Week 8:French, French, French! I absolutely progress in both listening and reading comprehension, hurray!
French:
Started listening/reading
Honoré de Balzac - Eugenie Grandet. Unfortunately there was something wrong with the audiobook (read by Claude Bermann): CD 2 didn't start where CD 1 ended!
I think, I'll read the book later, when my French has improved some more.
Started listening/reading
Guy de Maupassant - Le maison Tellier, but stopped after only 10 or so minutes. The interpreter, Paul Désalmand, read in such a boring, monotone voice that I just couldn't imagine to listen to him for several hours. Luckily I get all my audiobooks from the library, so at least I didn't pay anything for this sleeping pill.
Now I'm listening to
Honoré de Balzac - Le lys dans le vallée, read by Philippe Lejour, while reading the Swedish translation (the library doesn't own the French book). A young man experiences his first love to a dutifully married woman, a story overfull of sentiments. I feel like it should exasperate me, but I so far quite like the book.
I'm also reading
Astrid Lindgren - Les frères cœur-de-lion. It's the first French book ever that I read without the help of neither parallel reading nor a dictionary! (The fact that I read the books many, many, many times in my teens and a few times as an adult helps a lot of course. Astrid Lindgren is my Harry Potter
) I only check some nature related words and words which are bewildering. For example I understood the expression "le Fleuve des Fleuves séculaires" very well, remembering both the German translation (der Fluss der uralten Flüsse) and the Swedish original (de uråldriga flodernas flod), but "séculaire" made me wonder. Isn't that "secular, worldly" rather than "very, very old"? But no, "séculaire" means "happening once each hundred years" (might well be related to the Swedish word "sekel", a century) and "being very old" - voilà! "Secular, worldly" is "séculier" by the way.