En francais, s'il te plait

[kryptonitemonkey]

My french has grown increasingly rusty over the years. Not that it was ever super great, but time dulls even that. Every so often I find myself craving the beautiful language again, and try to remember how to say certain things, or figure out how one would say a thing. I heard a rather awesome suggestion t'other day, or rather read it. It was to read a well-known book, in their case it was Harry Potter, in the language, as simply reading in a language can really help one get a feel for it. And this is precisely what I started to do.

Well, I downloaded it and read maybe a paragraph before work actually required me to do something. I haven't been back to it yet, but I'm looking forward to giving it a try. I once attempted to start reading The Three Musketeers in french, but that book is fairly dense as it is, and who knows how many old colloquialisms and such it might have. Harry Potter, however, is written for a more modern (read illiterate) and younger audience, so should be a bit more accessible. Not to mention I've read the first one easily a half dozen times over the years. I just know that my many years of reading growing up granted me an innate feel of how our language works in a way that my substandard and brief school lessons on grammar ever could. I cannot often tell the subtleties of parts of speech enough to name what each is, but I absolutely know where each word goes and how it all fits together. I would love to have a similar grasp of french, and any step I can in that direction would be lovely.

Now if you'll excuse me, I shall go and listen to my favorite french singer, Emile Simon, with her beautiful and haunting music.

Comments

[matrixmann]

Ah, I feel like it's incredible how much my brain remembers from that French school classes!
Wouldn't have expected it to be that much...
Although, I realize, I'd need some practice in order to be really good at it or comprehend some more of it linguistically. Reading texts written in French, I find that pretty often I know a lot of words used in it, simply I can't tell anymore what they mean.
Even though, even with being only able to do this in "slow mode" (well, you have to read more carefully in order to comprehend), still I find basically my brain can understand it. And that's something that surprises me quite a bit...

In general, reading texts written in French, it would be a good thing to start with, in my opinion, to get more familiar with it again.
If one knows the basic grammar rules of the language, most of it is simply learning or re-learning words and conjugation forms - for which there exist dictionaries, fortunately.

[kryptonitemonkey]

This last Saturday I didn't have much to do at work, so I spent hours reading through Harry Potter in French. All day, and I only managed to get like 30 pages in. I probably could have nearly finished it in english in the same amount of time. I had google translate open on my second screen and had to use it quite a bit. Still, I felt accomplished but very worn out at the end of the day. It was like my brain had gone through the ringer.

[matrixmann]

Yep, exhausting that is because you have to concentrate strongly and try to guess the context way more than in your own or another foreign language which you're way better at speaking.
Same thing I experience.