An opera fan's log - French, German, Italian, etc

[garyb]

My (again very much non-native) thoughts:

"Hier soir, j’allais regarder les deux derniers actes de Pélleas et Méllisande, mais je n’avais pas assez de « pouvoir du cerveau »."

- Do you mean you were going to watch a recording at home, or go to a performance? To me "J'allais regarder" means that you were planning to watch it at home ("I was going to watch...") but then changed your mind and watched the cartoon instead. If that's what you mean, I think the phrase is correct, although "je devais regarder" could remove any ambiguity about whether "aller" is being used in the sense of movement or for the futur proche. But your rewriting as "je suis allé" changes the meaning completely: now you're saying you went out to watch a performance (and presumably watched the cartoon when you came home after the performance).

"qui est basé" doesn't sound right; I'd say "ce qui est basé" or "le dessin animé français Wakfu basé sur...". "C'était parfait" sounds better to me than "il était parfait", but I'm not sure exactly why and I might well be wrong.

For a plot of a story, "intrigue" is a better general term, as "complot" is more like a conspiracy.

[Deinonysus]

Merci Josquin, BalancingAct, et garyb !

My (again very much non-native) thoughts:

"Hier soir, j’allais regarder les deux derniers actes de Pélleas et Méllisande, mais je n’avais pas assez de « pouvoir du cerveau »."

- Do you mean you were going to watch a recording at home, or go to a performance? To me "J'allais regarder" means that you were planning to watch it at home ("I was going to watch...") but then changed your mind and watched the cartoon instead. If that's what you mean, I think the phrase is correct, although "je devais regarder" could remove any ambiguity about whether "aller" is being used in the sense of movement or for the futur proche. But your rewriting as "je suis allé" changes the meaning completely: now you're saying you went out to watch a performance (and presumably watched the cartoon when you came home after the performance).

"qui est basé" doesn't sound right; I'd say "ce qui est basé" or "le dessin animé français Wakfu basé sur...". "C'était parfait" sounds better to me than "il était parfait", but I'm not sure exactly why and I might well be wrong.

For a plot of a story, "intrigue" is a better general term, as "complot" is more like a conspiracy.

It was the former. I was going to watch a DVD of Pélleas et Méllisande, but then I didn't. I would never leave a live performance in a million years! Well, unless it was really terrible.

Maybe « j'ai prévu regarder... » would have been better to eliminate the ambiguity.

I found this great video about the difference between the imparfait and passé composé:

I definitely need to get a better feel for when to use which tense!

I did a bit of research and it looks like « ce qui » is only used when there is no antecedent. In this case, the antecedent is Wakfu, so I think I was correct to just use « qui » . « Ce qui » would be the equivalent of the English "that which", so for example: « Ce qui est basé sur un jeu vidéo est bête. »
https://www.lawlessfrench.com/grammar/i ... ue-ce-qui/
https://french.stackexchange.com/questi ... and-ce-qui

Thanks for the clarification on « intrigue » vs. « complot ». I couldn't really figure out which was correct to use.

[garyb]

You're probably right about qui/ce qui. I've never really studied that and my French is quite rusty anyway, so my instincts for what sounds right aren't to be trusted. "J'ai prévu regarder" (or "j'avais prévu regarder", probably more appropriate here) sounds okay to me but I'd wait for a native or more advanced speaker to say what the most correct and natural way to phrase it is.

I've never found passé composé versus imparfait to be a big difficulty; if you use passé composé for discrete actions and imparfait for ongoing ones you'll be right most of the time, and with more listening and reading it becomes more natural. Part of the confusion is maybe that they don't exactly match up with the English tenses: for example, "I went" has a different meaning in "I went there yesterday" from in "I went there often", but it doesn't take long to get used to the way French works which is perhaps more logical.

[tastyonions]

One idiomatic way is to use "penser" when you're planning to do or thinking of doing something. "Je pensais regarder un film" = I was planning to / had the intention to watch a movie. "Que pensez-vous faire après avoir terminé vos études ?" = What are you planning to do when you're done with school?

[Deinonysus]

Merci pour les conseils, garyb et tastyonions !

French
Je n’ai pas utilisé mes stylos-plumes depuis des années, mais dimanche, j’ai rencontré des proches, et la copine de mon cousin a montré son stylo-plume à mon oncle. Nous en avons parlé, et cela m’a inspiré de nettoyer les miens. J’ai un Lami Safari et un Namiki Falcon. J’ai aussi un Noodler’s Ahab, mais il fuit, donc je ne l’utilise plus. La dernière fois que j’ai utilisé mon Falcon, il a fui aussi, mais je crois que la cartouche n’a pas été assez serré.

