try to learn words, slang and idioms about ,say, "being upset/annoyed" or " screwing things up."

[c] For every idiom. learn it as part of a memorable sentence.... rude, silly, amazing, involving you if possible/suitable. We tend to remember things better if they are about us.

[d] Drawing you own picture is good too... the more senses you use to remember anything, the better it sinks in. Colour in the pictures in 101 French Idioms if you like... you will be engaging with the phrase for longer that way.

OK... enough about that for now...

Music Time.. it's Joyce Jonathan with J'ai pas besoin .... first the video, then one with the words...

now the wordy one...

French novels with wit and zip, plus Camille

2010-08-08T03:31:00.000-07:00

Once I had got my French up to a reasonable reading standard I started to look for interesting books to read.

Everyone has their own opinion as to what constitutes "interesting" but what I wanted was cleverness, inventiveness, wit, wackiness.... you get the idea.

I wanted the French equivalents of Jerome K Jerome, Martin Amis, Conan Doyle, Joseph Heller, Evelyn Waugh and the like.

I have had a lot of trouble finding anything like this.

I asked all the French-speakers I knew for French books which had humour in them. Interestingly, they mostly said that would be easy, but then they sank into thought and didn.t come up with much.

Oh.... one mentioned Boris Vian.... very amusing , they said. So I bought L'ecume des jours which was not my idea of fun. Two people fall in love, then the girl dies slowly. Hmmm.

Another said that La Pére Goriot was very like Dickens. I don't think so.

Anyway, I persevered and yes readers, I have found a few authors with those requirements.

Sébastian Japrisot.... La fee Carabine
Amélie Nothomb... Stupeurs at tremblements
Marcel Aymé..... Les contes de chat perche
Daniel Pennac.... aux fruits de la passion

I am sure there are more, and maybe you could tell me about them.

My wife, " The Librarian" a she is known in my blogs, was discussing this search of mine for musical equivalents of variou people... The Cure, Springsteen, Joy Division, Richard Thompson and so on.

We didn't come to any conclusions except that we definitely felt that Springsteen's music could, probably, only have come from the vast urban landscapes and mindset of the USA.

She sort of liked Dolly... we sort of agreed that they were a bit like Siouxsie and the Banshees/Comsat Angels/Cure/The Sound ...sort of thing.

Here's an unusual piece of music by Camille.... Le demeure d'un ciel..... it's not the sort of song I would normally listen to, but it's the way it's done that is interesting. See what you think ...

La Demeure D'un Ciel Lyrics

Pa pala pala papapa
Pa pala pala pa pa

On s'est connus
En bas des marches
Du palais tout en bas de l'escalier de glace
Tes pieds dansaient
Nus sur la neige
Et tu chantais cet air plein de malice et de grâce

Ôte maintenant
Tes souliers
Et chausse à ton pied
Quelques pelotes de nuées
Car ici désormais
Est la demeure d'un ciel
La demeure d'un ciel

On a monté
Toutes les marches
Du palais jusqu'en haut de l'escalier de glace
Un ingénu
Nous attendait
Et nous a mariés parmi les oiseaux sauvages

Ôte maintenant
Tes souliers
Et chausse à ton pied
Quelques pelotes de nuées
Car ici désormais

..a lot can hinge on a grammatical error..

2010-08-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

Last time we looked at a fictional account which showed how important it can be to be able to write good, accurate French.

This is not easy! To achieve that particular goal requires a lot of hard work. I try to write some French every day.... even if it's just copying out some song lyrics or writing some sample sentence to illustrate whatever I'm trying to improve on at the moment, or writing some of my diary in French.

Now in that story, his mistakes would have caused slight embarrassment.... but in this next one, which is TRUE, a little grammatical error has changed the course of a whole murder enquiry... a murder which is still being disputed since it took place in 1991 !!

Anyway, imagine my surprise when I read yesterday's Independent and found this article......

Who really killed Ghislaine Marchal?
Since 1991, 'L'Affaire Omar' has divided France. Now the case is being revisited – on film and possibly in court
By John Lichfield
Tuesday, 3 August 2010

