alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

August 23, 2006

French Headline of the Day

by @ 2:00 pm. Filed under foreign affairs, french

From RFI:

La participation européenne au sein de la Force internationale des Nations-Unies au Liban. Les 25 se réunissent aujourd’hui à Bruxelles pour trouver une réponse commune…

Originally I thought this was an interesting headline in that names that we take as universal, such as the United Nations, are not-so-universal. We see here that it’s rendered as Nations-Unies. The acronym “the UN”, however, is rendered as “l’ONU”.

Note also that while the foreign press uses the acronym FINUL (Force internationale des Nations-Unies au Liban) as a proper name, the english-speaking press just uses the more generic “UN peace-keeping force”.

Nouns: La participation (the participation), aujourd’hui (today), une réponse (an answer).

Verbs: réunissent (they meet), trouver (to find).

One thing that becomes apparent as you look at the nouns used in journalism, as opposed to what we’re taught in introductory French classes, is that the former are almost all abstract nouns, whereas the latter are mostly concrete nouns.

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August 18, 2006

French for Bloggers

by @ 11:46 am. Filed under Uncategorized, french

One of my projects for the year is to learn enough French to read Le Monde without cheating (no dictionary, no babbelfish). Like many of you shrill middle-aged youngsters, I took French 7-10 grade, and know how to conjugate the basic verbs, and have an okay vocabulary, as long as I limit my conversations to:

Me: Show me an object.
You: Here is an object.
Me: What is it?
You: It is a pencil.
Me: Where are you going for vacation this winter?
You: I am going to the mountains this winter.
Me: Are you going to the beach this winter?
You: No, I am going to the mountains this winter.

This, of course, is very far off from reading Le Monde.

What I’ve been doing is listening to RFI, a French radio program out of Paris specifically designed for folks like me (basic French that they speak slowly and distinctly). They conveniently provide the script, which again, is perfect for folks like me. That way I can look up the words I don’t know, and create my own vocabulary sheet. And, yes, I find many of the same phrases repeated from one day to the next, and am slowly getting to that goal of reading Le Monde.

It occurred to me today that there might be other folks who are interested in learning French with less an emphasis on conversation, and more on being able to follow the news from a European perspective. Bloggers, journalists, etc would fall into this category.

With that, here’s a vocabulary sheet that I drew up a couple of days ago: (pdf)

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