I’ve
been expending quite a bit of creative energy lately on French class. We have
substantial writing exercises due every week. For example, for four of those
assignments this term, we have to watch a movie or a news show, anything we
choose as long as it is in French then write something about it. Yesterday I
watched a rather touching short film on YouTube (okay, I had to watch it three
times, but at least it was short) then pounded out an essay in a couple of
hours. If I were to write in English for a couple of hours, I could easily
break the 1000-word mark. In French, I end up with about 350 words. Still, I
now have several verb tenses and a handful of conjunctions at my disposal so it
isn’t 350 words of “Sally sees Spot.”
For my first “écoute” I watched a
half-hour show about raspberries and strawberries. I can’t bring myself to
listen to half an hour of news from Syria in French; it’s bad enough to get it
daily in English. The fruit show was quite amusing. It is part of a
semi-regular series on TV5 Monde. The famous chef narrator highlights gastronomic specialties
from different regions of France. Besides interviewing a raspberry farmer and a
strawberry farmer located in this particular region, he interviewed the
director of a cooperative that packages up all the “fruits rouges” from the
area and ships them all over the place. The chef also spent far too
much time interviewing a woman who makes perfume, somewhat pointlessly I
thought since she admitted that it’s very hard to make perfumes using fruits
like strawberries as raw materials since they don’t have much oil in them. They
nattered on, and on and on, about how the scents of the “fruits rouges” could
“evoke memories of childhood” with their “clear, ringing notes.” I was howling
with laughter. The French can Frenchify anything, bless their hearts. I
expected one of them to drop the Proust bomb at any moment but they never did.
We
are also reading a book this term, Les jeux sont faits by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Yeah, that Jean-Paul Sartre. The title has an idiomatic translation. It means,
the die are cast. Sartre originally wrote it as a screenplay, and it was in
fact made into a movie in 1947. Each chapter is a short, self-contained scene.
The sentences are fairly short and contain lots of interesting action verbs
that describe what every character is doing at every point. “He shrugged his
shoulders, picked up the pen, and signed the register.” “He turned away from
her, headed across the room, opened the door, and exited the room.” It
definitely reads better in the French. I pulled out over 300 new vocabulary
words in the first 40 pages, most of them verbs. While the story is meant to illustrate some points of Sartre’s philosophy (death is absurd, one’s
fate is predetermined but one must always struggle to overcome that, etc.), we
don’t talk about that in class. We focus mainly on the grammar and the general story itself. I quickly
developed a system: I do the first reading with only a pencil to underline
things I can’t figure out from context, I do the second reading with a
dictionary, sometimes two dictionaries, often looking up dozens of words per
page and making extensive margin notes (yes, I write in books, I believe that
the concept of the book is sacred but any individual book is not particularly
so) then I set the book aside for at least a night (to take advantage of latent
learning) before I do the third reading where I try my best to read it at a
natural pace with understanding. I might even read sections out loud for the
third reading. That’s a tremendous amount of effort but it ensures that I not
only understand what’s going on in the book but I understand the grammar.
All
that thinking and listening and reading and writing and talking in another
language keeps my brain warmed up for working on my thesis. For example, in the
first half of October, I read 52 papers on poultry feeding trials in which they
fed the birds some form of omega-3 fatty acids. Not a typo: 52 papers. As a
result, I can clearly articulate what prior work has been done, what the
knowledge gaps are, and what my own feeding trials accomplish with respect to
the gaps. I meet with my thesis committee for the first time in a couple of
weeks and I have to make a brief presentation to them. I needed to get all that sorted out.
Poultry nutrition and Sartre make for odd bedfellows but the combination
seems to be working well.
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