Fuck, UMD library's closed this weekend. :(
I swear around here there are two weeks in late April/early May and two weeks in October where everyone gets to say, "Oh look, the weather is so beautiful!" and then the rest of the year it's either in the 90s with 86% humidity or in the 30s with sleet and freezing rain.
...at least in the winter, if you're cold, you can move around and/or put on more clothing. Heat? You're screwed. Not to mention city doesn't fucking smell like sewer gas in the winter. I could be biased, though, because cold just makes me shiver whereas heat makes me break out in hives.
(Yes, yes, I know, quit whining and move to Seattle/London/somewhere else cool and rainy. I'm working on it.)
I am... trying to work on a translation of that article from the Société des Amis du Peuple that I put up last week. It's mostly easy going, but there are one or two spots... "Tel était le texte de toutes les conversations; elles ne trouvaient tant d’approbation, queparce que chacun était pour son interlocuteur la preuve vivante de la vérité des accusations." Problem spot is in italics; the rest I have a firm enough grip on. If anyone with better French than mine wants to have mercy on me, I'd be much obliged. XD (Watch it be either blindingly obvious, or a typo I took at face value. Headdesk.)
Speaking of which, I might actually annotate this one. Usually any footnotes lying around my translations are from the original author; this one has no footnotes in the original, but it also has references to a number of current events that I'd never heard of and had to look up on wiki.fr. So unless y'all are conversant enough with carlism and the sack of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois that you don't need any help, looks like this one will have some explanation.
I'm getting to the point where I really need some more formal training in French; I have enough of a grasp of the language to translate French-to-English with a dictionary, but my knowledge is really patchy in the way that only self-taught languages can be. In a twisted way it does simulate natural language learning; I make some of the same mistakes that a small child, who hasn't yet grasped the nuances of, say, the tenses, would make. I use tenses as an example because I was only formally taught the présent, imparfait, and passé composé--I have a vague and mostly instinctual idea of the functions of the subjonctif, conditionnel, and passé antérieur, but I was never taught the details of how and exactly when to use them. The problem is compounded by all my knowledge being passive: even if I'm not sure of something in French, I have a good sense of what it would idiomatically correspond to in English; I cannot, however, actually produce an idiomatic sentence in French to save my life. I'm a bit beyond the average awkward constructions of a beginning or intermediate student, all of which sound like English translated word-for-word into French, but my sentences still never sound quite natural, in a way that's less easy to pin down than my rampant misuse of prepositions. Ideally I would like to be able to write in French that sounds like it was written by someone who speaks French, not someone who was taught French.
And this is just writing. Hoo boy. I cannot coherently understand spoken French. I can pick out words, but I can't listen to a sentence and assemble meaning out of it unless it's either repeated or spoken v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. I fare a little better with song lyrics, but I still have to listen to the song a couple of times to get the whole thing, and I'm hopeless with rapid-fire lyrics. It's not a matter of not being used to hearing a language besides English; I don't have half this much trouble with German. But... okay, I wouldn't go so far as to claim auditory processing disorder, but when my ears miss a bit of sound, my brain has trouble filling in the blanks and understanding what was said. It happens in English, it happens in German, it happens a whole lot more in French, to the point where I can't understand jack shit. sdjk;jf (On another level, my brain often refuses to parse foreign languages, which is why I can eavesdrop on nearby German conversations without actually taking in a word of what's being said. But that can be overcome if I make myself pay attention.) And when I try to speak French? Pathetic. Phonologically I mumble and always speak in a weird halting way like I'm not sure of what I'm saying; linguistically I go into amazing circumlocutions to avoid awkward-but-effective SVO constructs, mostly out of nervousness; usually I just avoid speaking it at all out of sheer embarrassment. It embarrasses me to think that I have a bad accent, that my sentence structure is foreign, that for all I know I'm committing some horrid linguistic faux pas I never knew about. (Random side note: I am actually more comfortable speaking Italian because when I do I have a French accent. French-accented Italian is cute, whereas American-accented anything just sounds grating to my ears.) And my mental assembly of sentences is slow, which is not a problem when I'm writing but definitely is when I'm speaking.
Well. My lack of formal training in the finer points of grammar can easily be solved by formal training; mastery of the French idiom could probably be accomplished with lots of time and practice in a native-speaking environment. My reticence in speaking could probably be beaten out of me if I were forced to speak French and nothing but French to people who didn't care if I mangled their language. It's the lack of verbal understanding that I'm most worried about--yes, it will get better with practice, but I still occasionally have to repeat "What?" and have sentences repeated back to me in fucking English. I'm petrified that I will never have complete spoken grasp of a language where half the syllables are routinely swallowed.
