FrançaisI went to a Bastille day party on Sunday. I was one of only two non-fluent French speakers there. I tried to speak a bit of French, but I didn't get too far. First, a friend of mine said « toutes les félicitacions » -- I hadn't seen him since my kid was born -- but he said it quickly and softly, and I had to ask him to repeat himself a couple of times before I got it.
Then after I introduced myself in English to a French couple, I said, « Je parle un peu de français. Ma femme est prof de français et elle parle très très mieux que moi. »
I messed up that last part pretty badly. I said "she speaks very very better than me". I should have said « elle parle
beaucoup mieux que moi ».
But, I'm not too discouraged. I have no shame of making mistakes, and I won't make that mistake again!
There is a very large asymmetry between my reading ability (very good, and I have no problem reading or learning from french books), my listening ability (varies greatly depending on the speed, volume, and situation) and my speaking ability (I do great if I have time to prepare a sentence or two, but I make mistakes off the cuff, especially if I'm trying to listen to someone and think of a response at the same time). All that will come in practice I'm sure.
ItalianoItalian conjugation is so much easier than French! The three main conjugations only differ by a couple of letters, and you pronounce all of the differences so you don't forget when you need to put in a silent s, t, or e. Listening comprehension is easier, although it does present its own difficulty, since whole phrases are mashed together and pronounced as one word. But I'm sure once you have the general patterns down you get used to it. Italian also has the benefit of a very unsubtle stress accent. Since French has no stress accent it can be much harder tell where the word boundaries are.
EnglishIt's hard for me to find time to sit down with a physical book. I decided to supplement my list of physical books with some ebooks that I'm able to borrow from the library. I've started on
A Picture of Dorian Gray, which is great so far. I've read
The Importance of Being Ernest before and this has a very similar style. Although it's a novel instead of a play, most of the text is dialog. And since it's Oscar Wilde, most of the dialog is a dense wall of pithy one-liners. The language is Victorian but at the same time it feels modern. It wouldn't feel out of place as the script of a hip HBO period miniseries about gay English noblemen roasting each other.
I'm trying to stick to ebooks that I don't have physical copies of, so that I fill in the gaps. Some that I'd like to get to are:
- Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
- Joseph Heller - Catch-22
- Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
- Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
- Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
- John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
- John Steinbeck - East of Eden
- Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
- Nathaniel Hawthorne - The House of Seven Gables
- Henry Fielding - Tom Jones
- George Elliot - Middlemarch
- Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
I'm going through
Dorian Gray reasonably quickly because I can access it anywhere. The physical books are going at a glacial pace.
Before I get much further with the physical books, I thing I want to go over some "prerequisites" that will help me understand references in other works. Greek mythology and the Bible (Hebrew and Greek with a bit of Aramaic) are fundamental to Western Literature, and I would love to read them in the original one day, but learning those languages are each multi-year projects, but I want to get my feet wet now with the language skills I have now.
So I'd like to read Bullfinch's
Age of Fable - summaries of Greek and Germanic myths through the lens of poetry by the likes of Byron and Shelley. I read a bit of it, but the poetry wasn't sticking; I think I'd do better with a better understanding form and meter, so I want to read through Stephen Fry's
The Ode Less Traveled. I had started reading that one too but I got stuck because Fry demands that you swear to do composition exercises before proceeding past the introduction, and I couldn't get into the habit of doing that. So I think my best bet is to defy him and just read through the book without doing the exercises. Sorry Stephen!
After that, there's the Bible. I don't think I can get through it without
some sort of a language challenge, so I'd like to go through the King James Bible since I'm fond of Early Modern English. Before that, I have the book
Early Modern English by Charles Barber. After that I can access everything on my phone; after the King James Bible, it's on to the complete works of Shakespeare and maybe
Le Morte d'Arthur (borderline between Middle and Early Modern English) and
Paradise Lost (borderline between Early Modern and Contemporary English).
So in summary:
- Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Traveled
- Thomas Bullfinch - The Age of Fable
- Charles Barber - Early Modern English
- Various - The King James Bible
- William Shakespeare - Complete Works
- Thomas Mallory - Le Morte D'Arthur
- John Milton - Paradise Lost
That's quite the list! In reality I've been making slow progress with my reading and I have a hard time sticking with things long-term, so we'll see how much I can get to.
I'm also trying to see some classic films. There are a lot that I've never seen. Films are just as important as novels. I finally watched
Rocky last night. I liked it, although I don't see why it needed any sequels. I think I'll try to watch
Taxi Driver and
The Graduate after that. Movies are so much easier to get to than books since you can get through them in one sitting. These are the three super-mega-must-see classics that I've never seen and can stream easily. There are other good ones too, but for other super-mega-must-see classics I may need to get physical DVDs from the library unless I'm willing to buy digital copies.