J’ai cherché mon encre noire Noodler’s, mais je ne l’ai pas trouvé. Peut-être que je l’ai jetée dans la poubelle il y a quelques années. Heureusement, j’ai trouvé une cartouche d’encre dans l’emballage du Falcon. Il me faut acheter plus d’encre sur Amazon. Je veux l’encre Noodler’s « 54th Massachusetts », une encre bleue-noire qui a été nommé d’après le premier régiment des afro-américains dans l’Union dans la guerre civil. Mais, je ne l'ai acheté aujourd'hui, parce qu'elle pourrait arriver jeudi, quand il y aura une tempête.

Écrire avec les stylos-plumes c’est très marrant. J’ai pratiqué écrire en anglais, français, et allemand, et même un peu en islandais et hébreu.

German
Leider ist mein Deutsch sehr rostig geworden. Das ist sehr traurig, weil ich Deutsch viel studiert habe! Ich bin noch nicht fließend, aber ich kann Zeitungartikeln ziemlich gut verstehen. Ich lerne kein Deutsch zurzeit, aber ich glaube, dass ich etwas Deutsch schreiben soll, damit mein Deutsch nicht schlechter wird.

[Deinonysus]

Mozart - « Dans un bois »
From a poem by Antoine Houdar de La Motte (1672 - 1731)

My favorite performance


The text
Dans un bois solitaire et sombre
Je me promenais l'autr' jour,
Un enfant y dormait à l'ombre,
C'était le redoutable Amour.

J'approche, sa beauté me flatte,
Mais je devais m'en défier ;
Il avait les traits d'une ingrate,
Que j'avais juré d'oublier.

Il avait la bouche vermeille,
Le teint aussi frais que le sien,
Un soupir m'échappe, il s'éveille ;
L'Amour se réveille de rien.

Aussitôt déployant ses aîles
Et saisissant son arc vengeur,
L'une de ses flêches, cruelles
En partant, il me blesse au cœur.

Va ! va, dit-il, aux pieds de Sylvie,
De nouveau languir et brûler !
Tu l'aimeras toute la vie,
Pour avoir osé m'éveiller.

My best fairly literal translation
In a dark and lonely wood,
I was taking a walk the other day.
A child slept there in the shade;
He was the formidable Love*.

I approach; his beauty caresses me,
But I had to be suspicious of it.
He had the traits of an ingrate
That I had sworn to forget.

He had a vermillion mouth,
The tint as cool as hers.
A sigh escapes me; he wakes;
Love awakens from nothing.

Immediately unfolding his wings
And seizing his vengeful bow,
One of his cruel arrows
In parting, wounds me in the heart.

Go! Go, says he, at the feet of Sylvie,
Once again to languish and burn!
You will love her all your life
For having dared to wake me.

*Other translations into English and German translated "l'Amour" here as Cupid, or Cupido (the German variant, closer to the Latin). One German translation was Amor, another Latin name for Cupid and an alternate German name. According to French Wikipedia, the French name for the god is Cupidon. But the author deliberately used "l'Amour", so I decided to translate it as "Love". Otherwise, the double meaning at the end of the third stanza doesn't really work.

Words I had to look up

• redoutable : formidable, imposing
• Flatter : "to flatter" in modern French, but in Middle French and earlier it also had the meaning "to carress with the flat of the hand". This text is early modern French and it's the only meaning that makes sense.
• s'en défier : To be suspicious of something
• jurer : to swear
• un teint : a tint
• aussitôt : immediately
• déployer : to unfold, to deploy (troops)
• une aîle : a wing
• vengeur : vengeful
• oser : to dare

Assessment
It's been much too long since I've done one of these translations! It really does help me understand the meaning. I have sung this before but I missed or misunderstood a few key words that completely changed the meaning. It's also very good for building my vocabulary.

Other Language Learning Updates
I started playing through one of my favorite games, Knights of the Old Republic, in French! I bought it when it came out for PC but I had to buy it on Steam to get the other languages (it's available in FIGS).

I also saw that Rurouni Kenshin is available with French dubbing on Netflix, so I started watching that. I know the story well enough that I don't think I need subtitles; I want to make sure that I'm working on my listening and not my reading, because my reading is already fine.