The most celebrated judicial saga, and spelling mistake, in modern French history are to be revisited on the big screen and possibly in the courtroom. The case of Omar Raddad, an illiterate Moroccan gardener convicted of murdering his wealthy employer in 1991, has been compared to the Dreyfus affair of the late 19th century and the OJ Simpson case in the United States in the 1990s. Sixteen years after he was convicted and 14 years after he was pardoned, France remains divided – partly along racial and political lines – between those who believe Omar Raddad is innocent and those who are adamant that he is guilty.
After a formal request from Mr Raddad, now 48, the French justice ministry is considering whether new techniques for studying DNA evidence found at the murder scene warrant a new investigation and, possibly, a retrial. A decision is expected next month.
At the same time, a movie is being made by Roschdy Zem, an award-winning French actor and director of North African origin, which will present Mr Raddad as a victim of a blatant miscarriage of justice and, possibly, a conspiracy. The title of the film, Omar m'a tuer – literally "Omar to kill me" – is taken from the grammatically incorrect message written in the victim's blood on the door of a locked room where her body was found in Mougins, near Nice, on 24 June, 1991.
In a country drilled in correct French usage from the age of nine, the blatant grammatical mistake has become one of the great talking points of "L'Affaire Omar". Would the victim, Ghislaine Marchal, 65, a highly educated and wealthy widow, have made such a basic error, even while dying in agony? The message should have read "Omar m'a tuée". The incorrect form – "m'a tuer" – has since become a buzz phrase in France.
Mr Raddad, who was illiterate and could barely speak French at the time of his original trial in 1994, was partially pardoned by President Jacques Chirac in 1996 and released from prison in 1998. Ever since, Mr Raddad has been pursuing every possible avenue to establish his innocence. "People keep telling me: 'You were pardoned. You should be happy with that' or 'Forget it and move on with your life'," Mr Raddad said this week. "Well, no. I was pardoned. I was not cleared. I want to clear my name."
Even after almost two decades, the Omar Raddad affair provokes intense fascination – and anger. The family of the victim, through their celebrity lawyer, Georges Kiejman, have attacked the film, unseen, as "an insult to Ms Marchal's memory". They have opposed all previous attempts by Mr Raddad to win a second trial. The film's director, Roschdy Zem, says: "They refuse to even consider the possibility of Omar's innocence. Why? Because if he is not the murderer, they have to face up to the question of who did do it."
Mr Zem, who starred in the award-winning movie Indigènes about North African soldiers in the French army in 1944, says that there was a racist element in the original conviction. At one point the presiding judge – who had lived in North Africa under French rule – addressed the accused man in Arabic. He told Mr Raddad: "Anyone who cannot read or write should hide themselves away in a hole."
Another celebrity lawyer, Jacques Vergès, who took up the Raddad case after the trial, was the first to make the comparison with the Dreyfus affair. "A century ago a military officer was convicted [of espionage] because he was guilty of being Jewish," he said in 2001. "Today we condemn a gardener because he is guilty of being North African." There is certainly room for doubt about the original investigation and trial. The initial pathologist's report put the date of death as 24 June, when Mr Haddad had an unbreakable alibi. The date was later changed to the 23 June. The first version was declared to have been a "typing error".
Ms Marchal was found in her villa in Mougins with "her skull broken, her throat cut, one finger sliced off and her body pierced 10 times by a sharp blade". Could a woman so mortally injured have written a message in her own blood? Actually, there were two messages. A second, truncated, scribble read: "Omar m'a t.." Experts called at the original trial were certain that the blood was that of Ms Marchal. They said they were "two-thirds" sure that the handwriting was hers. Other experts have later said it was impossible to tell.
Mr Raddad's lawyers have, over the years, suggested that the true murderer, or murderers, daubed the message with the dead, or dying, woman's finger to incriminate the gardener. It has emerged that traces of the DNA of two men were found at the murder scene, including one mingled with Ms Marchal's blood. Neither trace matches the DNA of Mr Raddad. Evidence has also emerged since the trial in 1994 that Ms Marchal did occasionally suffer grammatical lapses in which she used the infinitive instead of the past participle.
Mr Raddad has now formally requested that the French justice minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, should order a new judicial investigation into the case. Only she can do so. In 2002, a French court of "revision" (not quite the same as an appeal) decided that the new DNA evidence could prove nothing. The traces might have been left by detectives or by previous visitors, the court ruled.
Mr Raddad's lawyers say that scientific knowledge has now moved on sufficiently for such possibilities to be examined and excluded. If Ms Alliot-Marie gives the go-ahead, the DNA traces could be compared, they say, with samples taken from all convicted criminals in a new French database. A "revision" committee could then – if it was convinced that there were "new facts, unknown to the original hearing" – order a new trial.

.................................................................

Well, what about that as a real-life lesson eh?

This reminds me of a great bit in a William story from "William the Bad." by Richmal Crompton. William and his outlaws listen to a visiting speaker at school about the plight of orphans, and decide to find one and adopt it, so they make this notice to put outside the barn where the outlaws meet....

WANTED AN......

orfun
awfun
orfon
awfon

Then they they have a big argument about which of the four outlaws has spelt orphan correctly.

They resolve this by writing underneath... WE GNOW WHITCH IS WRIGHT

So much for the good old days of Education when all children left school totally literate in every way! ( The story was written in 1930 )

So the moral of all this is.... practise writing French or [a] your murderer will never be caught or [b] you will not attract a suitable orphan.

Et maintenant !! the music spot, which tonight is filled by Noir Désir with À l'envers à l'endroit ..........

and here are the words for it......

On n'est pas encore revenu du pays des mystères
Il y a qu'on est entré là sans avoir vu de la lumière
Il y a là l'eau, le feu, le computer, Vivendi, et la terre
On doit pouvoir s'épanouir à tout envoyer enfin en l'air

On peut toujours saluer les petits rois de pacotille
On peut toujours espérer entrer un jour dans la famille
Sûr que tu pourras devenir un crack boursier à toi tout seul
On pourrait même envisager que tout nous explose à la gueule
Autour des oliviers palpitent les origines
Infiniment se voir rouler dans la farine

A l'envers, à l'endroit, à l'envers, à l'endroit
A l'endroit, à l'envers, à l'envers, à l'endroit

Y'a t'il un incendie prévu ce soir dans l'hémicycle
On dirait qu'il est temps pour nous d'envisager un autre cycle
On peut caresser des idéaux sans s'éloigner d'en bas
On peut toujours rêver de s'en aller mais sans bouger de là

Il paraît que la blanche colombe a trois cents tonnes de plombs dans l'aile
Il paraît qu'il faut s'habituer à des printemps sans hirondelles
La belle au bois dormant a rompu les négociations
Unilatéralement le prince entame des protestations
Doit-on se courber encore et toujours pour une ligne droite ?
Prière pour trouver les grands espaces entre les parois d'une boîte
Serait-ce un estuaire ou le bout du chemin au loin qu'on entrevoit
Spéciale dédicace à la flaque où on nage, où on se noie

Autour des amandiers fleurissent les mondes en sourdine
No pasaran sous les fourches caudines

A l'envers, à l'endroit, à l'envers, à l'endroit
A l'endroit, à l'envers, à l'envers, à l'endroit

Oh.... those pictures up at the top... I found a rather grubby Footy card the other day, and on the back was a veritable Rosetta Stone of languages. Notice, dear reader, how concise the French version is.

