March Madness

March Madness usually refers to the end of season basketball games. My March Madness is studying French from a free, online, beginning French class that can be found on iTunes The FrenchPodClass (http://www.frenchpodclass.com/ ) .

It’s a delightful and fun way to learn French and allows one to choose the degree of seriousness that suits best. I download the weekly lessons which are short, varied and not dependent on previous lessons. My approach is quite haphazard. I listen to the audio lesson while I skim thru the pdf pages. I enjoy the music selections, especially the songs by Edith Piaf. I love the way she rolls the French ‘r’.

This week we had three sentences to translate. I submitted my translations, (guesses), of the following three sentences. Sebastian, the instructor, will show us the correct translation next week. Perhaps some of my readers already know what the sentences say.

Taille tôt, taille tard, toujours en mars.
Sème tes poi à la saint Patrice, tu en auras tout ton caprice.
Quand mars se déguise en été, avril prend ses habits fourres.

(update : The game is now over and the results can be found at : http://www.frenchpodclass.com/index.php?post_id=68661&comments=on )

I’ve also discovered ‘widgets’’. There is a small widget engine that’s free which is required for the widgets to work. The FrenchPodClass has a widget of quotes in both French and English which I downloaded to my computer desktop. The widget has a timer that you can adjust that controls the display frequency of the quotations and sayings. It’ll show the quotation for a while then fade away and reappear later with a new quotation. If you get impatient you can lick on the triangle icon and get another quotation right away. There are proverbs based on the calendar year in French and there are idioms with English-French translations. You can also select different color backgrounds like white and green and even a transparent background so your desktop theme shows through! You can learn all about widgets from Yahoo since they have a great number for people to enjoy. They explain what they are and how to use them and they will help you create one if you are in the mood to do so. You can even share your widget with others if you choose.

(To download the Yahoo! Widget Engine go here: http://widgets.yahoo.com/ and The FrenchPodClass_Quotations Widget can be found here: http://www.widgetgallery.com/view.php?widget=38958 )

I really don’t have an ear for languages. I was painfully aware of this in high school when I took Latin as a freshman. The only thing enjoyable in that class was a toga party. My attempt at learning other languages has yielded meager success at best. I have rarely gotten past ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’, along with an occasional phrase about cost, direction, food or weather.

Many years ago I listened to some German language records but never got past the question, “Where is the train station?” The mother of a friend once volunteered to teach me French but the only thing I learned was how to pronounce the word, ‘elephant’. When I studied Russian in college I learned how to say, ‘thank you’ and the first two words of the song, ‘Volga Boatmen’, (which is not an acceptable song since the communist revolution). The only thing in Spanish I know is, ‘My casa is your casa’.

All verbs in another language are irregular as far as I’m concerned. Word endings denoting masculine and feminine gender is beyond me. Pronunciation and writing French is proving difficult so I’m not spending a lot of time on that part of the course. The transcripts of the lessons have both French and English translations on the same page so I can fool myself into believing I’m truly learning the language!

À bientôt !