I might have said this already, but I'm really enjoying Duolingo stories. They remind me a lot of Assimil. They're a really great intermediat-advanced extension to Duolingo.

My current plan is to start working on Hebrew for about six months, starting in the summer. I want to pick up a copy of Hébreu sans peine and keep working on French. Then after that, I'll spend about a year on German.

I've started learning to touch type in Hebrew. This is about the extent of my Hebrew now:

.שלם! אני דײנוניסוס. אני אהב גלידה וספרים. יש לי אבא, ימא, אח, ואשה. אין לי קלב; אין לי חתל

Hello! I am Deinonysus. I like ice cream and books. I have a father, a mother, a brother, and a wife. I don't have a dog; I don't have a cat.

[Deinonysus]

Les Recettes Vintage
I found a really great YouTube channel, « ina Les Recettes Vintage » (Vintage Recipes). The ina is the French national archive ( « Institute national de l'audiovisuel » ), and this channel has clips from old school cooking shows. Here is a video that I started watching last night:



This clip features Paul Bocuse, a legendary chef de cuisine who died in January. His death dominated the French news cycle for days; it was like the US would treat the death of a beloved movie or rock star. It really does show how important cooking is to French culture.

I'm finding it very relaxing to watch these videos at night when I'm winding down. Here is the list of videos in descending order of popularity:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7gnE1 ... &flow=grid

Duolingo עורית
I've also started doing a bit of Hebrew Duolingo. I'm used to my reading comprehension being better than my listening comprehension, so doing the Hebrew Duolingo is kind of surreal. I can understand the audio immediately before I've even started deciphering the first written word.

One unusual aspect of Duolingo Hebrew is that there is only audio for complete sentences. Since it uses no vowels, it is impossible to know how to pronounce a word out of context, so there is no audio for isolated words. This is unfortunate because I need to look up the vowels for the default dictionary form on my own. But in practice, I'm at the beginner level, and since I'm a false beginner, I've only had to look up a couple of words, so it isn't too bad.

[Deinonysus]

It's getting down to crunch time! My visit to France is in a few weeks. I'm on track to finish Pimsleur French V and Assimil French With Ease this week. Listening comprehension is definitely the skill I want to work on most. I ended up getting the audiobook of Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers so I'll be listening to that in the car as soon as I finish Pimsleur.

I also want to finish reading Le petit prince and Voyage au centre de la terre before I leave. I haven't been spending much time reading recently, so I'll need to ramp that up. I have been keeping up with watching France24 most days, and I'll try to spend more time on KOTOR and Kenshin in French.

[Deinonysus]

Trip to France
It's been a long time since I've posted. My trip was last week now and I'm back! I can't decide whether to write details about it or keep it private, but it was incredible! We did basically everything in French. My wife did most of the talking since she's fluent, but I was able to participate in the conversations and chime in. We did all of our tours in French, and as usual I ordered all of my food in French, and I even found and bought a new backpack on my own without using any English when the one I brought broke!

I skipped the last couple of lessons in Pimsleur French V in favor of getting in more listening time with my Harry Potter audiobook. I got around a third of the way through the book and I think the extra listening comprehension practice really paid off in France. I've gotten to the point where I can understand someone's native French about as well as I can understand their heavily accented English, as long as they don't talk extremely fast or mumble too much.

I picked up some nice swag at various book stores. I got:

• A nice hardcover copy of Jules Verne's 6 most famous stories
• A copy of Beaudelaire's Les fleurs du mal in two volumes (with one illustrated by Matisse)
• A cheap but nice softcover copy of Charles Perrault's fairy tales. It's meant for French students studying for their bac tests, so it has lots of great footnotes and essays. I read Le petit chaperon rouge on the plane and in this version, nobody gets rescued and it just ends with Little Red Riding Hood getting eaten. I think the Grimms added the rescue later. Neil Gaiman talks about this in one of his early Sandman comics if memory serves.
• Not French, but I found a great music store where I got a great copy of 100 Schubert songs for high voice, including all three of his song cycles!

I can add all this to my fairly stagnant French reading list!

Danish
Since I've gotten back, I've taking a bit of a break from French (mostly just reading/watching the news every day) and working on Danish. I first became insterested in Danish around the time of my trip to Iceland last year. I saw lots of signs posted in Danish since Iceland used to be a part of Denmark and they still learn Danish in school, and Danish played a big part in the plot of a great Icelandic dark comedy miniseries called Ligeglad (which I believe means "indifferent" in Danish), which I watched on the plane ride back. Fans of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia should check it out!

