cette semaine 의 compo

아 피곤하다! 한국어를 공부하는 게 더 편한 거 같아휴...

Here's my composition that I turned in (late) in my French class yesterday. It's a letter to a foreign exchange student who might be staying at 'our' house (a topic that may deserve more attention later). Any corrections? Comments? Suggestions? Merci! :)

Chèr ~~~,

Comment allez-vous ?

Ici à California il fait n’est pas très froid.

Dans ma famille il y a quatre personnes : mon père, ma mère, mon frère et moi. Mes parents habitent à Livermore, près de Berkeley et San Francisco. Mon père s’appelle Mike. Il n’est pas trè grand (ses fils sont plus grand). Il est sportif et il aime faire du vélo. Mon père est très intelligent mais il est assez pessimiste. Ma mère s’appelle Judy. Elle n’est pas pessimiste ; est très optimiste. C’est un couple intéressant ! Ma mère est brune et élégante. Elle est gentile et généreuse aussi.

Mon frère s’appelle Jeff. Il ne habite pas avec mes parents. Il habite à Davis, près de Sacramento, avec sa femme Sandra et sa fille, Maya. Jeff est mince et beau. Il est discipliné, sérieux, et énergique.

Tout les personnes dans ma famille aiment faire du sport. Jeff et Sandra aiment faire de la natation, et je fais du vélo tous les jours. Mes parents aiment faire la cuisine ensemble. Nous avons beaucoup des activités, mais le week-end, nous aimons ne pas faire grand-chose!
Et vous, qu’est que vous aimez faire? Aimez-vous les sports? Est-ce que vous faites de la musique? Qu’est-ce que vous faites normalement le week-end? Et la chose plus importante: Qu’est-ce que vous aimez manger? :)

Amitiés,

David

Random thoughts from Friday's class

• The vowels with the different accent marks, like 'é', 'è', 'ê', and 'e', are still pretty much an undifferentiated mass for me. When they're pronounced in words individually, or in isolation, I can hear the differences, and I might even be able to imitate them. But when I'm trying to produce words and sentences with these different vowels, I don't think I'm paying any attention at all to the distinction. There's no time to process these distinctions, and since I don't know the words by sound yet as much as I have been learning to read and write them, there's a transliteration going on, 'remembering' orthographic practices as a way into speaking, a trans-modal exercise which feels like it's taking too much mental energy to worry about.
  
• Relatedly, though, I think I'm starting to hear liaison in familiar words, short common combinations like "vous êtes," with the final "s" of "vous" pronounced as /z/. I remember when I first started and learned that the final "s" of this word, like others, is not pronounced when the word is said in isolation, I wanted to say something like /vu et/ instead of /vuzet/
  
• It's really interesting in class to hear the French of others who are already Spanish speakers. There are so many crossovers between the two Romance languages. And it's interesting, that I've been assuming that when I hear Spanish words in class, that's because the person is a native speaker of Spanish. But it might just as easily be the case that they have learned or are learning Spanish as a foreign language and, in a pinch when they have to produce in front of the teacher and other students in a limited amount of time, they're just saying whatever comes out that means what it needs to mean without regard to what language it is. I've caught myself wanting to respond to the teacher and other students in Korean a few times. Does this mean that Korean for me hasn't really been internalized, that it's still hanging out in the 'foreign language box' in my mind?
  
• It's been a little difficult to know how I should interact in class. I find myself wanting to speak up, to make jokes, to try things out in class quite a bit, but restrain myself because I don't see the others doing this so much. I'm aware of myself as an 'older' learner (!) in this class, and as a male too. I think there are only three other guys, and they don't seem to speak up that much either. This is the case as much in whole-class discussions as it is in small group interactions. And I realize that I better 'level up' on my fluency in pop culture stuff like Carebears and Family Guy, the stuff of the references made in the class. Having taught before (and teaching now) I can empathize quite a bit with the teacher, negotiating meaning, trying to encourage interaction in the classroom, and trying to catch up with all the cultural references that students do make when they speak up...is she more of a 'mother' in the classroom for me, and more of a 'grandmother' for the other students?
  
• Why does de + le = du? Why not "de" And all the other 'crazy' assimilations that happen with "aux" etc.
  

"I'll be back"

It's been over a week since I've posted here, and that's an indication of the amount of studying and using of French that's been going on...so many other things happening recently.

But with the end of a week (and the intent to be in Lyon at the end of next month for a few weeks!) I feel renewed imperative to get back on the horse. No better time for the quote in the title for this post, the famous words of the "Governator" of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.



And this isn't all just a play with words, or play on words. In French class today my small discussion group was assigned the task of presenting a famous person with a bit of l'humour. We couldn't think of too many things to say, other than the fact (rumor?) that he uses botox, that are really entertaining. But we did think we could mention his famous deadpan line from the movie The Terminator as he prepares to storm into a building in search of the innocent Sarah Connor:

"I'll be back."

I was going to say this since I was the only guy in the group and we thought we could get a laugh from the class when we said in French,

"Je retourne."

And this is what happened. And it came off well--people laughed. But it seemed something was missing from the glossary, or we had found another example of faux amis as our teacher told us that, actually, and despite what our Chez Nous glossary told us, "retourner" wasn't the appropriate verb. Rather, we should use "Revenir".

So...the little question of the day is, what's the difference between these two verbs? It seemed like our teacher was telling us that one described events in the past, and the other was a statement of things to come. Is this right? I'm going to leave this blog entry hanging, waiting for an answer that I'll have to find, so that I can give voice to Arnold in a proper fashion, and, oh yeah, maybe even learn how to speak this language. :)

Ecouter la radio en française

Salut tout le monde,

Actually at this point I'm not sure how big the "monde" is...but I thought I'd at least put this question out there, since a.) I'm rushing out the door for the second videoconferencing interaction with les tuteurs à Lyon, and b.) I've been wanting to transform the silence in my house in the mornings and evenings into a more French space, since I've had so little time to study in the last week or two.

So...does anyone have recommendations for interesting, amusing, or educational radio stations that I can listen to online? I know about Radio France, but what else is out there? What do you listen to?

Just a short post today. A bientôt!

Ma famille

This has been my first week of class...it's great to be hearing the language, to have a community of people to study with, and yet it does feel very much like its own space. The person of the teacher, le professeur, is so important in the language classroom, and it was a bit of a shock today to go to Le Monde and a few French TV websites and realize viscerally that...yes, there is a world out there.

The first topic in our class, from Chapitre 1, is "Voici ma famille". Here's my first homework assignment, complete with mistakes.



Is it right to ask: "Qui il y a à votre famille?"