Today was the last day of the winter intensive period, so my goal was just to finish my intensive fair presentation. I had spent some time working on my presentation on both Wednesday and Thursday, but I still had a bunch of things to finish up--like a couple of things on my triboard, my student evaluation and my speech.
In the morning, I went in to school to make up a chem test, so I only really had the afternoon to work. Overall, I think I was really productive--although it took me a lot of time to finish everything up, I ended up with a triboard I really liked and a short speech that I think covered the highlights of my independent study but wasn’t so long that audience members would get bored. I’m looking forward to making this presentation on Sunday.
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Today was my last lesson with Madame Carine, and so my main goal was just to get the most out of this lesson. I also wanted to talk to Madame Carine about possibilities for continuing my independent study during the spring semester. Since I didn’t have a lesson yesterday, I really wanted to make use of this lesson--reviewing some of the conversational French we had covered in previous lessons and maybe learning some more verb conjugations.
This lesson was essentially a wrap-up, in that Madame Carine quickly reviewed everything we had covered in past lessons just so that it would be fresh in my mind for my intensive fair presentation. We went over the alphabet, focusing especially on sounds that I had struggled with in the past, like the “r” sound and the “x” sound. We also reviewed a lot of pronunciation rules, like dropping the “e” at the end of words like “octobre” when you’re pronouncing them, or making the liaison between “nous” and “avons” when you’re conjugating the “to have” verb for the “we” form. Then we went over numbers, and some of the main conversational phrases that we had covered. Phrases like “comment ça va” and “parlez vous anglais” will hopefully be useful if I ever go back to France or another French-speaking country. The lesson went a little differently than most do, in that instead of repeating after Madame Carine I would make attempts at pronunciation first, and then she would help me out if I struggled or correct me if I was wrong. The only new material I learned today was how to conjugate the verb “to be,” which is useful but less common than you might think, since expressing age, feelings, and weather in French is usually done with verbs like “avoir” or “faire.” The verb “être,” or to be, is one of the most irregular French verbs and so its conjugations just have to be memorized. In present tense, you say “je suis,” “tu es,” “il / elle / on est,” “nous sommes,” “vous êtes,” and “ils / elles sont.” In the afternoon, I worked a little on my tri-board presentation, which involved making sort-of a summary of everything I’d learned during this intensive (which was much easier because of Madame Carine’s review today) and deciding which information was most important. Today I woke up and found out that Maumee Valley and the majority of the schools in the area had called a snow day; I had a lesson with Madame Carine scheduled but I canceled it because of the road conditions and did some work at home instead. My plan was to complete a few pages from the workbook I bought last week, work a little on my final presentation, and watch another episode of The Returned so I could listen to a little spoken French. I have attached images of the worksheets I completed below, and it’s clear that they are pretty basic. They were just the first few pages of the workbook, and they had to do with vocabulary, possessive pronouns, and translation from English to French. The book goes a little more in depth than my lessons with Madame Carine so the workbook pages were hard for me; her goal, given the time I had, was just to give me an overview of the language and teach me some basic vocabulary / conversational phrases. However, if I do end up continuing my lessons through the spring semester, I will be going in depth--so doing workbook pages like this is a good start. I also worked on my final presentation, since I learned that I have to complete that by Friday rather than Sunday. I know originally I was hoping to create a storybook in French, but that would require a lot of art (which is hard for me!) and not a lot of French so I decided to just make a tri-board instead. Today, I planned out what my triboard would look like and have attached an image below. In terms of artifacts, I think I’ll bring the notebook I used for the intensive, the workbook I bought, maybe the French cookbook I used to make boeuf bourguignon, and a bunch of the worksheets and other papers that Madame Carine gave me. I’m also thinking about whether I might want to have some sort of interactive activity--like a game, where I could teach younger students a few French conversational phrases. Every time I watch The Returned it just gets creepier as more is revealed about the dead people who have somehow come back to life to haunt the town that they used to live in. It turns out that one of the characters committed suicide, while another one died in a bus crash. Meanwhile, the water in the reservoir is steadily rising, which is a confusing plot aside that seems to have nothing to do with the main characters. I’m sure that it’ll all rise to a terrifying climax at some point, but I might have to switch to a different French show before that happens. I do enjoy listening to the French and trying to interpret what characters are saying without the subtitles (I always need the subtitles eventually, but it’s fun to try without), though. I don’t think I’ve made a whole lot of progress in terms of being able to understand full, complex sentences, but I can pick out really basic words or phrases, which is a start. I might have to ask my French teacher or my French-speaking friends for alternative show recommendations! This one’s definitely too much for me.