As I looked at DanishClass101, Duolingo, and Pimsleur, I began to notice that Danish did a lot of weird things with vowels that I thought only English did. Examples include <a> sounding like /æ/ or /e/, <e> sounding like /i/, and even <i> sounding like /aj/ when followed by the right letter (except it's <g> instead of the <e> in English). Also, the syntax is shockingly close to English, and I'm finding that at least in the top third or so of the Duolingo tree, most sentences can translate word for word into proper English. And I don't think the mumbling that Danish learners complain about is much worse than what we do in English (you say potato, I say kartoffel). I've become rapidly convinced that even though other languages may be closer relatives, there's no language in the world more like English than Danish.

I realized that in the time it would take me to learn Icelandic, I could probably learn Danish twice (at least). I made extremely quick progress with the large number of cognates with English, German, and Icelandic and the familiar grammar. As I revisit Danish, I seem to have retained a lot from the brief time I spent on it last year. I'm trying to wrap my head around the new Duolingo Crown Level system, and after reading the FAQ (in French because the English FAQ is down), I'm actually really liking it. My current strategy is that I go down the tree adding in waves, only going up by one level at a time. Then when I start getting shaky, I go back and work on the next level. For example, I've been working on leveling my 1s up to 2, but I'm getting shaky so now I'm going back and leveling my 2s to 3. Then when I reach the end of the 2s, I'll start leveling the remaining level 1s up to 2, and so on.

I think Danish is great for me right now because it's easy enough that I can still keep an eye on French (unlike Xhosa which would demand my undivided attention for months to solidify the basics), and if I finish Pimsleur and the Duolingo tree, I'll have plenty of new Germanic vocabulary that will help me down the road with German and Icelandic, without the crazy grammar to worry about. I'll keep at it for now and see how it goes. My current goal is just to get up to an intermediate level and see if I can stumble through the book of Hans Christian Andersen's tales and stories that I impulse bought last year. As a bonus, I've got plenty of Danish songs, as well as opera arias translated into Danish, on my Lauritz Melchior CD box set (he's one of my favorite opera singers).

[Deinonysus]

Danish
If I understand the Danish phenomenon of stød correctly, there are minimal pairs where the only difference between two words is a glottal stop, like "hun" (no stød, means "her") and "hund" (stød, means "dog"). But we do the same thing in American English, where I think we use stød or something very similar instead of pronouncing our final Ts. In American English, the word "hunt" is pronounced just like "hun" (as in Atilla, or short for "honey") but the word is ended abruptly with a glottal stop. Another example in American English is the difference between "men" and "meant."

It looks like the glottal stop can also occur in the middle of a word. One example that the Wiki gives is that "læser" can either be a reader (no glottal stop) or the present tense of "to read" (glottal stop in the middle of the word). But we do this in American English too. The only difference between "kin" and "kitten" is a glottal stop in the middle of "kitten".

So even though stød is cited as a common difficulty in learning Danish, I don't see myself having much of a problem with it if it really is that similar to what we do in American English.

Unrelated to anything I just wrote, here's a bonus video. It's a movie scene where Lauritz Melchior sings "Jeg elsker dig" by Edvard Grieg, with lyrics by Hans Christian Andersen. The title means "I love you", but it's translated as "I love but thee" to fit the meter when Melchior sings an English translation as a second verse.



French
Not much to report here, but I have been trying to keep up watching the news every day. I've gotten back into Assimil and I'm a couple of lessons away from finishing "New French With Ease" and moving on to "Using French".

I'm also more than half-way through Le petit prince. Man, for a short children's book, it is heavy. It alternates between cute, funny, soul crushing, and profound. I'm kicking myself for not reading it earlier. When I'm done with that I think I'll get back into Tintin.

Duolingo
I'm still not sure if my wave strategy is correct (keeping skill levels even within a wave as I'm going down the tree), or if I should be doing multiple levels on a skill that I'm having trouble with. I may try switching my strategy.

It is a bit easier to track my progress with crown levels. There are 70 skills × 5 crown levels per skill = a max crown level of 350 for Danish. Since my crown level is 46, I'm theoretically 13% done with the tree. However, the time to complete a level increases almost exponentially from level 1 to 5, so that really isn't accurate and it may be closer to 5%.