A cautionary tale

2010-08-03T03:59:00.000-07:00

A little Gotlib comic to start with..... but now, a cautionary tale about the importance of yesterday's topic... accents.... however, you will notice that Patrick has, unaccountably, got his accent names the wrong way round at times in this story.

Rummed all round (by the late, much-missed Patrick Campbell)
From “A Feast of True Fandangles”

This pretty, vivacious French lady comes flying in through the gate, silk scarves fluttering, bangles all a-jangle, and before we have time to put up any defence at all she jams us into the position of driving her to Cannes the following evening – husband away, all away, no car, etc. – so that she can buy us dinner in a restaurant which she describes as being “ not sad, like all the other.” She dances away down the road towards her own house before , as I have said, we can intrude a single “But – “ or an “ Unfortunately – “ , and we have plenty of them in store for just a situation as this.
By an unlucky chance we have just given two lunch parties in a row, both of which turned – without perceptible interval – into dinner parties, so that the very last thing we wish to do is to find ourselves in a not very sad restaurant the very next night, laughing like hyenas, in French. And particularly, as the very last thing, far beyond the very last thing, in Cannes, which is half an hour away and is, therefore, absolutely unvisitable by either of us after dark.
However, two very good things happen the following morning. Madame, working away at it like a beaver, has managed to find herself a superb sore throat and, furthermore, an equal blessing, it is belting rain, with the clear intention of continuing to do so for the next three weeks.
It is with a song in my heart, under my golf umbrella, with mud up to my sock clocks, that I prance up the drive to the French lady’s house, to tell her that I am desolated but we cannot dine with her in Cannes tonight. This lady with- temporarily – no husband and no car, has gone out. I don’t know how she’s got out, in this torrent, but got out she has, not – perhaps – having got back the previous night.
I have had to pay this abortive visit in person because the lady, of course, has no telephone, so that having dried myself as best I can I sit down to write her a short note, to be shot into her letter-box by hand, upon completion.
I begin “ "Chere Jaqueline” –“ and absolutely, upon that instant I remember that while I can speak French, in a saw-toothed way , I am entirely unable to write it. Has, for instance, chere got an acute accent on the first e ? If I don’t insert the acute accent does it mean something else altogether, like instead of “ Dear Jacqueline- “ I am writing, “ Expensive Jacqueline “?
Out with the dictionary and, by gum, I’m right. Cher hasn’t got one, but chère has. A narrow escape. I’m off, then.
“ Chère Jacqueline – si ça vous derange pas –“
I want to say ‘ If that doesn’t inconvenience you ‘ but it looks as if I’ve said ‘ If that doesn’t drive you out of your mind.’
It’s derange that looks wrong. Too much like the onset of homicidal mania. Perhaps it has an acute accent and – by gum again – it has.
‘ Chère Jacqueline – si ça vous dérange pas – ‘ Much better , much Frenchier ‘ – je voudrais bien changer la nuit de notre rendez-vous a Vendredi – ‘
I would wish well to change the night of our assignation to Friday. Pretty rough stuff and even at that it seems to be missing something. Out with the red-hot dictionary again and I find to my total amazement that notre means ‘our’ but if you glue a circumflex on the ‘o’ it means ‘ours’. The which I was about to do. ‘ Ours assignation –‘. And surely there is something wrong with ‘ a Vendredi’? Has Friday. Of course ! The damn thing’s got a grave accent ‘ à Vendredi ‘ . To think I missed by a hairsbreadth telling expensive Jacqueline that ours assignation has Friday ! The poor woman wouldn’t have known which way to turn.
On then, encouraged, to the pith of the communication. “ La pauvre Vivienne est tellement enrhumée – ‘ It can’t be.
The impoverished Vivienne is muchly rummed. My wife, dressed in rags, is stiff with Bacardi and a slice of lemon.
Dictionary. A winner ! ‘ Être enrhumé – to have a cold .’
But I note, with a shudder, that the perfectly commonplace word être has a circumflex on the first e – a thing I’d never known before, or hadn’t noticed. Resolve to keep clear of that.
Now, to round it all off. “ Et voila – quel temps !” And there it is – what time !
But that has to be right because that’s what everyone says when it’s raining. Excpet that the French, according to the dictionary, say ‘Voilà ‘ with un accent grave on the à . The awkward foreign swine.
I am about to push this back-breaking work through Jacqueline’s letter-box when she opens the door herself. In a barely audible croak she says she doesn’t want to derange me, but she is muchly rummed. – “ Et violà” she cries, “ le temps !”
If only she’d said even half of that before I got going…

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
As for the music, this is a really lovely Diam's song... Par Amour

and here's the words... in a strange variety of fonts but perfectly readable... go for it!

Typing French accents + Wolinski + Superbus

2010-08-01T06:40:00.000-07:00

Before I start a rather fact-filled and dreary account of various ways to type French accents, here's a plug for a favourite cartoonist of mine, and one of the first French cartoonists I encountered.

When I first started (re)learning French I used to go and read Paris Match in the library where I worked.... and after a while I plucked up the courage to ask what they did with them, and they threw them out. What!!

So I arranged for me to have them instead and built up quite a stack of them.... and the first thing I used to look at was the big Wolinski cartoon which was usually very funny and interesting. See link in sidebar for lots of his cartoons

Needless to say, after a while the library cut back on its expenses and stopped getting it...grrrrr grrrrr.

Incidentally, another good read in the library was the TLS ( Times Literary Supplement) but they have now stopped getting that as well.... you won't believe this, but it has been replaced by the Beano. Yes. It's true.

Just in case you don't know, you can often enlarge the various pictures I use by clicking on them.

There are quite a few routes to getting French accents on the PC, and lots of sites to "help" you.

But first let's look at a simple if cumbersome method that requires no special keyboard....

