French is a ridiculous language!!! Why can't we all just speak German????
Last night one of the guys (gars) at church asked me where I went on my mission, and when I said Germany, he said "Ah, sprechen sie Deutsch?" I sighed out "ja!" in utter relief without thinking (I was trying to say "oui", but at least I didn't say "yes") and then said "Das ist eine Sprache die ich sprechen kann!" No one said anything to that, so I'm guessing no one else knew German. But the ease with which those words slipped from my lips was a soothing balm to my soul! The words, they just formed themselves and put themselves together in coherent ways!
I love German.
I am now going to complain about French.
Italian has done me a bad turn in making the "io" optional. Since French and Italian are closely related, I have started out with the feeling that I don't actually need to say the subjective pronoun at the beginning of the sentence. I never think "je" at the beginning of sentences, especially since it starts with such a completely different sound than "I" or "Ich" or "Ik" or "Io". And then, when I want to make a sentence negative, I immediately put the negating word first, like in Italian, but that doesn't work. Plus, there are TWO negating words in French! "Ne...pas"!!! Why? That goes against all my no-double-negative training!!
There are so many words in French that sound the same but have different endings, just to differentiate cases or plurals in the written language.
je parl
tu parl
elle parl
ils parl
that's what the verb "to talk" sounds like for the singular cases, but they are spelled
je parle
tu parles
elle parle
ils parlent
WHY???
I tried to spell the word "gars" in my head when I heard it last night (I learned when this girl was calling all the "guys" to dance their part), and put in an unnecessary U, T, E and another R. Who was I to know that it was such a simple word? There is probably another word that sounds just the same with with five more letters in its spelling, including an X.
Okay, I'm done.
French seems to make no sense at all, pronunciation-wise, until you study where and why it came from the Latin. I took a class on the linguistic history of French when I studied in Poitiers and it completely, totally changed my preconceived notions of French spelling!
ReplyDelete(Hi, by the way. Enjoying hearing about your aventures. :) - Amanda)
Hi Amanda!! Thanks for reading along :) Do you happen to know a text about the linguistic history of French that I could check out? It might help my angst. And maybe give me a more positive look at the whole French thing...
DeleteLet me ponder. All the ones I used in France were in French. There's got to be some good ones in English, though.
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