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...