La coqueluche du moment!

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.

Long awaited update

Foolishly on returning to uni in September I neglected to bring my French and German dictionaries with me. To be fair the French one is huge, bigger than my English one in fact. I've resolved to post to this blog when I go home. That way I'll have more to talk about, although I'm by no means planning to allow this blog to dissolve into a tedious description of my life. Even if it is in a foreign language I imagine it'd still be boring.

So yeah, sorry I guess, but it's not like I write this for your benefit. You just get strung along for the ride, disappointed at every turn. Poor little you.

Mein Deutsch Tagebuch - 21/8/2010

Samstag 21^te August 2010, 02:04 morgens.

Hallo,

Mein Name ist Liam und ich habe beschlossen, um mein Deutsch zu verbessern, ein Tagebuch führen.

Also, weißt du da, heiße ich Liam. Ich wonhne in Sidcup. Es ist eine kleine Stadt in England, die in der Nähe von London ist. Ich wohne mit mein Bruder Aaron und meine Eltern. Ich bin einundzwanzig Jahre alt. Diese September, fänge ich ein Universitätsabschloss in ˶Sound & Music for Interactive Games˝ an.

Jetzt, gehe ich ins Bett, weil ich sehr müde bin.

Entschuldigung für der kurze Eintrag!

Wilhelm Donnellmann

Die Wörter des Tag: beschlossen - to decide, ein Tagebuch - a diary, führen - to keep, anfängen - to start, ein Universitätsabschloss - a degree, ein Eintrag - an entry (written)

This reads like my Year 7 homework but I felt it had to be done to awaken any dormant memories of how on earth to speak German. Here's the sentiment I based it upon:

----

Hello,

My name is Liam and in order to improve my German, I have decided to keep a diary.

So, as you know I am Liam. I live in Sidcup. It's a small town in England near London. I live with my brother Aaron and my parents. I'm 21 years old. This September I am starting a degree in 'Sound and Music for Interactive Games'. Now, I am going to bed because I'm very tired.

Sorry for the short entry!

Liam D

----

Future entries will be a lot longer than this, my head was aching from the trauma of trying to read a Brothers Grimm tale in German and I couldn't bring myself to figure out any more.

Introduction

Over the course of my lifetime, I would like to learn as many languages as possible.

'Why?' I hear you ask.

Partly because I would like travel a fair bit when I have the money and feel it rude to expect everyone to speak English, partly because I find linguistics rather interesting and partly because I just want to and I don't need to justify myself to you and you can go away if you don't like it. (Only kidding, please stay, I'll make you a hot drink and everything)

I recently read Stephen Fry's first novel 'The Liar' and loved the character of Donald Trefusis - a Professor of Philology at Cambridge. In the book Trefusis, during a long car journey to Salzburg, asks protagonist Adrian Healey "Are you going to sit in the car or are you going to come along with me and hear me practice my Luxembourgeois?".

An incredible idea then struck me; why don't I improve my largely failing but much missed language skills by keeping foreign-tongue diaries. How awesome would it be if I too could one day practice my Luxembourgish with foreign friends (albeit in somewhat less perilous circumstances than Professor Trefusis before me).

Ok, I know what you're thinking - I get carried away with things (true) and this probably won't last more than a few weeks (largely probable) but this is probably one of the more productive, skillset enhancing things I could be doing with my spare time so I'm happy to carry on.

So, enough rambling, my first post is in German and will be appearing shortly.

Enjoy! Or don't, do what you want.

PS. While I'll be doing my best with grammar, it will most probably be awful to begin with (and there's no guarantees it will improve soon) If anyone could direct me to grammar checking software/services (preferably free, I'm a post-grad student) it would be much appreciated. Also, if you can see yourself where i'm going wrong with grammar, any feedback would be welcome, encouraged, much loved, tremendous.