............. these are the ALT codes for typing in French accents and suchlike using the ordinary keyboard. For each one you press the ALT key, then you type in the code using the numeric keys to the right of the keyboard, NOT the numbers above the letter keyboard.

Alt Codes for typing French characters:
Capital Vowels
À ALT+0192
Â ALT+0194
Ä ALT+0196
È ALT+0200
É ALT+0201
Ê ALT+0202
Ë ALT+0203
Î ALT+0206
Ï ALT+0207
Ô ALT+0212
Œ ALT+0140
Ù ALT+0217
Û ALT+0219
Ü ALT+0220
Ÿ ALT+0159
Lowercase Vowels
à ALT+0224
â ALT+0226
ä ALT+0228
è ALT+0232
é ALT+0233
ê ALT+0234
ë ALT+0235
î ALT+0238
ï ALT+0239
ô ALT+0244
œ ALT+0156
ù ALT+0249
û ALT+0251
ü ALT+0252
ÿ ALT+0255
Consonants/Punctuation
Ç ALT+0199 (caps)
ç ALT+0231 (lower)
« ALT+0171 (Left Angle Quote)
» ALT+0187 (Right Angle Quote)
€ ALT+0128

If you want to be extra swish, you can install the French Keyboard... it takes a bit of getting used to, and you will probably need to put little stickers on some of your keys, but it's good. There are lots of sites which give you instructions about how to use it, but I have put a link in the sidebar to what I think is the best one ( well, the most error-free!)

Incidentally, you can also access some accents on the ordinary keyboard by using the control key (Ctrl) simultaneously with the nearest thing you can see to the accent you want (!!) then release and press the letter you want.The only problem is that although this works in Word, it doesn't seem to work when you are composing a blog! Why... I don't know. There can alse be problems when printing these accented letters... I think that's because some printers, or printer drivers, sdon't support accents, or only with a limited selection of fonts.... you might need to experiment. ... as will I.

Several sources say that you are better off using an International Keyboard, or even the Spanish Keyboard as they can do all the French accents but they are QWERTY keyboards too.... more experimentation required there I think.

All I know is, it was all much simpler on the Mac. As are most things.

To lighten the mood, here is that Superbus lot again with their winsome ditty, Addictions....

and here are the words...

Lyrics to Addictions :
Mords-toi la langue, tu vas finir par te taire
Rien n'est plus tendre qu'un petit bout de chair

Je ne me passe plus de vous
Je ne me passe plus de tout

Et j'additionne les addictions
Je collectionne à ma façon
Et j'additionne les addictions
Je collectionne à ma façon
Et je jette comme je prends
J'affectionne les tourments et j'apprends
Et je jette comme je prends
J'affectionne les tourments et j'apprends

Mords-toi la langue, tu vas finir par me plaire
Reste dans l'angle, que je te vois bien le faire
Je ne me passe plus de vous
Je ne me passe plus de tout

Et j'additionne les addictions
Je collectionne à ma façon
Et j'additionne les addictions
Je collectionne à ma façon
Et je jette comme je prends
J'affectionne les tourments et j'appprends
Et je jette comme je prends
J'affectionne les tourments et j'appprends

Mords-toi la langue...
Mords-toi la langue, tu vas finir par me plaire...

Je ne me passe plus de vous
Je ne me passe plus de tout

Et j'additionne les addictions
Je collectionne à ma façon
Et j'additionne les addictions
Je collectionne à ma façon
Et je jette comme je prends
J'affectionne les tourments et j'appprends
Et je jette comme je prends
J'affectionne les tourments et j'appprends

J'additionne les addictions
J'additionne les addictions !

(Merci à emma, Jade pour cettes paroles)

Any more ideas about any of this stuff today please let me know via the comments thingy.....

Those pesky genders

2010-07-30T14:03:00.001-07:00

Ah, those pesky genders for French nouns...... they can be very hard to remember.

All the books say.... " Make sure to remember the gender of each noun you learn as well as its meaning.".... much easier said than done in my experience.

Now there are lots of clever strategies for doing this.

One simple way is to associate masculine words with a man, and feminine words with a woman. For example..

Suppose you want to remember that sand is LE sable.... just think of David Cameron sinking in a big heap of quicksand.

If you want to recall that a teacup is UNE tasse, think of Lady Gaga starting off her show by jumping out of a giant teacup.

These mind-images really last, and are an excellent way to fix anything in your head, noun-genders included. This works even better if your associations are rude, funny or ridiculous. True.

You can extend this idea by assembling whole collections of, say, masculine nouns you want to memorise and weaving them into a story featuring a man, say, Bob Dylan staring at the weather through his windscreen and putting on a lovely scarf with a fish design on it to keep out the cold...... well, you get the idea.

Some traditional remembering ideas are good, like writing masculine nouns in one colour and feminine nouns in another, or even having separate lists for the two genders. Colour is a big aid to memory.

Reading and listening will help a lot too, and you unconsciously soak up repeated encounters with nouns and their genders... even more so if you read them out.

A memory aid used by many of the top memorisers is to imagine a house, and store all the masculine nouns in the ground floor rooms, and the feminine nouns upstairs.... and every time you take in a new noun, you mentally picture yourself bringing it into the house and carefully putting it somewhere on the correct floor.

Let me know of other ways that work for you.... this is a big problem for many learners... even more so in German with neuters as well.

And as for today's music, it's Manu ( which used to be Dolly) with "Tes Cicatrices"..... and this, believe it or not, is the same woman you saw playing Tous des Stars and Quand l'herbe nous dévore a few posts ago.

Boucq

2010-07-29T03:52:00.000-07:00

I got a lovely French comic book today in the local Oxfam bookshop. Like many charity shops these days it doesn't display its Foreign Language fiction , and hardly any FL learning books either...BUT.... if you ask, they will bring out a box or two of French books from the back. If you don't ask, you don't get, and in this shop there was no notice up to say that they had extra stock in the back.

