It's been a long, long time since I've posted on here. In the years since my last 'update', I've holidayed (not a real verb) in a few different places and had a couple of opportunities to speak some non-English! In this respect, the best experience I've had (by far) was in Vienna last August, where I managed to get lots of the locals to understand me. Unfortunately, I struggled with understanding the ensuing conversations and (since we were only there for five days) by the time I started to get the hang of it, it was time to go home.
This year I'm going back to Spain and, for once, making the effort to learn some Spanish! I'm quite excited about this, since fluent Spanish is one of my favourite languages to listen to. I'll be starting some (very basic) Spanish posts later in the year. Before all that, however, je vais a Paris en avril!
I don't think (my memory is terrible) I've ever been to France since I stopped 'officially' studying the language in 2006, so it will be interesting to see how I fare in real-life, fast-paced conversational settings. In preparation for the trip, I've purchased Collins' Easy Learning French Grammar, and shall be doing a couple of blog-related activities:
1) Starting at some point soon, I'll be brushing up on my verbs and tenses. For a while now, it has been my (unproven) belief that getting to grips with grammar is the most important (and most difficult) part of learning a new language. In these activities, the focus will be on practising each tense. I will practice each tense until I feel I've covered them sufficiently enough to remember! This will give me the opportunity to use a variety of different verbs; there will be a secondary focus on expanding vocabulary.
2) I have begun (by which I mean I've done this once) watching French cinema films with English subtitles. Last night I watched The Intouchables (aka Untouchable). I thoroughly enjoyed the film, and after it finished I immediately rushed to Wikipedia to find out more about it (a newly emerging habit of mine). There, under the 'Critical Reception' subheading, I was surprised to find the English(/American) media gave it some pretty bad reviews, many implying the plot is fundamentally racist. This whole debacle has inspired me to write my own thoughts on the film... en français! So the idea for my next blog post is something of a film review. This should help me learn different ways of expressing my feelings in French*, as well as give me opportunity to use lots of different tenses, etc.
*Something I really should practice doing in English...
So there you have it; with renewed vigour I hereby declare this blog resurrected!
...
I'll give it two weeks...
Au revoir!
P.S. The title of this post 'La coqueluche du moment' was somewhat lost in translation. I wanted to call it 'Flavour of the Month' (referring to French being my current language of interest), but also wanted the title to be French. According to my Concise Oxford Hachette French Dictionary, the French have two idioms similar to this. 'être en vogue' meaning (no prizes for guessing) 'to be en vogue' (or if you want to be obstinately English about it 'to be in fashion'). The second idiom 'être la coqueluche du moment' translates as 'the idol of the moment' (in the Pop Idol sense of the word 'idol'), and can only really be applied to people. Since 'En vogue' would have been a bit too much of an ambiguous title, I opted for the latter. In hindsight, I could have called it something like 'la langue en vogue' or 'la langue du moment', but now that I've written all this out, I don't really want to change the title and render this paragraph obselete, so I'm going to leave it as is.
P.P.S. Incidentally, the French word 'coqueluche' can also mean 'whooping cough'. I thought this both funny and interesting. One day I'm going to study etymology. Probably.
