Am I being a little top-heavy with the language posts? Probably. Oh well. I'm currently reading Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost, Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta and Let the old dreams die by John Ajvide Lindqvist so perhaps you'll get a lit corner or two sooner or later :D

Until then...

As I have mentioned before (quite a few times, I believe,) I am studying abroad in France. My home uni requires that at least fifty percent of my French credits are from literature classes, as I also do comparative literature at home. This means that I have to study French literature at around the same level as French students.

What does this have to do with language learning outside of a university setting? Well, I'll tell you.

I was wondering to myself, while idly trawling the How To Learn Any Language [HTLAL] forums and procrastinating on the essay that I should be writing right now, how writing commentaries would aid in the study of a language.

Writing commentaries, for those who don't know, is a very academic exercise. It involves studying a short extract of a text in great detail - the analysis is meant to be almost scientific. When writing a commentary for English, you are meant to deconstruct word choices, lexical fields, punctuation - all of that - in order to see what they impart on the reader: how do they change the understanding of and the feeling induced by the text? What do they say about the narrator, and what does the narration style tell us about the situation? So on, so forth. It's pretty difficult to do even in English, and in French it's a new beast entirely.

A French commentary wants you to not only analyse all of these things, but also look at the grammar of the text. How can the usage of the passé composé as opposed to the imparfait or the passé simple inform our understanding of such and such moment? So on, so forth.

As you may or may not know, I struggle with grammar. Having never learnt these concepts in English, I find them almost impossible to internalise in other languages as I simply have no point of reference and no familiarity. Forcing myself to pay attention to grammatical structures and grammar in the way that writing a French commentary requires might actually be of some use to me.

Of course, this is all conjecture. I have a book of poésie en prose that I have been struggling to read, but which I quite enjoy, so maybe I'll turn my efforts towards that. At least, I hope to as soon as I finish this essay that I have to write!

Happy essaying!

And happier blogging :D

Little Newman

P.S. - Unrelated. Almost every other weekend, the person who lives above me has a guest (or guests, who knows) whose company xe enjoys rather too much for my personal liking. I feel like going upstairs and complaining XD but I guess they're pretty good when I want to party loudly with all my friends and their mothers, so I haven't much of a right...

Gummy dares!

Yesterday. Yesterday was Eurovision, which can only mean one thing: EUROVISION PARTY!

Actually, in all honesty, yesterday was not only the first Eurovision party I've ever been to, but also the first time I've watched Eurovision in over five years (!!!!)

I know, I'm a bad European.

Also, we missed half of it because what was with that astounding amount of concise they went for? However, we missed half of it for a VERY good reason. The majority of the people I went with were from the UK, so of course we wanted to be as drunk as is possible for what we thought was the only possible outcome: pitiful defeat.

So after a couple of rounds of Cheat where you have to wager an amount of alcohol every time you accuse someone of cheating - get it right, and they're wasted. Get it wrong and you're in trouble - we played gummy dares.

In drinking, I'd say vodka gummy bears are about as right as you can get while still being wrong. Usually you just chuck everything in there and hope for the best - at least, that's what we do. They're sticky and start to melt after a while and feel disgusting, not to mention that they're often far too alcoholic to taste pleasant if you're not already well on your way to drunkendom. All of this, somehow, adds up to greatness. A classic example of the whole being greater than the sum of parts. (Erm...)

And do you want to know a way to make your gummy bears drinking party even better? With gummy dares!

We saturated four colours of gummy bears in raspberry vodka: red, white, yellow and orange. While they were soaking, we all wrote out dares of varying degrees of silliness onto slips of paper, folded them up and put them in a pile. The rules are pretty simple, and they go as follows:

You shut your eyes, dip your hand in the gummy bear bowl, and pick ONE. The colour of gummy bear you pick dictates what you have to do.

Red gummy bears are 'safe'. You have to eat it, but that's all.
White gummy bears are a dare. You have to eat the gummy bear and do a dare.
Yellow gummy bears are a shot. You eat the bear and do your shot, all is well(ish).
Orange gummy bears (which we added at the last second,) are truths. You eat your gummy bear, and you answer a question put forward by the group.