Tomorrow I’m looking forward to working more on my triboard and attending my last lesson (for now) with Madame Carine :( Today the last week of the intensive starts, which I’m pretty sad about because I’ve enjoyed learning French so much these past two weeks. My plan for this week is to have a lesson today, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then on Friday I’ll come in to school to present my final project. Because I have so few lessons left, my goal for today was to make the most of the time I have--ask Madame Carine lots of questions, and try to fit in as much learning as possible. For that reason, today’s lesson ended up being pretty packed.
The lesson began with a review of numbers, which we covered at the end of last week. As usual, pronunciation was the hardest part of the learning process--I remembered what the words for different numbers looked like on paper, but couldn’t remember exactly how to pronounce them. Often I would make an attempt to pronounce a word, my teacher would correct me, and then I would make another attempt at pronunciation. I struggled a lot with the words for 11-15, because they look really similar to the Spanish words for 11-15 but sound completely different. For instance, 11 in French is “onze” and in Spanish it’s “once,” so I would get caught up and confused by the Spanish pronunciation as I was trying to pronounce the word in French. However, Madame Carine has been really understanding and overall, I think knowing Spanish has been an asset. After reviewing the numbers I learned how to talk about age. When you want to ask someone how old they are, you say “quel âge as tu.” To respond to this question, you would say “j’ai dis-sept ans” or however old you are. Madame Carine told me that this sentence construction is often confusing for English-speakers because you use the verb “to have” rather than the verb “to be.” In English we say “I am seventeen,” whereas in French you say “I have seventeen years.” However, since I know Spanish this wasn’t as difficult to wrap my mind around--in Spanish you also use the verb “to have” to talk about age. We had a little French conversation to practice talking about age, and also reviewed some conversational phrases from past lessons like how to ask what someone’s name is, and how to ask how someone is. This felt like another level of language learning, because I had to both think about what I wanted to say and express it in French, rather than just repeating what Madame Carine was saying. It was also nice because I got to hear the French accent and proper pronunciations of words I was struggling with. I always like having an example to mimic when I’m learning new things; I think this is especially important with language learning. I feel like I’ve avoided falling into a lot of bad habits because I can listen to the way Madame Carine speaks and fix my own pronunciations. Having someone to mimic and look up to also makes me feel more comfortable with making attempts to pronounce things, because I know that Madame Carine correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll learn how to say the word the right way. Madame Carine told me that she already had tomorrow’s lesson planned out, but on Thursday I asked if we could cover the verb “to be,” since we’ve mostly been focusing on the “to have” verb. We’ll also review how to talk about things you want or would like. We haven’t really gotten into into different verb tenses (mostly just present), so it would be nice to learn a little conditional because that can be useful in formal conversation. I’m also planning to do some research on the benefits of language learning at some point this week, either tomorrow or Thursday, so I can include that information in my presentation. Today I got back into the groove of my normal schedule, attending a French lesson with Madame Carine in the morning and then going to school in the afternoon to complete some extra worksheets (and later, to attend track). My goals were to retain what I’d learned from the last lesson (I think we learned numbers and conjugating the verb “avoir”) and to make more connections between English and French. I’ve made a lot of connections between Spanish and French, but French also influenced English and I’m sure there’s room to explore there as well. The first powerpoint Madame Carine showed me today had to do with talking about the weather. Rather than using the verb “to be” as you do in English, you use the verb “to do,” or “faire.” We haven’t really talked about conjugating -re verbs yet, so I just learned how to conjugate the verb in the context of the weather--you say “il fait” and then add an adjective about the weather. I learned a bunch of different vocabulary, like “beau” and “chaud” and “bon” and “frais”--as usual, I’ve attached an image of my notes below. I also learned how to say “it’s raining” (“il pleut”) or “it’s snowing” “il neige.” Madame Carine told me that the verb “to rain,” or “pleuvoir,” is one of the most irregular verbs, but you only really use it to talk about the weather so it’s not too important to learn at this point in my French education. I also learned a little bit about French culture, in that in France (as in most of Europe), they use Celsius as opposed to Fahrenheit to talk about the temperature. I’ve never really understood how to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius, but Madame Carine told me the little trick that she uses--to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius you subtract 30 and then divide by 2, and to convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit you add 30 and then multiply by 2. This will make understanding temperature readings when I’m abroad a lot easier--I’ve always felt a little behind as an American, only understanding Fahrenheit. I also learned some strange French phrases that contain the verb “avoir.” For instance, there is no French verb for “to need,” and instead you say “avoir besoin.” Also, “avoir une araignée au plafond” directly translated means to have a spider in your ceiling, but is often used to jokingly call someone a little crazy. “Avoir un poil dans la main” means to have a hair in your hand, but is also used to call someone lazy. “Avoir la tête dans les nuages” is easier to understand than the other two, meaning to have your head in the clouds or to daydream. It’s funny to learn some of these little French phrases--they make so little sense to me and I’m sure English has a ton of similarly nonsensical phrases that I just never questioned because I grew up hearing them.