So the message is, it's usually worth asking in charity shops if there is nothing on show... there is usually a massive heap of books in the back sorting rooms.

Anyway, I struck gold this time because they had Les Frustres 3, which I haven't got, and it was FULL SIZE so I can read the clever, witty strips without a microscope... which is nice.

They also had a comic strip book by a cartoonist I hadn't heard of, BOUCQ, and there plenty on the interweb about him.... including videos of his drawing methods.... see below...

Boucq's themes and drawings can be rather "adult" at times, if that's the right word.

As for today's music, it's a bit Eurovision in places but a cracking chorus. The band is Superbus, the song is Lola...... it's got scrolling lyrics too, you lucky people...

Dual-Language books

2010-07-28T11:54:00.001-07:00

Dual-language books (DL for short) helped me a lot when I was starting to learn French a few years ago, even though a lot of them are pretty turgid!

I've got quite a collection of them now, mostly got cheaply from junk shops.

There's several different sorts...

[a] The basic Dual-language book....e.g. Penguin 1 & 2 etc.... usually a series of short stories with the English version on the facing pages. The basic rule with these is the more modern they are, the more interesting are the stories!
It has to be said, in my opinion, the french DL books are definitely stodgier than DL books in other languages... German, Spanish, Welsh, Latin.... to name but a few. I think this is because French is weighed down a bit with ancient "classical" writers who, to be brutally frank, are rather dull. Sorry folks.

[b] Then there are Poetry DL books... I've got a few, and I love that Apollinaire one, he just seems to appeal to me. It's a beautifully set-out and well- produced book as well.

[c] You can get DL plays... mostly the classics like Moliere ...I have to confess that Moliere doesn't hit the spot for me. A good one I have got is Waiting for Godot, which I've got in both French and English. In this case the play was in fact written in both languages by Becket and they are a bit different.

[d] Getting DL in another way, you can of course get novels in French which are also available in English. One of my favourites in Catch 22 ( same title in both languages, rather boringly) and there are many others. ... Harry Potter, Fred Vargas, lots of Maigrets... the key thing is you want to pick the ones that can be bought cheaply ( English versions) in Charity shops and the like. Catch 22 is an absolute doddle to find for almost nothing

[e] What you don't tend to find is dual-language stuff dealing with nore idiomatic works.... probably because they are mostly aimed at relative beginners. I could have done with it when I read Zazie dans le Metro... a very idiomatic book, with, in my opinion, rather unlikeable characters. Zazie herself is an absolute cow!

[f] There are loads of DL childrens' books... and if you are a real basic beginner that's fine but they cost a lot per word!

Right... time for a bit more music. This is a rather odd video by Jeanne Mas called EnRouge et Noir which seems to be a 70's ( 80's ?) pastiche, but the good thing is it's got the words with it. But look at those mullets!

Not exactly Diam's is it!!

Maigret and Dolly

2010-07-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

Today's recommended book is really for more advanced readers... probably A-level standard.... but everyone can get something from it and it's only around £3 + postage on Amazon.

It's 2 Maigret stories written as plays, so it's mostly speech..which is good.

They are detective stories so they keep your attention.

But the best thing is...

Every few pages there is a detailed breakdown of all the special points of grammar, unusual idioms etc which through the book builds up to a thorough grammar workout... a fantastic learning aid for the reader. You could do worse thatn to photocopy these pages and make them into a book.

This is because the book was originally published as a teaching course by the BBC and there were tapes of each of the plays to go with it, though I haven't got those.

I've read these thoroughly and have learned a lot from them. I really recommend this book to anyone who wants to get to grips with the tougher quirks of the French language... and who doesn't ?

It's that band Dolly again ( nowadays called Manu) doing a very Cure-like song " Quand l'herbe nous dévore."

I seem to have the French Keyboard on the PC sorted out more or less now... so expect accents from now on.

You would hardly recognise the singer as the same on from the previous video, but she' the same one.

Here's the words nicked from the net... although a quick check through seems to indicate they're rather unreliable.... as you will no doubt detect for yourselves.I will try to get a more accurate version for you.

L'amertume mutile nos efforts
Mielleusement de prime abord, alors
Tout en haut des cîmes
Nos vices se décimeraient encore
Nous dessinent quand l'herbe nous dévore

De sommiers lâches en lattes rances
D'étreinte vives en ultime indifférence
Lassitude au charme indélicat
Plaisirs monocordes et des joies monotones
Nul doute ne prime
Quand les envies suppriment les remords
Nous désirent quand l'herbe nous dévorent

De sommiers lâches en lattes rances
D'étreintes vives en ultime indifférence
D'artifices arrogants en soldats playmobil
D'acides attouchements en gestes si malhabiles

Draps secs et perverses ont goûté mon sang
Sans autres sentiments
Songes et parole de bois
Ne trouvent aucun éclat
Que de promesses salies

.. Lithuanian Motivation..

2010-07-25T13:19:00.001-07:00

This giant picture shows the fair Lithuanian City of Kaunas. A few years ago I went there for a week to attend a Symposium on Adult Learning... I was then a Mathematics Lecturer at an FE College.

On the course were people from all over Europe.. Hungarians, Greeks, Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Dutch.... and me.

For that whole week , over the whole course, they all spoke English. Very good English too.

I found this pretty shaming I have to admit. As an educated adult, widely read and with many fields of interest I felt completely and utterly foolish. Not only did they speak English fluently, they seemed to think nothing of it.... it was obviously perfectly normal for them, and their co-workers, to be bilingual.

Over the week I thought about this a lot, and when I stepped on the plane I vowed that I would learn a language. I had asked many people on the course about how they had learned English so well, and they all said that they were taught English from a very young age.... 8 at the most. Also, they had to admit that English was accessible to them easily on TV, in films, on the radio etc. Here in England you could not say the same at all. Many of them had travelled extensively in the UK and some had lived there for some time. The Hungarians especially found English grammar childishly simple, but the pronunciation was a joke!