Of course, we provided an out for those who didn't want to do the dares. A friend had come to visit from Paris with a bottle of what she touted as the cheapest, nastiest rum ever. I didn't think it was that bad, but I was definitely among the minority. If you really, really didn't want to do the dare, you had to take a half shot of this rum instead. Of course this only works when you have something god awful to drink, because you want to make ducking out of the dare as unpleasant as possible.

This game was a good amount of fun, although I don't think I'll be able to look at gummy bears for quite some time now. Which is a shame because the rest of them are in my sink.

Happy drinking!
And Happy Blogging!
Little Newman

P.S. Speaking of Eurovision - what was that about?? We were all shocked beyond belief and, as a bunch of English girls in France, just a leetle bit worried about what new levels of French hate our night out would bring!

Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Pratar du svenska?

In my last post I mentioned that I am focusing my active language learning efforts on Swedish and German. First of all, maybe I should explain what it is I mean by 'active'. After all, didn't I say I was going to start actively engaging in French?

Yes, even I'm a little unsure how to sort this tangled mess out.

What I mean is that, by and large, I know French. I can sit in, understand, and pass university level classes. I can get myself around in French. Yes, I find it hard to understand any francophone under the age of twenty five (enunciation, people, it's a Thing!) but the problem isn't so much my vocabulary or understanding of basic grammatical structures as it is my lack of exposure.

In short, (bref, as they say,) I don't feel the need to actively go out and follow courses. My book learning is coming to an end and I what I need now is actual usage.

I cannot say the same with Swedish and German. Yes, I can just about string together a jag heter Lily or a ich will deutsches Bücher auf Deutsch lesen. I can understand quite a lot of written Swedish (and, by extension, Norwegian and Danish), an amount that is most definitely not proportionate to the work I put in. My passive exposure to Swedish means I could probably pick up a few more things with minimal effort. But that's not what I want.

I want to be able to pick up a book in Swedish and know that I won't be looking up every second or third word. I want to understand conversations that happen around me (even if I don't feel comfortable taking part.)

And in German? To be honest, my ambitions are much, much higher. I would like to spend a year in Germany, au pairing. Of course, most host families are more than willing to pay for a language course for their au pairs (and I'm pretty sure that taking such a course is a requirement for German au pairs.) But I would like to reach a B1 level of German before that. And, if it is where life leads me, I wouldn't mind doing my masters in Germany, either. But that, of course, is very dependent on a lot of other things.

I have liked German for a very long time. At first, I liked the entertainment value of German composite words which, admittedly, is not a good reason or motivation to learn any language. But as I grew older, the desire to learn German grew stronger. And then I met actual Germans. I love Germans. I have yet to meet and talk toa German that I truly dislike. There are a lot of stereotypes about Germans and German, especially in the English speaking world that just don't match up to real life (although, that being said, there are also a lot that do!)

I like that, when I talk to Germans, I feel that I am actually, truly being listened too - although that terrifies me also. I don't really have that much to say, certainly not much of importance! And I also love listening to Germans speak! Whether they are speaking English, German or French, I love their accents. Quite different from the harsh and guttural sounds most anglophones produces when imitating or speaking German, I find German speech patterns to be quite soft.

Including that notorious German 'ch'! Maybe one of the reasons it's so often misrepresented by anglophones is because it's so hard for us to get right. N'importe, disais-je, I want to try!

In fact, the only thing I can say I don't love about German right now is the Grammar. But I don't love grammar in any language, so I'm certainly not going to let that put me off!

Despite this entire post so far being something of a love letter to German and Germans, most of my effort actually goes into my Swedish.

I think I mentioned before that I am passively exposed to Swedish quite often, but I actively engage in Swedish more often, too. Sometime last year, I bought myself a copy of John Ajvide Lindqvist's Låt den rätte komma in and I am making (so slow as to almost be negligable) progress through it. I am making fairly heavy use of Lingq's Swedish resources and try to understand Swedish whenever I come across is. I recently watched the Swedish film version of Låt den rätte komma in and I can assure you I was quite ecstatic whenever I caught a word or phrase I understood!

I haven't set myself any concrete goals with regards to Swedish, but as a vague goal I would quite like to be able to understand this clip from Johan Glans 'World Tour of Skåne'. I think that I'm probably, somehow, almost a quarter way there!

(Baby steps, friends, baby steps.)