At the end of the lesson, Madame Carine reviewed some vocabulary and we talked about the similarities between French and English. I learned that adjectives ending in “ous” in English can often be easily translated to French, where they end in “eux” instead. For instance, the word “serious” in French is just “sérieux,” while the word “generous” is just “généreux.” Although this trick doesn’t work all the time, it can be an easy way to remember some vocabulary words. It’s also a reminder of how similar French and English are, and how much the two languages have influenced each other. A lot of English words for technology, like the word “Internet” have made their way into the French language, while a lot of French words and phrases like “comme si comme ça” and “RSVP” have made their way into English. Although English isn’t considered a romance language, I think it does help with French a little more than knowing Russian or Chinese might. The United States and Central Europe and Britain have a lot of shared history in terms of frequent wars and colonizations during which language could easily spread, so this does make sense, but it’s still cool to see the direct effects of colonization on languages of today. I’ve attached an image of one of the workbook pages that I completed both at home and during my French lesson today; I also purchased a workbook called Basic French which is part of a McGraw Hill series called “Practice Makes Perfect” and was recommended to me by Madame Carine. I’ve enjoyed learning French throughout this independent study, but I feel like the more I learn the more I like the language and I’m hoping to do some extra work in this workbook during the long weekend, just to get ahead and to figure out if there are any areas I haven’t covered in my lessons that I would like to learn more about before the end of my independent study. I’m also hoping to think up some questions about French language or culture for Madame Carine this weekend, in preparation for my last week of lessons :( 1/21/2019 0 Comments Day 9: Rest Day (1/17/19)Today I was planning to meet with Madame Carine, but she couldn’t get to me at our usual location in Perrysburg and the roads were a little snowy so we decided to cancel today’s lesson. I was also feeling under the weather, so I decided to take a rest day and watch a French TV show called “Les Revenants” or The Returned. My goals were to try to pick up as many words as I could and also to do some of the worksheets that Madame Carine had given me over the past few lessons.
“Les Revenants” is actually a terrifying show that tells the story of characters who die and then come back to visit the town they used to live in--not as ghosts but as real people who seem normal except for the fact that they eat a lot, can’t sleep (ever), and have special powers. It’s fairly new and it probably falls into the supernatural / fantasy genre, although it’s definitely an adult show--not childish at all. The actors are mostly European (some are Belgian, many are French) and they speak entirely in French--although the show has great English subtitles. As I’d noticed when I was traveling in Europe, it’s a little hard to distinguish between different words because they all flow together but it was a fun challenge to pick out words and phrases I could understand. The show was also interesting to watch because it was filmed in France (mostly in the countryside or in smaller towns) so I got to see a little of French life outside of Paris through French shops and French restaurants. I also tried to pick out the way that French mannerisms differ from American mannerisms and one big thing I noticed is that the French (at least in this show) are a lot more exuberant in terms of their emotions--embracing one another all the time, getting into arguments easily and then making up within a few minutes. Perhaps these are all just characteristics of this particular show, but I did notice some of these qualities in the French people that I interacted with when I was traveling. Another interesting thing is that I still can’t pick out differences in the French accent. Madame Carine tells me that there are clear differences in the way that French is spoken between, say, Belgium and France, just as there are clear differences in the way English is spoken in the U.S. and Australia, but I still can’t tell the difference the way that I can with English. I think it would be really fun to be able to distinguish between regions; I’m not sure why it’s so hard for me to believe that French varies just as English does but it is! This is definitely something I’d like to take to Madame Carine about more, because she grew up in Paris and probably can tell differences even between French spoken in cities and French spoken in the countryside (just as I can tell the difference between, say, Southern English and Midwestern English in the United States). I also completed a worksheet in the afternoon, which I have attached below. Today was a much quieter day than normal, but I’m glad that I got to take a little bit of a break, while still learning about French language and culture. I’m looking forward to getting back to my lessons tomorrow, though. I think when you first start learning something it’s important to keep practicing as often as you can, so I didn’t love skipping my meeting with Madame Carine today. I’m also worried about losing what I’ve learned these past two weeks when I go back to my regular classes, but perhaps I can work out a way of continuing my French lessons during the semester. Today I had another lesson with