paris

French without passion

19 languages

Michel Montaigne has something to say about passions

I had thought that in 2022, I would brush up my Modern Greek, but then life happened.

Not to abandon my carefully crafted plan to study three languages a year, I needed an easier option. I needed to choose a language that I can refresh or update without much effort. Thus an idea to read some French books came up. 

There was a hiccup, however. My relationship with French is a passionate romance that turned sour. Long gone are the days when I was begging to be accepted to a French phonetics class, learning French songs by heart, and bracing the cold to get to the médiathèque française to borrow French  books.

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan (“where is the snow of yesteryear?”)

This year, I willy-nilly read a couple of French novels, more out of duty than for fun, and said to myself that this approach was going nowhere. 

I, who would usually eagerly wait for the night to fall, to intimately engage with my Spanish, Italian, and even German novels, was looking for pretexts to do something else, anything really, rather than to read French romans. 

Is there anything at all I can do to improve my French and enjoy the process?

Deliberate learning is a well-known technique of identifying, isolating, and working on a single issue that you need to improve, and which will move the needle. 

I wanted to work on something that would give me the most bang for my bucks. 

My French pronunciation is passable. In any case, working on your phonetics is not much fun.

My grammar is reasonable. Besides, I adhere to the line of thought that the importance of grammar in achieving language fluency is exaggerated. 

But what about vocabulary? Hold on,  I really like phraseology: hearing a new idiom is music to my ears. 

I have been working steadily on my English idioms for three years now. Although I sometimes want to throw in the towel, my English has gradually become more idiomatic. I have been slowly acquiring flexibility, elegance, and effectiveness in expressing myself. 

Thus, I decided to make my French more idiomatic. More so, I decided to do comparative idioms in French versus English, which is right up my street.

I would start with English expressions that I actively use, and for which I do not know a French equivalent off the cuff. 

(How do they say “off the cuff” in French, by the way? “Sur le champs” is one option, I just checked. Others include “au pied levé”,  “spontanément”, and  “à l’improviste”).

For example, I comfortably and frequently use English idioms “lay the groundwork”, “mince your words”, or “not set in stone”, but needed to look up their French equivalents: “poser les jalons”, “mâcher ses mots”, and “pas gravé dans le marbre”.

The process would be that of deliberate learning: identify the gaps and work on filling them. Look up new French idiomatic expressions, learn them, and use them.

Let’s hope that this comparative phraseology approach rekindles some French passion.

Don’t slam the door

19 languages

IMG_20170309_175245
puerta cerrada

I was reading in Spanish novel where a protagonist left con un portazo, ‘slamming the door’. I was left wondering how do you slam the door in different languages.

In English, we close the door. We can also shut the door,  bang the door, and slam the door. We can even slam the door in somebody’s face, although this is not recommended.

In French, on ferme la porte. If one wants to slam it, on claque la porte, and if one is annoyed, bothered, or impolite, on claque la porte au nez.  In his Chanson pour l’Auvergnat, Georges Brassens sings:

Tous les gens bien intentionnés
M’avaient fermé la porte au nez

In Spanish, to close the door is cerrar la puerta, but to slam it is dar un portazo. One can irse / marcharse con un portazo and one can also cerrar la puerta en la cara. A good rule of thumb was mentioned in a dictionary as an example: siempre es mejor irse cerrando puertas que dando portazos.

In Italian, you would normally chiudere la porta (close it), sometimes sbattere la porta (slam it), and rarely sbattere la porta in faccia. If you are really upset and it’s too much, you would sbattere la porta e dire: “Basta”, literally or figuratively.

In Russian, you can хлопнуть дверью or уйти, хлопнув дверью; on the other hand, they can закрыть дверь перед  носом. A popular song goes:

Уходя – уходи! Если кто-то тебе не поверит.
Уходя – уходи! Затвори за собой плотно двери.

In German, there is plenty of options: die Tür schließen, die Tür zuschlagen, die Türe vor der Nase zuschlagen / jemandem die Tür vor der Nase zuschlagen; jemandem die Tür ins Gesicht schlagen / werfen. Note that if the English, Italian, and Spanish slam the door in somebody’s face, whereas the French and Russian focus on the nose, the Germans can do both, face and nose.

In Latvian, one says aizcirst durvis, aizcērt kādam durvis, aizcirst kādam durvis deguna priekšā, aizvērt durvis kāda deguna priekšā. (Nose again.)

In Czech, one can mlátit, prásknout, bouchnout dveřmi . One can simply zavřít dveře (shut the door) or emphatically zavřít dveře před nosem. (Also nose.)

In Modern Greek, one says κλείνω την πόρτα, and κλείνω την πόρτα κατάμουτρα. The word κατάμουτρα is curious: κατα is a preposition with many meanings, including ‘down’ and ‘upon’, whereas μουτρα is slang for face. My Modern Greek is not yet sufficiently good, and I could not find any equivalents of slamming, but the Greeks surely are able to do it?