All this pretty much points to an immersion program somewhere in France. Paris, dearly as I would love to visit it, is probably out as a place to learn the language; the biggest thing holding me back from speaking, after all, is fear of having my accent or usage made fun of, and Parisians have a bit of a reputation. ;) I'd probably end up there anyway, but probably at the end of my stay, after I could at least swear with reasonable fluency at anyone who took a swing at my accent. I've been looking at programs in Bordeaux and possibly Aix, and I'll probably ask around a bit more after I've narrowed it down. My parents would be happy to pay for it, especially if I got course credit. I would, however, have to do it over the summer (while airfares are expensive, ack), because I'm moving in with lady_iphigeneia whenever she moves out of her parents' house and I don't think she'd appreciate having to pay full rent on a 2-bedroom while I go gallivanting about Provence. XD
There is, however, one thing I'm really worried about if I end up going to France, and that is food. I have really nasty food allergies. The peanut one will probably not be any more of a pain in the arse than it usually is, but I have a nasty, fatal, anaphylactic milk allergy, and that also extends to butter, cream, cheese, and plenty of other things that are fairly inextricable in French cooking. That I will be cooking my own food 100% of the time is a given; that I will not be going to restaurants or taking courses in French cuisine is another given. But this just strikes me as something that is a lot more likely to fuck up in France, and on top of that I am petrified that something really unpleasant will happen as a result of having to explain my allergy issues in stilted French. I have a hard enough time getting it through people's heads in English that my allergy is potentially lethal; that it is not lactose intolerance or stomach discomfort or hives, it is anaphylactic shock; that if something I eat even touches dairy it will trigger a reaction; that if I collapse at the dinner table somebody needs to grab my purse, take out the EpiPen in the little clear case at the bottom, and ram the needle into my thigh; and that I will probably need to be hospitalized afterwards. I just... it fucking scares me. I could die. People don't take it seriously at home, and they're probably even less likely to take it seriously when I'm a finicky American somewhere in France trying to explain in really bad French that this is a medical issue and not me being a dumb cow who refuses to eat real food because it's not McDonald's.
I mean, I can deal. Making my own food isn't a problem, and you bet your ass I will learn how to explain my allergies in painful detail, carry around some sort of document explaining my allergies in three or four languages in case I'm too incapacitated to talk, and get a medical alert bracelet in French as well as English. But it is fucking stressful and I really do not want to have that on my plate. (It also means I'll probably have to learn how to choke down vegetables, something I have gone nineteen years without bothering to do, lest I starve for want of food I absolutely know won't make me sick.)
Anyway. It's not going to prevent me, it's just one more thing to worry about. Now, to actually get my ass down to business and pick a program. XD
...at least in the winter, if you're cold, you can move around and/or put on more clothing. Heat? You're screwed. Not to mention city doesn't fucking smell like sewer gas in the winter. I could be biased, though, because cold just makes me shiver whereas heat makes me break out in hives.
(Yes, yes, I know, quit whining and move to Seattle/London/somewhere else cool and rainy. I'm working on it.)
I am... trying to work on a translation of that article from the Société des Amis du Peuple that I put up last week. It's mostly easy going, but there are one or two spots... "Tel était le texte de toutes les conversations; elles ne trouvaient tant d’approbation, queparce que chacun était pour son interlocuteur la preuve vivante de la vérité des accusations." Problem spot is in italics; the rest I have a firm enough grip on. If anyone with better French than mine wants to have mercy on me, I'd be much obliged. XD (Watch it be either blindingly obvious, or a typo I took at face value. Headdesk.)
Speaking of which, I might actually annotate this one. Usually any footnotes lying around my translations are from the original author; this one has no footnotes in the original, but it also has references to a number of current events that I'd never heard of and had to look up on wiki.fr. So unless y'all are conversant enough with carlism and the sack of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois that you don't need any help, looks like this one will have some explanation.
I'm getting to the point where I really need some more formal training in French; I have enough of a grasp of the language to translate French-to-English with a dictionary, but my knowledge is really patchy in the way that only self-taught languages can be. In a twisted way it does simulate natural language learning; I make some of the same mistakes that a small child, who hasn't yet grasped the nuances of, say, the tenses, would make. I use tenses as an example because I was only formally taught the présent, imparfait, and passé composé--I have a vague and mostly instinctual idea of the functions of the subjonctif, conditionnel, and passé antérieur, but I was never taught the details of how and exactly when to use them. The problem is compounded by all my knowledge being passive: even if I'm not sure of something in French, I have a good sense of what it would idiomatically correspond to in English; I cannot, however, actually produce an idiomatic sentence in French to save my life. I'm a bit beyond the average awkward constructions of a beginning or intermediate student, all of which sound like English translated word-for-word into French, but my sentences still never sound quite natural, in a way that's less easy to pin down than my rampant misuse of prepositions. Ideally I would like to be able to write in French that sounds like it was written by someone who speaks French, not someone who was taught French.
