Martin & Marseille

It is interesting to watch the development of my language skills (the French language skills, that is). Remember for me it's the first time I'm really learning a foreign language, English doesn't count and Latin doesn't really count, either.
Before I went everyone told me I'd pick it up in no time and I'd be fluent after a couple of weeks. I don't find it that easy.
For a start, I communicate too much with other foreigners (i.e. non-French) people. This is less avoidable than it seems: for a start, I live with more foreigners than natives and then I do lots of stuff over the internet. If I work on a computer project for a day on my own computer I usually don't see much French stuff. Even some projects for university require reading English papers. I probably do much more stuff in English when I'm in Germany but never noticed.
Then I don't do much active learning. My École does offer French for foreigners, but that's designed for 1st year students and clashes with my 3rd year timetable. 80% of my learning is just chatting with people and listening in classes, the rest is made up of reading (fiction, newspapers, some web sites) and only a very little bit of actual work on my grammar and vocab. I think this is not the best way to learn a language: It's difficult to remember which prepositions to use and which gender nouns have this way.
Nevertheless, I'm a lot better than I was. I can follow most of my lessons, even when the prof doesn't talk too clearly (most of it interpolated, but still). I read French books (nothing hard, so far only French translations of English books) and newspapers and get quite far using a dictionary. I have conversations and use the subjonctive just because everything else sounds wrong. I get asked for directions and can help.
But I still make loads of mistakes. This is what I find difficult.

- Pronunciation
Is not really that hard. Write me down a French word and don't rush me, I'll read it without a mistake 95% of the time. But French pronunciation is adaptive. It changes. That makes it difficult to apply it correctly the same time as constructing sentences. And it is very sensitive to mistakes. Little pronunciation mistakes can make words and sentences completely incomprehensible.

- Conjugation and tenses
German conjugation is weird and very irregular so I should be used to this. There's a difference, though: in the spoken language, German speakers usually only need the present form (Indikativ), the past perfect (Perfekt) which uses a participle and present forms of be (sein) and have (haben). Future forms are even easier: connect future forms of 'be' and 'have' with the infinitive or use the present in a future context. The famous Konjunktiv isn't really used that often so you can get quite far with forms like 'Ich würde gerne klettern' (I'd like to climb).
French conjugations like their own forms. For spoken language, you need to conjugate the participle (for passé composé, past tense), the imparfait (simple past), futur, conditionnel, of course présent and the subjonctif which all have their own conjugations. Then, you should know the futur composé which is a composite conjugation but uses go (aller) for a modal instead of have and be. For a higher language level you also could learn the subjonctif imparfait and for reading the passé simple is often used in books, but for an intermediate level understanding them is enough.
Point I'm trying to make: we Germans are getting a bit lazy and use modals too often, so this multitude of conjugations is confusing.

- Vocab
I'm pretty lazy learning vocab. It's just so boring... But as I never learnt lots of French at school, most of my vocab I just 'picked up'. Which means I don't know much, use it in wrong places and of course mix up the genders. What I try and do is remember whole phrases: "La coté obscure de la force..." not only gives me the genders of two nouns, but also helps because words on -é usually have the same gender - now I know it's feminine.

- Writing
My writing in general is pretty bad. I'm starting to get the hang of accents, but my biggest source of mistakes is the accordance of adjectives and participles. Take this sentence: 'FSO is very well developed.'. In French, that's 'FSO est trés evoluée.'. I usually forget the last e, because it's so far from the word FSO. And even so, FSO is an English abbreviation - so why is it feminine? Answer: because it's a technology, and it's 'la technologie'. I just hope I didn't do any mistakes in this paragraph.

- Style
Have you ever seen or hear someone create a phrase and you thought "Grammatically it's correct and I can't explain why, but it doesn't sound very good?" People tell me that loads here. Interesting: seems like a 'feel' for a language evolves in several stages. I wonder if I ever get to the one where I can choose the 'better' phrase from two grammatically equivalent ones.

Although my French gets better all the time, I know it won't be anywhere near perfection until March. 6 months is just not enough to learn a language at my age .

Wow, what a quote. I'll break some journalistic rules and start with both a quote and a joke:

A US-American, a Frenchman and a German are sitting on a bridge. You want to make them jump down. What do you say to them to achieve that?

To the American: "There's a 1000$ down there"
To the Frenchman: "It's forbidden to jump off this bridge"
To the German: "Jump"

Where's the connection between the joke and the quote? Easy: this is an article about rules and German and French people.
Everyone knows the German are a law- and rule-abiding people. Well, at least everyone says so. And I have more than once done something like stopping at a red pedestrian light even there's no car around in the middle of Brazil, for example. I had a little chat with the secretary for internships here and she immediately started telling me about her trips to Germany and of course some anecdotes about German law-abidingness.

My observation: it's all true (I leap right back into the over-generalisation without any data backing me up again). But there's a twist, and here's my theory: Germans are more rule-abiding, but they also have more sensible rules.

France is by no means short of rules. You get them everywhere and by the hundreds and loads of them are ridiculous (in my humble opinion). So no wonder French people don't stick to rules: they couldn't budge a meter without breaking one. So hey, why not break a couple more while you're at it.

I think a typical French procedure is something like this: there's millions of rules, you stick to those you can care to do so, then someone 'in charge' will come complaining, you start a discussion and bargain out some understanding. When I organised a birthday party for someone from the student's home I had to sign a piece of paper that there wouldn't be any alcohol at all, I wouldn't invite more than 15 people, there'd be no noise and the room would be handed over spick and span by 23.00 tops. Quite impossible to both do a birthday party and stick to those rules, but I was assured by some people who do parties more often that you just have to have a quick word with the security guy and it would be OK... (and I didn't invite more then 15 people, they just came).
Rules are everywhere. There's traffic lights and crossings I wouldn't even notice without the lights. You're supposed to stop at zebra crossings if someone wants to cross, but there's one every 25m. My student card has some space just for general rules (in Karlsruhe the space is rented out for advertising). You automatically ignore them because there just not enough time to read them all. I am not allowed to attach an electric hotplate in my room, but a microwave oven is fine. A fridge is not. If you want cars to drive 40km/h because the road is dangerous there's a sign limiting to 10km/h.

So far my unqualified observations. There's lots of stuff I'd like to know, e.g. if the law system is something like that (see the quote), and if they started off with lots of laws and started ignoring them or if the many rules were introduced to compensate for the ignoring.

The title is (ironically) a quote by Charles de Montesquieu, a Frenchman (you've probably heard of him, he's the one who came up with the division of the administrative powers executive/legislative/judicative). Quite a loose translation, the German translation is "Wenn es nicht notwendig ist, ein Gesetz zu machen, dann ist es notwendig, kein Gesetz zu machen." His favourite author, Tacitus, also had his opinion on this subject: "The most rotten countries have the most laws." And here's the catch: this country is far too nice to be called rotten. At least French people don't blindly jump of bridges.

hi all,

happy new year. During my holidays in Germany I got a huge amount of positive feedback concerning my blog, and I want to thank everyone for their interest and also apologise that I haven't written anything for a while. I am quite busy, and practically all of my classes require computer work so I prefer to do something other then hacking away during my free time. However, especially having been home to Germany during the holidays I've come up with some new ideas for entries which will hopefully be available soon.

For those reading my blog on-line, some might have thought that the weather-plugin is buggy. It's not: since I got here I haven't had one day without sun and yesterday I did a nice hike from La Ciotat to Cassis along the Calanques, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and having some ice-cream afterwards. Incredible what a European summer can be like. As usual when I do something interesting, I forgot my camera, though.