Madame Carine in the morning, and then did some research on French slang in the afternoon. The lesson was mostly centered around conversation today, so my goal was to speak as little English as possible and to make a real effort at pronouncing words without Madame Carine’s help, just to sort of test myself and see what pronunciation skills I’ve picked up and what rules I have retained. Madame Carine started the lesson by reviewing how to conjugate a normal French -er verb, and then moved on to how to conjugate the verb “avoir,” which means “to have” and is very irregular. The reason she wanted me to learn this verb so early on in my French education is because it’s used in a variety of different ways. It’s not just used to say “I have this physical object in my hands” but also to express feeling cold, or hungry, or tired. The conjugations are difficult (I’ve attached a picture of my notes from today below), and so we spent a lot of time going over both the spelling and pronunciation of those. It confuses me that the conjugation of verbs in the tu form and the il / elle / on form are spelled differently but actually sound the same--how do people speaking French figure out the subject of the verb if only the conjugation is used? I guess you have to do a lot of thinking in context, which is probably a lot easier than it sounds but still I find the system a little odd. We focused on pronunciation a lot today, also discussing the French liaison between words. For instance, when you want to say “we have” you say “nous avons” except the s from the “nous” is sort-of brought over to the word “avon,” so it sounds like “nouzavon,” or one word instead of two. This is probably why listening to French dialogue was so difficult for me while I was traveling in Europe--I always thought that words blurred together, and it turns out that they actually do. I’m still trying to figure out when to use the liaison and when not to, because it doesn’t apply to every case, but it was kind of fun to learn. After learning how to conjugate the verb “avoir,” I learned how to put it in context. Madame Carine went through a long powerpoint about vocabulary like “chaud” which means hot, “froid” which means cold, and “faim” which means hungry. As in Spanish, you say “I have hot” or “I have cold” in French when you’re hot or cold, rather than saying “I am hot” or “I am cold” as you do in English. After learning a bunch of this kind of vocabulary (in the same photo of my notes below), Madame Carine had me put the words into sentences. She would show me a picture of a person shivering and I would have to say the correct phrase in French, “il a froid.” This was one of the first times I wasn’t just repeating the words she said, but actually forming my own thoughts in French. It was difficult at first, but as we practiced more the verb conjugations and the vocabulary would come to mind more quickly. My long-term goal with French is to get to a place where I no longer have to think in English and then translate my thoughts into French, but can just think in French and then say what I’m thinking. This obviously won’t happen during my independent study, and probably will take years of studying to accomplish, but I like making progress towards that goal anyways, even if it’s small.
At the end of the lesson, Madame Carine taught me a little French culture. I learned that the difference between the words “ami” and chopain,” both words that mean “friend,” is that “ami” is often used by adults or in formal contexts, whereas “chopain” is often used by teenagers or in informal contexts. For instance, the word “boyfriend” in French is actually “petit chopain,” which is really fun--I would never have guessed, since the word “petit” just means little. I also learned some French slang, which teenagers in France sometimes use. For instance, instead of saying “la femme” French kids will switch around the word and say “meuf.” In the same way, the word “louche,” which means “blurry,” becomes “chelou.” It’s really cool to be able to learn from someone who grew up in Paris because I get all this insight into French culture that I would never have had otherwise. I also get accurate and up-to-date information about French culture, which is really hard to find online. Today I had another lesson with Madame Carine in the morning, and then did some research in the afternoon. My goals for the day were to greet and say goodbye to Madame Carine in French instead of in English as I normally do, and to work on my pronunciation of the “r” sound that I keep struggling with. In this blog post I also wanted to reflect a little on making the French dish “bouef bourguignon” yesterday, since I wasn’t finished cooking when I wrote yesterday’s blog post. “Bouef bourguignon” actually translates to beef burgundy, which makes sense because the dish is essentially a rich beef stew made with red wine. Main ingredients include bacon, beef, wine, carrots, tomato paste, mushrooms, and thyme, and the dish is served over roasted potatoes. One reason it took so many hours to make this dish was because my father and I decided to slow-cook it, which meant cooking it at a lower temperature for a longer amount of time. This method is supposed to allow the ingredients to come together better and provide more flavor. Although it was time-consuming and a little difficult at certain parts, I really liked cooking bouef bourguignon and I absolutely loved eating it. The flavors were perfect (probably because I asked my dad to help me out) but it was also filling without being too heavy. After traveling in