Since then I have worked on quite a few, Latin, Russian, Spanish, German, Welsh... but mostly French. And I've stuck with French for some good reasons..

[a] Having made a complete pig's ear of French many years ago at school, I still had quite a start with vocabulary.... I knew about 2/3 of the vocabulary in a GCSE revision book I bought.

[b] French offered probably the best reading and films

[c] French learning materials are widely available.

[d] I knew some French speakers ( several of my colleagues at work for example.)

[e] France is easy to visit.

[f] As I was pretty late in starting (56) it would be hard to start from scratch with a new language.

The key thing was, and is, that my Lithuanaian experience has given me great motivation to read, understand and speak another language.

One big advantage I had was that,as a teacher, I knew a lot about how to learn, how to make tough things interesting and learnable, and how to make things memorable.

And here I am at the age of 60 trying to pass my enthusiasm and strategies on to you.

So, here is Dolly with Tous des Stars... rather heavier stuff than usual. The thing about this band is that in every video they have made the singer looks entirely different.... but it's the same one.

and here's the words to this catchy little number..

Tous Des Stars Lyrics
Parce qu'on est tous seulement des hommes
On pense que la vie est trop conne
Parce qu'on ne sait plus la regarder
On ne sait plus se regarder

On pense que la vie ne sera bonne
Que si l'on passe à la télé
C'est pas si dur à réaliser

Parce qu'on tous des stars
Parce qu'on est tous des stars
Sans télé sans miroir
Parce qu'on va tout casser
Parce qu'on est tous des stars

Un jour où l'autre
On abandonne
Le simple fait d'être des hommes
Toujours chercher à chercher ailleurs

Parce qu'on est tous des stars
Sans télé sans miroir
Parce qu'on est tous des stars
parce qu'on va tout casser

C'est bien le mieux que l'on puisse faire
Être des hommes de tout son cœur
Juste essayer, juste essayer
Parce qu'on est tous des stars

Pour tout le mal que l'on se donne
Le simple fait d'être des hommes
Ne plus chercher à chercher ailleurs

Parce qu'on est tous des stars
Sans télé sans miroir
Parce qu'on va tout casser
Parce qu'on va y arriver

Parce qu'on est tous des...

Parce qu'on est tous des stars.

What a belting song.... she's really into it too, closing her eyes and looking up. It gets better every time I hear it.... a perfect pop song, dynamics, words, killer chorus, the lot, fantastic singing.

slang, and how to get it

2010-07-22T09:50:00.000-07:00

When I first got interested in learning French ( many years after my disastrous school French!) one of the first books I got was a little book about slang.... Merde! by someone called just Genevieve.

I got it in a junk shop for £1 I think, and how I loved it! From the very first page of " Common Everyday Musts" un type, un gars, une gonzesse, une gosse, machin, copain....on to all the ways to call people idiots, through "love" and "sex" it was a joy from start to finish.

A few weeks ago I found out that there was a volume 2, called appropriately Merde Encore! and it had gone up to a stunning £1.40 in a different junk shop in Norfolk.

I recommend both of them.By reading the small print I have found that she is actually called Genevieve Edis.

A much more staid and sensible and comprehensive book about slang now.. I found this in the University Library where I live and immediately (!!) got it from Mr. Amazon. Hardly a day has gone by since when I have not consulted this wizard tome.

It is called " Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French" by Herail and Lovatt.

The only downside is that it was written 1984... so it's very much a snapshot of the time... but lots and lots of it is still in use today, and of course it's fine for the slang in many novels etc. And a great bedtime book too.

Well, another downside is that it only works in one direction... that is, French to English... if you want to find the slang French for upper-class prat you just have to search through the book... you would certainly have to look a long way to find that the slang word for worthless merchandise was le fer-blanc.

Then there is the Oxford French Cartoon-Strip vocabulary Builder which claims to give you " all the short cuts to sounding really French" which it only partially does.... but, to be fair, it does have quite a bit of French slang and it is more up-to-date than most other offerings.

Of course, if you want really up-to-the-minute slang, the internet is your friend. If you Google " french slang" you get 731 000 results. Ouch!

Next time, probably, I am going to tell you why I am learning French at my advanced age ( hint..... in a few days I will be 22,222 days old). Besides the sheer excitement of finding out, I hope to get across the importance of motivation... because if you ain't motivated, it ain't going to happen.

Here's another fine song from Diam's.. Ma France a moi... sorry about the lack of accents in these posts, I haven't got the hang of the French keyboard on this PC... I'm used to a Mac but the Mac is no more!

Great song, fine words, and such a clever, hard-hitting video.

and here's the words...

Update.... looking up Amazon for the book pictures I found that you could get that Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French for £1 + postage so I ordered another copy to keep in the car.

Scrabble

2010-07-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

Of course you can play scrabble in French, and a lot of fun it is too.

I've put a link in the sidebar to a site where you can play French Scrabble online. It also tells you the piece values and numbers if you want to put together your own set....I do this by buying old scrabble sets cheaply in junk shops and picking the tiles you need ( It didn't work for Russian though!).

There are also easily-found French Scrabble downloads, and you can buy proper French scrabble sets online too.

As a weird sort of sideline, here's a very odd video involving Scrabble...

You hardly need to ask why play French Scrabble.... it is fun for a start, it works your brain hard, you need to look up all sorts of words in the dictionary, and you spend a good while looking at the words too. It's even fun to play by yourself just to see how high a score you can get. A good way to do this is to leave a board set up and just sit down and play a round or two when you have a spare moment.

There is a French Scrabble World Championship, which appears to be dominated by Senegal for some reason.

