Still Studying French

A few days ago, I got an email from amazon.fr offering free delivery on Nostromo by Joseph Conrad because I had purchased Lord Jim. Yay! Turns out I have to live in France to get the free delivery. Shucks!

I'm about 1/3 of the way through my second pass through Lord Jim in French. My first pass was not a proper reading--more a scan to find the vocabulary I need to know. This is a proper reading. And wow is it hard! Every other sentence throws me for a loop. Some of it is Conrad's fault. Most of Lord Jim is actually Marlow talking about Jim. So most of the book is in quotes. When Jim says something, it is really Marlow telling his listeners what Jim said. When Jim quotes, say, the captain of the Patna, it is actually Marlow telling his audience what Jim said the captain said. Run that through French, which by the way isn't as careful as English when it comes to closing and reopening quotes for the "...he continued..." type phrases, and you have one big mess. Especially when they are using 19th Century nautical terms.

So what types of errors am I making? Well, I was often getting thrown by the "ne (verb) que" negation since 'que' is so common in so many other circumstances. And the 'que' is often far from the verb. That one is not happening so much anymore. I got fooled by "il y a des jours que..." reading it as "there have been some days that..." instead of "it was some days ago that..." Look alike words are problematic. "he thought he broke all the sides on his left side"? Huh? No there is no accent over the e in the first "side". It's "he thought he broke all the ribs on his left side." And French has entirely too many words that start with brou...
I also have to deal with all those goofy tenses like pluperfect subjuctive. Yikes!

The Alchemist wasn't that hard. In fact it wasn't until reading Lord Jim that I learned the difference between 'qui' and 'que' and how they relate to the verb in the subordinate clause. I remember griping about word order and its failure to make sense, though. Now I know. I thought I had to figure it out from the context, but now I see the grammar.

Welcome

Well, it's the middle of November and I'm preparing for my trip to France and Africa. I left my job a couple of months ago and have been studying French fairly intensively. I use the Living Language CDs to work on speaking and hearing. I'm also trying to rent 2 French movies per week from Video on 15th. You can see my reviews on my Facebook account.

I was studying Arabic, but that's on hiatus for a while. I'll focus more on Arabic later.

The way I'm learning to read French is by reading books that can be found in each language. I did it with a book called The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and I'm currently reading Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. Conrad uses complex compound sentences, so when I'm finished reading Lord Jim in French, I'll be ready for anything. I'll probably have entries about my language studies in future posts.