And this is just writing. Hoo boy. I cannot coherently understand spoken French. I can pick out words, but I can't listen to a sentence and assemble meaning out of it unless it's either repeated or spoken v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. I fare a little better with song lyrics, but I still have to listen to the song a couple of times to get the whole thing, and I'm hopeless with rapid-fire lyrics. It's not a matter of not being used to hearing a language besides English; I don't have half this much trouble with German. But... okay, I wouldn't go so far as to claim auditory processing disorder, but when my ears miss a bit of sound, my brain has trouble filling in the blanks and understanding what was said. It happens in English, it happens in German, it happens a whole lot more in French, to the point where I can't understand jack shit. sdjk;jf (On another level, my brain often refuses to parse foreign languages, which is why I can eavesdrop on nearby German conversations without actually taking in a word of what's being said. But that can be overcome if I make myself pay attention.) And when I try to speak French? Pathetic. Phonologically I mumble and always speak in a weird halting way like I'm not sure of what I'm saying; linguistically I go into amazing circumlocutions to avoid awkward-but-effective SVO constructs, mostly out of nervousness; usually I just avoid speaking it at all out of sheer embarrassment. It embarrasses me to think that I have a bad accent, that my sentence structure is foreign, that for all I know I'm committing some horrid linguistic faux pas I never knew about. (Random side note: I am actually more comfortable speaking Italian because when I do I have a French accent. French-accented Italian is cute, whereas American-accented anything just sounds grating to my ears.) And my mental assembly of sentences is slow, which is not a problem when I'm writing but definitely is when I'm speaking.
Well. My lack of formal training in the finer points of grammar can easily be solved by formal training; mastery of the French idiom could probably be accomplished with lots of time and practice in a native-speaking environment. My reticence in speaking could probably be beaten out of me if I were forced to speak French and nothing but French to people who didn't care if I mangled their language. It's the lack of verbal understanding that I'm most worried about--yes, it will get better with practice, but I still occasionally have to repeat "What?" and have sentences repeated back to me in fucking English. I'm petrified that I will never have complete spoken grasp of a language where half the syllables are routinely swallowed.
All this pretty much points to an immersion program somewhere in France. Paris, dearly as I would love to visit it, is probably out as a place to learn the language; the biggest thing holding me back from speaking, after all, is fear of having my accent or usage made fun of, and Parisians have a bit of a reputation. ;) I'd probably end up there anyway, but probably at the end of my stay, after I could at least swear with reasonable fluency at anyone who took a swing at my accent. I've been looking at programs in Bordeaux and possibly Aix, and I'll probably ask around a bit more after I've narrowed it down. My parents would be happy to pay for it, especially if I got course credit. I would, however, have to do it over the summer (while airfares are expensive, ack), because I'm moving in with lady_iphigeneia whenever she moves out of her parents' house and I don't think she'd appreciate having to pay full rent on a 2-bedroom while I go gallivanting about Provence. XD
There is, however, one thing I'm really worried about if I end up going to France, and that is food. I have really nasty food allergies. The peanut one will probably not be any more of a pain in the arse than it usually is, but I have a nasty, fatal, anaphylactic milk allergy, and that also extends to butter, cream, cheese, and plenty of other things that are fairly inextricable in French cooking. That I will be cooking my own food 100% of the time is a given; that I will not be going to restaurants or taking courses in French cuisine is another given. But this just strikes me as something that is a lot more likely to fuck up in France, and on top of that I am petrified that something really unpleasant will happen as a result of having to explain my allergy issues in stilted French. I have a hard enough time getting it through people's heads in English that my allergy is potentially lethal; that it is not lactose intolerance or stomach discomfort or hives, it is anaphylactic shock; that if something I eat even touches dairy it will trigger a reaction; that if I collapse at the dinner table somebody needs to grab my purse, take out the EpiPen in the little clear case at the bottom, and ram the needle into my thigh; and that I will probably need to be hospitalized afterwards. I just... it fucking scares me. I could die. People don't take it seriously at home, and they're probably even less likely to take it seriously when I'm a finicky American somewhere in France trying to explain in really bad French that this is a medical issue and not me being a dumb cow who refuses to eat real food because it's not McDonald's.
I mean, I can deal. Making my own food isn't a problem, and you bet your ass I will learn how to explain my allergies in painful detail, carry around some sort of document explaining my allergies in three or four languages in case I'm too incapacitated to talk, and get a medical alert bracelet in French as well as English. But it is fucking stressful and I really do not want to have that on my plate. (It also means I'll probably have to learn how to choke down vegetables, something I have gone nineteen years without bothering to do, lest I starve for want of food I absolutely know won't make me sick.)
Anyway. It's not going to prevent me, it's just one more thing to worry about. Now, to actually get my ass down to business and pick a program. XD