Friday 2 November 2007

It Don't Mean a Thing Part Deux

I'm coming to the conclusion that I don't know enough English to learn French. English grammar that is.

Verbs, nouns and adjectives are about the limit of my grammar words the rest seem to of passed me by somehow. Probably while I was writing "I must remember to bring the correct books to my English lessons" 500 times for most of a term in high school. Except for infinitive but only because my english teacher was always going on about Star Trek splitting the infinitive in "To boldly go" and mentioning Star Trek would get my attention.

This leaves me trying to learn two things at once - the words and the words for the words. If we just knew at school which stuff was padding and which stuff was going to come in handy it would save so much trouble later. I can still remember how ox-bow lakes are formed and that little bit of knowledge has never ever done me any good. In fact it is probably taking up brain cells that I could be putting to some useful purpose right now.

So I listen to that man on the CD

"say give me 13 euros"

"say I have some"

"say will you buy me some wine"

"listen and repeat"

"say how much do I owe you"

on and on with the words that never spring to the tip of my tongue because that bloody river making that bloody ox-bow lake is meandering through my mind.

Geography teachers, they have a lot to answer for.

5 comments:

Debra in France said...

Hi B, hey I can remember how ox-bow lakes were formed as well!! Coming back in the car from the market today, for some stupid reason I was thinking about adverbs and do they come after the verb or between the verb and the subject! Don't ask me why that had popped into my head - c'est bizarre! All I can say that after months of thinking and practising something, one day you wake up and that particular bit of grammar clicks in you brain and you 'have got it'. Then they drop another bit of grammar on you and it starts all over again!

Breezy said...

Mmm this is why the cheese man was so impressed with your French that he thought you were Spanish! No seriously though you have put the work in I was kind of hoping to just catch it like flu. Duh

Anonymous said...

dear dear !!! languages are so complicated aren't they !!! so have a little break, just for fun !!!I tagged you here...don't worry, it's not complicated, come and join us...

menopausaloldbag (MOB) said...

Ah, before you know it you will have the grammer fundamentalists paying you a visit to assist you with every possible permutation of grammer, syntax and sentence structure you can think of! Get yourself a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves and then you can bum yer load with the best of them! Good luck with the lingo learning.

Breezy said...

MOB - I'll pretend I'm not in. Always wondered what that book was about