France, I think that this tendency is common in French dishes--they’re satisfying in just the right way. I have included the recipe and pictures of the meal I made below--I would definitely make it again. Madame Carine started off today’s lesson with a powerpoint on numbers. I think she expected that it would be really difficult for me to learn them, since, as she said, there was no real rhyme or reason to them (at least for the numbers up to 15) and I would just have to use brute-force memorization. However, she had decided that it was important for me to learn them in order to engage in basic conversation and talk about my age, the date, and the time, so she had allotted a fair amount of today’s lesson to going over them. When she started going through the powerpoint, I quickly found that the French numbers were really similar to the Spanish numbers, and it wasn’t difficult for me to remember them at all for this reason. For example “un” is one in French, and “uno” is one in Spanish. Even the teens, which Madame Carine thought would be especially difficult, were easy for me because they were almost identical to the Spanish words (“onze” is eleven in French, while “once” is eleven in Spanish). Although the pronunciations of the words for numbers are totally different in each language, the spellings are really similar so learning the French numbers took a lot less time than Madame Carine expected. So, we moved on to learning how to talk about the date--a huge benefit of having one-on-one lessons that’s become clear to me recently is being able to move as fast or as slow as you need, which makes learning a lot simpler.
Madame Carine first showed me a powerpoint on the months of the year, which were most difficult again because of pronunciation (especially words like août, which is august). Then we talked about how to form a sentence using the days of the week, the months of the year, and numbers, and we had a little conversation where she would ask me “what day is it today?” and I would answer, “C’est mardi quinze janvier deux mille dix-neuf.” We repeated this kind of conversation for a little while, switching roles and changing the question to “what day will it be tomorrow” or “what day is your birthday” to get some extra practice. That sort of conversation is really helpful for me because it gives me a chance to listen to some French (when Madame Carine gives me the question or provides the correct answer) and to practice my own French in a repetitive way. I think repetition is the key to learning a language well, and I’m glad we’re doing a lot of it even though it can seem tedious sometimes. Madame Carine is also really forgiving in that if I don’t get something or can’t seem to pronounce a word properly, she will go over it again and again until I get it. I also learned a lot of vocabulary through this exercise--every time Madame Carine would say a word I didn’t know, I would ask her what it meant and then write it down and try to pronounce it myself. She doesn’t conduct the lessons in French, but she does throw in some French words here and there and tries to speak French as much as possible, which helps me a lot. The purpose of this independent study project is to learn basic and conversational French, and knowing words that people who speak French use regularly ties in directly with that purpose. At the end of the lesson we went over the numbers again, and I started a worksheet on how to say the date. At home I finished up that worksheet and did some extra research on French numbers. We had only gone up to about thirty today, and I wanted to learn what the following numbers were and also how the French words for numbers came to be. I found that learning numbers gets a lot more difficult after sixty-nine, because there is no word for “seventy” or “eighty” or “ninety.” If you want to say ninety-nine, you have to say “quatre-vingt-dix-neuf” which is really confusing and requires a lot of thought about multiplication and addition (because if you just add those numbers up it totals to forty-three, not ninety-nine). This strange way of discussing numbers comes from what’s called the “base-20” system, where rather than having a whole bunch of different numbers the language just has numbers up to 20 (since that’s all you can count with your hands and feet) and then you multiply / add these numbers in order to get the larger numbers you want. Some argue that the Celts brought this system to France, while others think that the Vikings did; regardless, it still exists in the French language today. Abraham Lincoln actually used the system it in his Gettysburg address when he says “four score and seven years ago” which really means 4 x 20 + 7 (87 years ago), so maybe it’s not quite so crazy as I initially thought. Still, it’s going to take some time to learn, and I’m looking forward to having Madame Carine explain it to me in one of our next lessons. I really learned a lot today, and I’m looking forward to learning more tomorrow. Today I had my fourth lesson with Madame Carine in the morning, and then in the afternoon I went home to learn about French culture through a little French cooking--I decided to make a dish called “bouef bourguignon” which is a dish that comes from Burgundy, France. My goals for the day were to continue to practice my pronunciation and to try and get the present tense verb conjugations down (Madame Carine told me we would be learning some regular verb conjugations today, for -er verbs). My other goal was not to mess up the French dish I’m making, which ended up being harder than I expected.
