When I stepped off the plane and arrived in Paris, armed only with my high school French, I was a very long way from being able to communicate easily in French. My being a linguist didn't help much, just like being a physicist doesn't necessarily make you a good ball player. Actually, being a linguist made things a bit worse, because everyone assumes linguists are great at languages.
Anyway, the following French words/phrases are ones I never learned in high school, that would have been helpful to know. Do you know what they mean? (Francophones, yes, I know you know what they mean, please be quiet and let the anglophones think...then afterwards, let me know any précisions eventuelles... )
1. bouquin
2. aisé
3. moche
4. arriver à (not the 'arrive at' meaning)
5. avoir à
Pencils down!
1. bouquin, 'book'
This one really annoys me. It's a cognate with the English word for goodness' sake (that is, the words sound alike and have the same origin). In high school we learned livre for 'book'. But no one ever says livre. They always say bouquin. The people who line the banks of the Seine selling books are bouquinistes. Yet somehow we never learned bouquin in class.
2. aisé, 'easy, well-off'
Another cognate. This one is less-frequently used, I think, than facile. Maybe some of my francophone readers can comment on the difference between aisé and facile. I guess the teachers didn't want us to know about aisé for fear we wouldn't use facile. But sheesh, to come across a cognate like that after all this time!
3. moche, 'ugly'
Ok, my sister-in-law says she learned this one in class. But we didn't. Instead we learned laid, which no one ever says.
4. arriver à 'manage to'
Once I was able to decode the sound signal and figure out what people were saying, I realized they were saying j'arrive (pas) à a lot. Why were they always talking about (not) arriving at something? Turns out (thanks, JD!) that the physical meaning of arriving at a place has been broadened to include managing to do something (if you squint with your mind's eye you can see the connection). And arriver à is used a lot more than manage to is used in English. My ad hoc rule is that if you can say arriver à instead of pouvoir 'be able to', do so. Of course there are some cases when you have to use pouvoir, for example, when it's a matter of permission rather than actual ability.
5. avoir à 'have to'
'Have to' as in "I have to do something this afternoon'. This is another cognate that I can't believe we learned in school. I'm quite sure we didn't learn it. Instead we learned il faut que, 'it is necessary (that)'... which, to be fair, is used all the time. I'm sure the case of avoir à is like aisé, where they didn't want to teach us the one that was like English for fear that we'd use it all the time. But as a result, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I recently learned that you could use avoir à for 'have to'. (I'd love to hear about differences in meaning between avoir à and il faut if any francophones are so inclined to comment.)
So there you go. Now you know more than I did when I stepped off the plane.
If you'd like to know more, check out part deux.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
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20 comments:
I would say "aisé" is more polite than "facile" and I would use "facile" more often than "aisé", for sure.
How come your teachers never told you about "moche"? I'm very surprised!
"Avoir à" and "il faut". God this one is way too hard to explain, I leave it to one of my fellow French compatriote:)
How about "J'en ai pour...." (more or less "I'm busy for (20 minutes, say)"). That's not taught.
I doubt that the reason for not teaching you some of those is the closeness to english. I am Dutch, and they never taught me bouquin, moche or aisé in school.
Emilie, I have no idea why they didn't tell us about moche! Except that maybe the textbooks were old?
Expat, I love J'en ai... and indeed I wasn't taught it. That's another great one.
A clear blue sky, that's interesting... so why don't these appear in books?
'Mater' is universal among young people for 'regarder'. Any idea how this was derived?
Well well well, i sort of feel like I need to show off a little bit here... And try to explain things....
Ok... let's start with the easies (I know this is not english but I feel this could work so....)
Bouquin is slang. Plain and simple. It not bad. You just wouldn't write it.
(Only i you have some kind of found love for a language would you have a sweet sweet friend give you some a fantastic slang dictionary so you would know what's what anyway :)
If I were a French teacher, I certainly wouldn't bother teaching slang while all the rest is already so difficult. Plus, have you ever considered that maybe your teachers didn't know about these words. How many of them actually went to France, even if they were French teachers? And how many long enough anyway? Just saying, not that I'm dissing anyone here.
Also, something you'll love.? We have a verb derived from "bouquin" bouquiner. (You could tell Heidi)
- Tu fais quoi ?
- Je bouquine.
Also "Je bouquine" is actually the name of a great magazine for kids. I don't know if it still exist though.
Aisé. This one is hard to use. Sorta old fashion. Etre à l'aise meand to feel/to be comfortable. Etre mal à l'aise, just the opposite of course.
I almost never use it. Parce que c'est assez mal aisé à utiliser dans une phrase without feeling you're still leaving in the 18th century.
Moche. Again, it's slang. Laid(e) we don't use that much, also we wouldn't write moche.
Arriver à... to be able to or to manage to do something.
Also SPOILER ALERT THE NEXT SENTENCE IS NSFW ;)
Arriver is also used some time in erotica literature as well as venir to declare you're aving an orgasm (or if you dating Alfred de Musset or Guillaume Apollinaire which is very unlikely). Venir means to come... see the relation.
Avoir à vs Il faut que...
J'ai à faire. I have things to do (high register) J'ai des choses à faire (ibid but regular register).
J'ai à + infinitive verb
J'ai (something) à + infinitive verb
Il faut que je fasse... (you luv subjonctives don't ya?)
I think you can fairly translate them the same way : I have things to do, but they sound different to me.
Something you're gonna love :
- Qu'est ce qu'il faut que tu fasses avant de partir ?