Moving on... the other day I was browsing around finding some nice websites for you and I found one written by an American living in France who seems to have much the same taste in French music as I do. It's such a good blog I felt a bit jealous... there is a link to it in the sidebar.

Time for music..... this is beautiful Zazie with Tous des Anges. I would describe it as atmospheric.

... books that don't exist !

2010-07-19T11:31:00.001-07:00

Today I am going to write about some French books that I would like, but which don't actually exist.... or maybe they do, but I haven't found them yet.

Book 1.... there is a brilliant Spanish grammar book called " A Spanish Learning Grammar". It is set out so well, with very clear explanations and loads of sample sentences. It is split into Part one... for relative beginners... and Part 2... for more advanced learners... great!

It is written in a lively, entertaining style, and has little cartoons all the way through with odd semi-stick characters. Where's the French version?

Book 2... again for Spanish learners, a rather unique book called "Breaking out of beginners' Spanish." This is a book you can read for fun, it's written by someone who learned Spanish by going to Spanish -speaking countries and learning to talk to them!

He is very perceptive about why we find it hard to speak in another language and addresses these problems. So, he has a chapter about Ways to Start a Sentence.... you tend to get stuck ... what you need is a collection of instant starters!

He says, and I think he is right, that we often give ourselves time to think even in our first language, by saying a load of cobblers like " Well, you know, I think..." amd you're off, you've made a start. He shows you lots of these sneaky starters.

Then there's a chapter on Snappy Answers... he gives you a little tool-box of quick, fluent answers to impress your aquaintances! It's just a great, lovable book. So where is the French version, eh?

Book three..... ooh, this one runs deep... where is the French Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner????? As far as I can find out, only the horrible Disneyfied versions are available, and I hate them. There is/was a proper one called Winnie L'Ourson but is seems to be totally unobtainable. You can get them BOTH in Spanish, German, Latin, Russian. Come on folks, let's have a proper French set.
[Apart from anything else, I've read them in Spanish and Latin, and the first one in German and I want to beat some sort of record of my own making by doing the French one too.]

While we are at it, where is the French Cure, the French Bruce Springsteen, the French Joni Mitchell, the French Joy Division, the French Richard Thompson ? I'll have to wait a long while for them to trundle into view I think, but I'd live to be proved wrong.

Here is Beatrice Martin of Couer de Pirate just sitting at a piano and singing " Francis" beautifully....

and here are the words.....

Find me some of those books and I will love you forever... in a platonic, 60-year-old way you understand.

Les Frustres

2010-07-18T06:40:00.000-07:00

In the very first blog I recommended a cartoon strip called Mafalda.

I like Mafalda because it has all the advantages of cartoon strips... portability, it's all speech, it's funny, it's clever and quite grown up even though it stars children.

An even more grown-up cartoon is Claire Bretecher's " Les Frustres."

The only drawback...the cartoons in the books are shrunk so my old eyes find them hard to read....they are reasonably cheap though and there's lots of fun, serious fun I suppose, in them.

I've got vols 1 and 2, but not 3.... but I will do now I know it exists!

Now a bit of music to finish...

Here's Saez with a beautiful live version of " Fils de France" getting an appreciative reception from an audience that knows the words!

Here's the words...

J'ai vu, les larmes aux yeux, les nouvelles ce matin
20% pour l'horreur, 20% pour la peur
Ivres d'inconscience, tous fils de France
Au pays des Lumières, amnésie suicidaire

Non, non, non, non, non...

Nous sommes, nous sommes la nation des droits de l'homme
Nous sommes, nous sommes la nation de la tolérance
Nous sommes, nous sommes la nation des Lumières
Nous sommes, nous sommes à l'heure de la résistance

Pour les rêves qu'on a fait,
Et pour ceux qu'on fera
Pour le poing qu'on a levé,
Pour celui qu'on lèvera
Pour un idéal,
Pour une utopie
Allons, marchons ensemble
Enfants de la patrie

Fils de France
Ça pour baisser la tête, ah oui ça t'aimes bien les minutes de silence
Fils de France
C'était à peine hier et déjà tu brandis le drapeau de l'ignorance
Fils de France
Nous n'oublierons jamais que nous sommes
Et serons les fils de la résistance
Fils de France
Au royaume des aveugles, tu sais bien ce qu'on dit ( ? what does he sing here?)
Les borgnes sont les rois

Y'a ces ombres derrière nous
Y'a ces idées vendues
Y'a les drapeaux qui flottent
Et ces hymnes dessus
Et puis y'a toi mon frère
Oui toi qui n'y crois plus
Et puis y'a nos prières
Et nos causes perdues ( ? mais la cause est perdue?)

Honte à notre pays
Honte à notre patrie
Honte à nous la jeunesse
Honte à la tyrannie
Honte à notre pays
Revoilà l'ennemi
Allons, marchons ensemble
Enfants de la patrie

Nous sommes, nous sommes la nation des droits de l'homme
Nous sommes, nous sommes la nation de la tolérance
Nous sommes, nous sommes la nation des Lumières
Nous sommes, nous sommes à l'heure de la résistance

Nous sommes, nous sommes la nation des droits de l'homme
Nous sommes, nous sommes la nation de la différence
Nous sommes, nous sommes la nation des Lumières
Nous sommes, nous sommes à l'heure de la résistance

They seem to be pretty accurate... I've ? the two bits I heard differently

Some good reads....

2010-07-18T06:09:00.001-07:00

Here's a couple of Roald Dahl's terrific books which I would recommend to any of you who want to read reasonably easy French and have a lot of fun along the way.

As a bonus Les Deux Gredins ( The Twits) is packed with brilliant insults which the fools hurl at each other throughout.

As a warning, the first French book I read was Candide... this is a great book, but not as a first read! At least I had read it in English years ago so I had a bit of a start.

