Reading more Le Point

Everyday I go out, order a cup of coffee or two or three, and read one of my French magazines. I'm getting much better at it. The articles are either really easy--I'll need to look up one word every three paragraphs, or really hard where I need to look up multiple words sentence after sentence after sentence. I keep looking up words I know I have looked up many many times. Oh why am I learning a new language at the old age of 39?

I spent a long time on a sentence about upper end real estate in France. The problem was with the word "disposer". I was taking it to mean "dispose of". The guy who runs Sotheby's International Real Estate Group wants to "dispose de 50 agences" in France. But that wasn't making sense in the context of everything else he was saying. Well, it turns out he wasn't saying that he want's to dispose of 50 agencies, but rather have at his disposal 50 agencies. Opposite meaning altogether.

Besides that I learned that my iTouch is a "baladeur", that legs can be described as "galbée", and pet custody is becoming an issue for divorce in America (one guy was feeding fatty sausages to his dog who has digestive problems right before driving the pooch to his ex-wife every Sunday night).

One of the benefits of being in Canada is that I have several channels in French I can leave on in the background. I get bits and pieces--in a Quebec accent, I suppose. But I still can't get much. The movies we rent are nice because there I'm getting better and better at connecting the subtitles to what I just heard. I hope someday I won't need the subtitles, but that's a long way off.

Well, off to read more Le Point--today I want to finish the article about Bhutto's assassination, the new anti-smoking law (thank you France!), excerpts from a book on Hillary Clinton, and the reviews of the latest cellphones.