Madame Carine started off today’s lesson by showing me a powerpoint on some basic French -er verbs. She had me practice verbs like “díner” meaning to dine, “regarder” meaning to watch, “habiter” meaning to live, “travailler” meaning to work, and a bunch of other similar verbs. Then she taught me the French pronouns: “je” means I, “tu” means you, “il / elle” means he or she, “nous” means we, “vous” is a more formal version of you, and “ils / elles” means them (male) or them (female). As in Spanish, you only use “elles” if the group of people is entirely female. Even if there is one boy in a group of a thousand girls, you must use the word “ils” which speaks a little to the influence of masculinity on language and history. Each pronoun requires a different conjugation of any given verb. It’s difficult to type out the verb endings, so I have attached a picture of my notes from today below. What’s especially confusing to me is that different verb conjugations are sometimes pronounced the same because of French rules of pronunciation, so you have to figure out the subject based on the context (or based on the pronoun that the speaker uses). I also learned how to say the word “don’t” in French. It’s more complicated than just placing the word “no” in front of verbs, as you do in Spanish. It requires a different setup: subject + ne + verb + pas. Again, this is a little difficult to write out, so the picture of my notes I think will make more sense, both for the sake of my independent study blog and for me to look back on in the future. We spent about 20 minutes going through slides where Madame Carine would ask me “do you like to ___ (insert verb)” in French, and then I would answer in French whether I liked to do that activity or not. This afternoon I made “bouef bourguignon" for dinner tonight, and I’m planning on reflecting more on this process tomorrow because at the time that I’m writing this blog, the dish is still cooking (it takes a really long time to make, using a process called slow-cooking). I hope to include pictures and a little background information on this dish in tomorrow’s blog. It’s been almost a week since I started learning French, and I feel like I’m starting to get a little more comfortable with the language. I don’t think I’m anywhere near to being able to hold a complex conversation, but I do feel a little better about making the French sounds. I’m looking forward to learning more tomorrow. My days are starting to come together a little more, in that I’ve developed a good routine. In the morning I went to Way Public Library for a lesson with Madame Carine, had lunch, and then went to school to do some extra work and some research on French culture. My goals were sort of the same as they were yesterday: I wanted to focus especially on pronunciation, and try to continue making connections between French and Spanish.
Madame Carine started the lesson by having me review the alphabet, and then added in the letters with accents. I learned that there are a couple of kinds of accents: the acute accent, the grave accent, the circumflex, the umlaut, and the cedilla. The acute accent is only used on the letter e (é). Usually e sounds like “uh” in French, but the accent makes it sound more like “ay” as in the word éléphant, which sounds like “allayphant” rather than “uhluhphant.” The grave accent is used over the letters a (à), e (è), and u (ù), and makes a deeper sound like the “e” in the word “jet.” The circumflex is used over any of the five vowels, looks like a little hat (ê), and makes the same sound as the grave accent. The cedilla only goes under the letter “c” (ç) and makes a sound like “suh,” as in the word “garçon.” The umlaut simply separates a word into two parts, as in the word “noël,” where you say “no” and then “el” instead of “nool.” Sometimes accents are simply used to differentiate words from each other, like differentiating the conjugation of a verb from a noun or an adjective or a preposition, and therefore don’t affect the pronunciation of the word that much. Today I also learned the days of the week and the months. The months were a little difficult to learn, especially the words “juin” which is june and “août” which is august. I’m also finding it a little confusing that in words like “octobre” you don’t say the e at the end, you just sort of end off with the consonant. In spanish, you would say “octubre,” placing emphasis on the last syllable, so it’s hard for me to make the transition between the two languages for words like that even though they are spelled similarly. It’s also hard to say words that end in a consonant like r, especially because the French r has a special sound. When I did my research on French culture, I learned that the days of the week “lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi, samedi, and dimanche) are very similar to the Spanish days of the week and are actually based on astrology. For instance, lundi comes from the word for moon, which is “lune,” mardi comes from mars, jeudi comes from jupiter, and so on. That’s really interesting to me--learning languages reveals a lot about human culture and human history. Learning French is a little slow because it’s so difficult to pronounce words, but I’m slowly learning the rules of the language. As we’re going through Madame Carine’s powerpoints she will make little notes for me about pronunciation, jotting down that “eux” sounds like “uh” or “ois” sounds like “ooah.” These notes have been really helpful for me moving forward to more complicated words. I’m looking forward to continuing to learn tomorrow. |
AuthorKiran Dzur |