And for both, I am trying to write things. Just a little bit, just what I can, but I'm trying. I find it much easier to hash out (and hash up) a short few sentences in Swedish or German simply because I am not terrified of awful grammar faux pas as I am in French. After all, it doesn't matter if I'm contravening major grammar rules because I didn't know they existed! Whereas in French I feel like the earth should swallow me up and spit me out in some seventh circle of Daily Mail hell for making the slightest mistake because for goodness sake Lilian, you've been at this language for ten years, shouldn't you know this by now?

As I've said in this and at least one previous post, I am using Lingq* and italki for learning (both Swedish and German), and also Lang8 for writing practice. Feel free to find me there!

Happy learning and
Happier blogging,
Little Newman

*also, for those morally against Lingq's practice of awarding people points for linking to their site, have no fear! That link should be safe! While I'm not against it, I'm not particularly for it either. Any points I'm awarded, I'd rather get through actual work that I do. And also, no puns were intended there, they just sort of happened.

Language marriage counselling

As with all my other interests, my efforts to learn new languages wax and wane.

I have managed to narrow down a pretty impressive 'to learn' list down to two languages: German and Swedish. I have also decided to actively fall back in love with French.

To be honest, I'm not sure when I fell out of love with French. Perhaps the process started long ago, when I failed in finding an interesting piece of original language French young adult literature - not just English books in translation. No matter when the process started, it really became apparent to me this year. I've barely made any efforts to speak French in my everyday life, meaning that my conversational skills are more than below par. Write a detailed analyses on what Casanova's changes of verb tenses reveal about his personality and mood in Histoire de ma vie? No problem! Explain, in detail, why I think that I can't really say that I know anything about the current political status of Libya due to the biases and underlying motives of English news and media? I could practically do that in my sleep. But hold a conversation with a couple of teenage girls who I like and whose company I enjoy? Slow down, good sir, you go too far!

Part of the problem is a lack of vocabulary. It's all very well and good to try and look up the vocabulary of casual conversation, but this is an area where I am to be found lacking even in English. I analyse most of my conversation and realise I rarely say anything of substance. It's a fact that most of what passes between my friends and I as conversations are silly in-jokes based on meaningless phrases and past interactions with others and... faces. I make a lot of very stupid faces. Somehow I feel that this won't go far to developing my ability to make either friends or conversation in French.

The problem persists. No matter how many times my roommate and I say we will talk in French, we never succeed. Over the course of the past academic year, we have only had two conversations in French, and they were both short. And she ticks all the boxes: she's French, we get along and have similar interests, and I like her so much that she accompanied me on my last trip back home, which resulted in my family demanding that she come back to visit them in the summer.

So what can I do? Apart from attending ever more language exchanges, where there is the occasional chance of my finding a francophone with whom I can easily and freely speak French?

I'm going to interact much more with French culture, that's what. 'But Lilian, you have spent a year in immersion!' Yes, random observer, yes I have. And during that single year I have made more friends than I have in the rest of my life, all of whom speak English to a native level (if not natively), and with whom I am, at most, only going to speak very bad franglais.

So I will watch more in French. I will try to read more in French (because at my level, reading French should not be as much of a chore as it is). I am going to actively try to find people to speak French with. To that end, I have joined italki, a website that allows language learners to find either conversation exchange partners or teachers willing to help them learn their chosen language. I am trying to become an active member on the How to Learn Any Language forums for the moral support and encouragement of other language-learners (although becoming an active member of any forum is something I find difficult.) I have also found a French series that, so far, I enjoy. It is called Les Revenants, or The Returned, and it has been popular enough to be remade for English television. It's about a small town where the dead are coming back to life, and other supernatural phenomena is building up, also. It's quite difficult in places, with emotionally charged scenes - I'm sure you can imagine the kind of turmoil a family would be going through on their young daughter, dead for four years, returning home without realising that a thing has changed. Harrowing, indeed. But very good.

Finally, I will try writing some more. I am sad to say that creative writing in French is still far out of my reach, but I reckon I could manage a blog post here and there. Then again, I can barely do that in English!

As for my other two languages, Swedish and German? I'll guess I'll have to save that until next time.

Happy language learning and
Happy Blogging!
Little Newman


P.S., for any French language learners looking to improve their listening skills with interesting and amusing native content, try either Cyprien on YouTube or WorkinGirls. Both of them are quite challenging, WorkinGirls far more so than Cyprien, but the entertainment factor is high and makes it all the more worth the effort!