- J'ai encore à passer l'aspirateur et à faire la vaisselle.
OR
- Qu'est ce que tu as à faire avant de partir ?
- Il faut encore que je passe l'aspirateur et que je fasse la vaisselle.
Dontcha luv' it? You sort of can do anything with that.
And one more for the road :
- Il faut encore que je fasse tout ce que j'ai à faire ici avant de partir...
So by now you should be ROTFLYAO of thinking about suicide if you ever wanna learn french...
En espérant vous avoir renseigné et vous avoir fait sourire, cordialement,
JD
Check out my new blog and win a record :
http://g1d.hautetfort.com
PS : J'en ai pour 5 minutes is really useful.
Tu en auras pour 5 euros is also very useful.
And this one : C'est pas très intéressant meaning it's not a very good deal that you'll never ever ever learn at school.
And "chou" IS NOT cabbage in the phrase : mon petit chou... non mais....
"Non mais..." and "Bon mais...." are delightful in their own right. I really can't think of a true translation. They're both retorts to something the speaker finds just a tiny bit offensive.
"Je pense que je vais inviter la voisine dans mon lit samedi" "Bon mais..."
If you were not taught this in the US (especially if your French is just high school French) it's mostly because most French teachers in the US (especially in HS) only know basic textbook French...
One thing I was famous and 'popular' for when I used to teach there was that I taught "real French"... Which first really perplexed me, then amused me...
A few explanations on these words (even if a lot has already been said).
1. Bouquin is very informal French, basically slang, and definitely belongs to the oral world. One thing that's a problem for a lot of foreigners when they come to France is that they're unaware that written and spoken French are very different from each other (for many reasons, mostly historical and political... think: French Academy), unfortunately, most people learn written French only... Not always very useful to speak everyday French.
(Bouquin actually comes from Dutch... I don't know more about its origins)
2. Aisé is kinda old fashioned. It's almost never used anymore meaning "easy". It's still used to mean "well-off" but it's both sorta formal and almost a euphemism (you know how money talk can be taboo in France).
(as you mentioned "easy" comes from "aisé")
3. Moche is oral informal French too, as you mentioned, nobody says "laid".
(moche comes from amocher, which is slang for to damage or to disfigure)
4. Arriver à (not the 'arrive at' meaning). I'm really surprised you were never taught that one. It's very basic French.
5. Avoir à : the fact that you were not taught that one makes sense on the other hand. First because we use it only in specific contexts, with many verbs it just doesn't sound right. Also, I never taught it to my students on purpose. Because I wanted them to learn 'devoir' and later on the subjunctive, which they would never learn properly if they knew they could rely (poorly) on the exact equivalent of "have to"... If they encountered it later on, they'd figure it out by themselves...
-Expat: "mater" meaning "to stare" is actually an interesting word. It comes from Algerian French (not the Algerian population in France, but the French population in Algeria back when it was a French colony), and finds its origins in the Spanish "matar" which means to kill.
So originally, "mater" meant "to kill with your eyes" (in French with have "tuer du regard").
We also have the 'real' "mater" in French, which has the same Latin origins as "matar" and which also means to kill (but in a more abstract way, as in "mater une révolte": "to crush a revolt")
"Bon mais", is more or less "Well..."
Hard to translate "Non mais" except by a somewhat offended "But..."
You're much more advanced than I am in your French, but one thing I recently noticed while visiting a French-speaking place was that people would use "S'il Te Plaît" when handing me money or a menu. I expected them to say something similar to "here you go" - maybe voici - rather than saying "please."
dalla - What's the Latin origin of 'mater/matar'? Assuming it's not 'to mother someone', the best I could figure out was a relationship to 'matara' (Lt., a kind of spear). As in 'to spear/pop a revolt', or to borrow British slang, 'to give someone evils' (a strong stare).
Dallas: "S'il vous plaît" (I doubt they're using the "tu" form) is common in Belgium with the meaning you're mentioning. It might also be in areas close to Belgium.
Anonymous: can't remember the exact Latin word from which "mater/matar" come from, it's something like "matare" but it definitely means "to kill"...
It appears in English (from French) in Checkmate... (that's the only occurrence I can think of in English)
After JD's comments I am starting to understand (and remember): my french teacher, not high school, but an extra course I took before coming to Paris, told me that there is a big difference between written and spoken French. what was in our high school textbooks probably referred to written French. And I must say, that in The Netherlands, probably most of my teachers had been to France. It is not too far from home for us.
David - Thanks. It was, in fact, Belgium that I was hearing that.
what about party? i was taught in h.s. that 'une boum' is a party but no one over the age of 12 would ever say they were going to 'une boum'!
and they never taught me that to respond positively to a negative statement one says 'si' and not 'oui' - "mais si, j'aime bien ce film!"
Gloaming Designs, not only nobody over 12 would ever say "boum" but I'm not even sure kids use it anymore either, for me it's a word that existed only in the 80's... And in many American teachers minds apparently, I can't tell you how many students I had who were taught that...
So if you want to talk about a party,
you'll generally talk about a "fête", "soirée", "teuf" (this one might slowly be getting old fashioned) and the youth of today might have new slang words I'm not aware of...
You're french teacher must have really sucked. Did you take honors classes or regular french? I'm in 8th grade and I know all of that stuff all ready. Easy.
Yes, but you don't know the difference between "you're" and "your", nor the fact that languages and nationalities take a capital letter.
Time to work more on your English rather than show off because you know three words of French.
:-)
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