Have some fun and read these instead if your French is anything above beginner level. You will learn a lot of new words, and collapse with laughter on the way.

Both good outcomes.

Here's the remarkable Saez with Jeunesse Leve-toi and as an extra, another version with the words so you can happily sing along.

Here the version avec les mots...

I guarantee right now that learning songs like this will improve your French no end... to learn effectively you need to engage ALL your senses... listening, speaking, singing, reading..... and what better to sing along to than this lovely stuff?

..convoi exceptionnel !

2010-07-17T10:24:00.001-07:00

Driving around today a big lorry in front of me had CONVOI EXCEPTIONNEL written on its rear end. In my little office French dictionary convoi is a masculine noun meaning convoy, column, procession.

This is a bit of a false friend I reckon... in the UK the lorry would probably be labelled Long Load or Wide Load... both of which it was.

When you read a passage in French, or hear some conversation, your brain is doing loads of things all at once.

... it's keeping the latest string of words in short-term memory
... it's recognising some of them, and may or may not be sure of their meaning.
... it's registering some as " haven't a clue" words
... it's "translating" instantly individual words almost subliminally
... it's recognising and translating little words groups like bien sur, n'est-ce pas, comme d'habitude etc
... it's piecing together all these fragments and groups to make some sort of sense.
... it's prioritising all these bits and discarding some of the less important ones.

.... etc etc.

It's no wonder that reading , listening and translating ( let alone speaking) any language is a mammoth task. You can all do this almost without thinking in your native language... bloody remarkable.

It is so effortless because you have spent your entire life so far learning to do this! And you are still doing it.

You can't do this with French, or any other language you do not yet know, except by getting yourself into a situation where you have to... immersion.

But... you can do as much as you can.

How to do as much as you can, and the most efficient and interesting ways to do it, is what all teaching should be about, this blog included.

I have just come back from Wales... Welsh is another language I am interested in. I went into junk shops etc and got about 20 easy Welsh childrens' books for almost nothing. In the same way, I look for French books too, but rather older ones.

You should do the same... but not too many or the supply will dry up for me.

Next time I will recommend some excellent French books to read.. I've already put in a plug for the Mr. Men books.

And now... some music... this is Zazie with "toc toc toc"... this has a killer chorus, rather Cure-like in my opinion.

The Mister Men meet Diam's

2010-07-09T02:17:00.000-07:00

Today's recommended read, even for you older learners out there , is the Mr. Men books which, as you can see, are in French too.

Lucky us, eh?

My favourite is Monsier Grincheux.

The French in these is not babyish at all... which I find with most French children's books except those for the very very young. One way to visualise your French skills is to imagine how young a French child would be when they spoke as well as you... it's actually quite a worrying thought!

I've no idea what the age profile of any future readers might be, but this piece of finishing music is a wonderful French rapper, Diam's.

There are some good, clever rappers around ( in English there is Scroobius Pip... listen to The Beat that my Heart Skipped for a start) and Diam's has some beautiful stuff on YouTube.
Also, she has some songs with the lyrics scrolling along so you can easily join in and get to learn the words.
Anyhow, if you look up all the colloquial stuff in this song alone it will keep you busy for a while and increase your useful stock of words no end!

UPDATE... On looking at this post recently I have noticed that the video is blocked... but if you press the play button you get a blocking message from EMI... however, if you then slide along the choices at the bottom 3 places right, there is another copy of it you CAN play! Hah!

and here it is with the words too.... join in!

I'm away to sunny Wales for a few days... see you later.

Saturnin Pompier

2010-07-07T12:09:00.001-07:00

Last time I showed you a cartoon.... Mafalda in fact. Mafalda was originally in spanish but has been translated into many languages.... including French.

Cartoons like that are especially good because they are almost all speech..... and speaking good French is one of our ultimate targets.

They are also rich in vernacular french, colloquialisms, verbal short-cuts and abbreviations.

Reading is really good, and book recommendations will be coming up, but especially cartoons and plays.... because they are all speech.

Now today we are going to look at a video of a cartoon... that way you get all speech + the moving picture + we hope, humour. The only snag is that you can't carry them around in your pocket like a cartoon book... unless you have one of those fancy iphones or its equivalent.

There are loads of these on the net.. this one is a rather odd one with talking Guinea Pigs etc, it's called Saturnin Pompier......

And another thing.... You all probably know this already, but here goes.

There is a brilliant grammar book which is cheap, interesting, full of cartoons illustrating each grammar topic and packed with a wide variety of practice tasks to try.

It's called La Grammaire en Clair. It's pretty cheap on Amazon and you can often pick them up for even less in charity shops etc. It really is a brilliant way to improve your French grammar... there's a thumbnail of it at the top of the post.

I think music can be very important in learning a language. It doesn't necessarily have to be good music, but it helps, so here is the brilliant Saez ....

Isn't it lovely? He has been described as the Baudelaire of our generation. I've watched this loads of times and it is still thrilling. The audience knows every word and sings along....beautiful. You do the same..........

Mafalda

2010-07-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

Whatever language you want to learn, you have got to engage with it as much as you can.

One of the things I want to pass on in this blog is lots of different ways you can increase your engagement with French.

If you are going to want to use/speak/listen to/sing/memorise/repeat/translate/play with the French language you will have to be interested in it.

Here's the lovely MAFALDA in cartoon form.

Click on it to enlarge it..........

Great characters, thoughtful , interesting ,short cartoons which you will really enjoy reading.

And while you are doing that you will be learning as well.... vocabulary, word patterns, grammar....

More to come... meanwhile read and enjoy this Mafalda strip and loads of others you can find on the net..... my blogs traditionally end with a bit of music.... music is a great way to keep language running through your head.... sing along, learn the words...

This is Noir Desir ..........