He works in a lab

Il travaille dans un laboratoire. Il est chimiste // He works in a lab. He is a chemist

We carry on with the professions, as you can plainly see from the pic. We also had a long explanation about possessive adjectives in French. To be honest, I didn’t get what was the problem. It might well be some specific difficulty that Spanish speakers tend to have. Or I might have missed the point completely. I’ll report next week, when the lessons and pictures resume.

The cat doesn’t like it the lab either, though maybe not so much as in the eggplant jungle. Nobody knows why did he get there, but that’s cats for you.

And hooray for me — another week done (another Koi pen brush for me!)

Anniversaire

c’est mon anniversaire aujourd’hui // it’s my birthday today

Once I’ve finished drawing a туева хуча (pardon my Russian, it means, er... an awful lot) of candles, and started adding flames I automatically counted them and SUDDENLY! realized that this awful lot was not nearly enough to represent my actual age. Jeez.

Aaanyway... Not sure why the sumo wrestler cat from the previous post crawled into the pic, but here he is.

I promised myself a little prezzie from stationery shop for every week I manage to make as many posts as we had classes. I am looking forward to another Koi pen-brush, they are great.

Pictures related to birthdays, cakes, candles and things @ Shutterstock.

Le cheval a huit ans

Le cheval a huit ans / The horse is eight years old

This time the phrase comes from Duolingo site. I thought it was rather adorable and lends itself well to a little drawing.

Judging by the discussion under the phrase, native English speakers find it difficult to accept that age construction can contain verb “to have” (“avoir” in French, “a” in third person singular) and not the equivalent of “to be”. Fortunately I have already passed though this stage with Spanish. Spaniards also “have” their years, not “are” them, if I may say so.

Come to think of it, the Russian construction “Тебе сколько лет?” — “Мне 50”, implies by the grammatical cases that somebody went and gave the years to the speaker. I.e., the question can be interpreted as “How many years (were given to) you?” and the answer “I (was given) 50”. If so, Russians also “have” their years.

S’il vous plaît

silver plate / s’il vous plaît / please

I always assumed that the use of “silver plate” in Nanny Ogg’s “fake foreign” was Terry Pratchett’s invention. I was quite surprised to find it listed as one of “American fighting words and phrases”. In the same capacity of course — as a way to remember how to say “please”, “s’il vous plaît”, in French. Maybe it is more widely used than I thought.

While we are on the subject, did you know that “Yellow blue vase” sounds like a very polite and formal (and not very well pronounced) “I love you” in Russian? If you didn’t, let it be your daily bit of useless knowledge.

Continuing with free associations: in a Russian folk tale there is an episode where a silver plate (saucer, to be more precise) and an apple were used for divination. This explains the weird writing on the sketch.

I am not sure whether all the above will help me to remember the spelling of s’il vous plaît, but silver plate is now etched in my memory.

Food

formule de jour /daily special

We spoke about food today (and many other things). To me, “formule de jour”, “formula of the day” is reminiscent of an alchemy labs with a tangle of glass vessels and crucibles all joined by transparent tubes with green liquid running through them.

While meaning simply “daily special”.

Beautiful language. Bit crazy though.

Trois chats mignons

trois chats mignons / three cute cats

Dans le train

 dans le train / les passagers / la destination

Today we listened to a short conversation which was happening between a few people on a train. One of them was supposedly a Russian guy. He spoke with an actual growl to his voice. Seems like some people still think that not only bears roam the streets of Moscow — they actually believe that said bears are breeding with Muscovites.

Second observation — just as I found it curious and a bit embarrassing that the the dialogues in my “Spanish for beginners” books were concentrating on appearances (“how is the new girl? she is short and ugly and has black hair”), in French for beginners I find it curious and amusing that during the casual introductions people give each other their ages almost first thing. I mean like “Here is my seat number four, oh, hello there, nice to meet you, I am Laura and I am 23 years old”.

It is rather reminiscent of this passage from Jerome K Jerome on the subject of learning French — in school, in his case:

... the importance attached by the French nation to pens, ink, and paper. “Have you pens, ink, and paper?” is the first question asked by one Frenchman of another on their meeting. The other fellow has not any of them, as a rule, but says that the uncle of his brother has got them all three. The first fellow doesn’t appear to care a hang about the uncle of the other fellow’s brother; what he wants to know now is, has the neighbor of the other fellow’s mother got ’em? “The neighbor of my mother has no pens, no ink, and no paper,” replies the other man, beginning to get wild. “Has the child of thy female gardener some pens, some ink, or some paper?” He has him there. After worrying enough about these wretched inks, pens, and paper to make everybody miserable, it turns out that the child of his own female gardener hasn’t any. Such a discovery would shut up any one but a French exercise man. It has no effect at all, though, on this shameless creature. He never thinks of apologizing, but says his aunt has some mustard.

Arguably, learning someone’s age is is more useful than knowing if they have ink, so there was some progress made since Jerome’s times.

Écoute!

Écoute! / une oreille (Listen / an ear)

Don’t know about you, but I tend to switch off almost completely very soon after our class enters into repetitive phase — i.e. the same grammar construct or a pronunciation point is being worked on for a while.

Not even the obvious approach of “my turn” can quite pull my attention back. Instead, I was concentrating on drawing ears of my classmates. They are surprisingly difficult to draw, once you are past “just a loop” stage.

The first one

This year I have started with French lessons. To make me remember better and to make my classes more fun I will try to do a sketch in each class and put it here. There are four lessons per week till January. Let’s see how long I will last :)
And, appropriately, here is my attempt at The Gallic Shrug:

I dunno

Funny that English “I don’t know”, French “Je ne sais pas”, Spanish “No lo sé” and even Russian «Я не знаю», all can be said using exactly the same cadence.