My french learning journey has been dragging for a while, which isn’t so very good if I want to pass the exam anytime soon. You know how it is, you decide to commit time and energy into something and promise to dedicate daily time, but then it drags and drags and you get distracted and sometimes you don’t even feel like it, and then a month goes by, then two, then three, then it’s been a year and you still cannot say you made any terribly big progress. Yeah.
I feel like my level is fine enough for bare minimum exam pass (I really need any non-failure score), but it’s just I simply cannot bring myself to connect all the dots and scattered knowledge into a system mappable enough to my normal speech in English or Russian. It shouldn’t be that hard and I know that I can do some super basic A1 vocab. I must be really close. I only need to get serious. Alright.
Journaling my french studies Day 1:
I listened to the beginning of Easy French podcast.
que est allée se réfugier
I noted the trap of wanting to use avoir with aller in the past tense and tried out writing some random sentences with it just to refresh my memory.
réfugier chez ses parents
I notice chez and remember that I could also say “rendre visite à …”, I write down some examples and note usage differences. Along the way I notice that rendre can be used with “making someone feel something”, and I feel weird about it, because I know that I can use faire for that purpose, as in literally “make”. I look up and turns out the usage chart goes as:
rendre + adj
faire + noun
donner + physiological state
tenir + warm
This looks huge, so I try out many examples: “il me rend triste” , “il me fait peur”, etc.
Then I continue reading Madame Bovary, the phrase I am working with is
Dans les beaux soirs d’été, …
I notice dans and compare with modern examples where I can say only “les soirs” instead. Probably both are correct. I try out some random sentences:
Dans les matins
Les matins
Chaque matin
Le matin de chaque jour
and so on. I remember days of week and grammar that applies to them:
Le samedi je mange …
Nous allons lire les livres dimanche
etc.
Then I combine my knowledge of faire / rendre / donner with les soirs / chaque soir to produce some combined sentences.
I learn a new word “la fraîcheur” / “freshness” and I like it. Trying out a couple of random sentences to remember it.Practicing french “which” as “dont”, still a bit hard to get used to it:
J’adore l’été dont la fraîcheur me rend heureux
It reminded me of Orphée aux Enfers opera, specifically a chanson by Eurydice: La femme dont le cœur rêve / The woman whose heart dreams.
Writing it down I realize I forget how to write the œ character and so I practice random sentences with le cœur just to burn it into my brain.
la fraîcheur -> I memorize its product adjectives: frais, fraîch, fraîches (sounds like “fresh”, pretty neat).
Now, working with a big sentence
La rivière, qui fait de ce quartier de Rouen comme une ignoble petite Venise, coulait en bas, sous lui, jaune, violette ou bleue, entre ses ponts.
There are several things I want to work on:
1.) faire .. comme
I randomly try a couple of sentences, e.g. sentence l’apprentissage du francais me fait comme un professeur (??), it sounds weird and probably is wrong. I figure out the structure I was looking for is donner l’impression e.g. “cela me donne l’impression d’etre intelligent.”
This is very helpful, but I am still behind on “faire comme”, so I look up some more stuff and then settle with “comme - like” and “comme si - as if”
I learn a new important word: préféré(e) and try to incorporate it into my random sentences (“favorite”! it’s a super usable word)
2.) en bas / en haut / de haut en bas
Super simple stuff, but I figure that up and down are used a lot, so I spam random sentences to memorize it in different contexts.
les hivers froids, je vais en bas pour me tenir tiede
3.) sur / sous / sous lui / sur lui
Again, simple stuff. Still worth practicing.
In the end I split the sentence into simple phrases to process it once more:
- La rivière coulait en bas.
- La rivière coulait entre les ponts.
- La rivière fait de Rouen comme une ignoble Venise.
Next sentence
Des ouvriers, accroupis au bord, lavaient leurs bras dans l’eau.
1.) Accroupis / Accroupire
“squatting” is not something I imagine using often, however I still felt like memorizing it.
2.) laver / se laver
“washing” is common and used a lot. I look up “dishes” and “plates” together with it to memorize in group: les plats / les assiettes.