dance day 25

So you’re probably wondering what’s up with all this French talk?  And do I sense some animosity here?

Alas yes. In order to occupy productively those who are on COVID-19 related reduced work hours, the government has offered to pay for certain types of training. 

Never to miss a good deal I decided to brush up on my French since my French isn’t as you would say, academic.  Basically I don’t know the rules I just go with what sounds right.  

This works when you talk because annoying grammatical rules like making your adjective agree in number with your subject aren’t as noticeable because French isn’t phonetic and you don’t usually pronounce the last letters of a word so people don’t notice if you add an ‘s’ or not.  Example: “Les gestes barrière” or “Les gestes barrieres?”  When you say it you don’t have to choose because the two sound exactly the same (I would just like to note that when I asked my French teacher which one it was her answer was different than what is recommended by the Academie Francaise.)

So basically I have been getting by by only speaking French while actively avoiding writing it.  Unfortunately since everyone started working from home because of COVID-19 I now use a lot of skype so it’s hard to avoid writing. Also skype chatting is spontaneous so it’s either write as if I was a 5 year old child to my professional colleague or be extremely slow because I’m looking up the gender of words like error (spoken it’s l’erreur so I never learned it’s gender) and exceptions of making an adjective agree with its subject. 

The last time I took French lessons was before I had kids and I thought that’s why I stopped.  Too busy.  But then after my first lesson when my teacher, who had had grossly overestimated my level, had me do exercises on pronominal verbs I got that sinking feeling.  You know the one you get when get back together with an ex and then they do that thing that reminds you of why you broke it off in the first place?  

I didn’t stop learning French because I was too busy. I stopped learning French because I find it anfractuous and oftentimes needlessly so.  Don’t believe me?  When I had a hard time with the accord du participe passé my teacher told me not to worry too much about it.  She agrees it’s convoluted and there have been endless petitions to the Académie Française to simplify it.  Unfortunately they have always refused (I’m not surprised, have you ever tried to get two French people to agree? The Acamémie Française has forty members.).  She said there have been books written dedicated to just the accord participe passé. 

I found one.  It’s fifty pages.