Tag: keep intermediate french weird

Language is different in real life than it is in literature, so part of my intermediate French reading practice is following blogs and magazines. A surprisingly deep source of weirdness that I have become very fond of is Vogue France.

My first thought about high fashion is usually that it is toxic– misogynist and body-fascist– but to its credit, it is also very strange. A way to get most of the weirdness and a minimum of the poison is to follow the vogue.fr RSS feed. It contains very few and very tiny photos, and a seemingly random selection of their incredible headlines.

What is amazing about Vogue France headlines? They are clearly written in French, but they contain hardly any French words. This is mind-melting and I feel certain that learning how to make French phrases out of English slang is improving my grasp of French grammar.

A recent example:

Tendance dad shoes : 13 sneakers normcore ultra mode

You get to learn French words for “trend” and “fashion”, but after that it is only the word order that distinguishes this from the English equivalent, “Dad shoes trend: 13 ultra fashionable normcore sneakers”.

If plays are relatively easy reading projects, screenplays are even easier. TV and film are more familiar than theatre for most of us, it is easier to find movie versions of screenplays, and those movies are more likely to have subtitles. Given these advantages, I thought I’d try reading a more difficult genre of screenplay: experimental film.

Hiroshima mon amour is a film by Left Bank filmmaker Alain Resnais, with a screenplay by experimental novelist Marguerite Duras. It portrays an intimate conversation between two lovers about memory, time, and war. The film is known for using flashbacks in a jarring way, as if past memories are intruding suddenly in the present. Reading the script, with the writer’s notes and directions included, makes the different time periods quite clear.

It’s an interesting type of reading practice. The vocabulary and language is simple and the script is short, but the statements and ideas are abstract and strange, with complicated emotions. I enjoyed it, with my limited french language skills and my better-developed thinking and feeling skills.

There is a beautiful Criterion edition of the film, if you want to see the finished work (and practice listening).

Here’s a tip I got from my bookworm partner: reading a play is an easy win. Plays are much shorter in terms of word count than novels, yet for some reason reading a play feels like a big accomplishment.

This is especially true of La Cantatrice Chauve by Eugène Ionesco, which is both one of the most performed plays in France and entirely composed of parodies of the texts from Assimil brand language lessons. It’s as if it was invented to help beginner french readers feel like they are making progress.

This play is also straight-up hilarious, to the point that I was obnoxious to be around while reading it. Comedy is famously hard to translate, so reading the jokes in their original form felt like a great use for a second language.

La Cantatrice Chauve is a major work of theatre of the absurd, so odds are good your library will have or be able to get a copy for you. There are multiple productions of the play on YouTube that could make for good for listening practice, although I haven’t found a particularly excellent video yet.

Shopping for french books led me to do something I’ve never done before: browse books by category on Amazon. This is how I learned that littérature francaise (from France) and littérature francophone (from the french-speaking former colonies) are sometimes treated as distinct literary categories. That is a stereotypically French thing to do, right? On the one hand, having enough pretension to consider French Literature as a world cultural treasure that needs to be distinguished from “literature in french”, and on the other hand having no shame about colonial racism. In any case, I found the categories helpful since one of my goals was to read literature in french from authors outside of France, but I didn’t know the special name for it.

Being only an intermediate reader, I started with Une Si Longue Lettre by Mariama Bâ. The english translation gets assigned in grade eight classes. I read it after getting through book 5 of Harry Potter (L’Ordre du Phénix), and I think I could have handled it after book 4.

Some things that make this an accessible read: it is a short book (165 pages, counting generously); each chapter is only a few pages and has a distinct topic, so you don’t have to follow long passages; and the entire book is a letter from a woman to her friend, so it uses mostly everyday language. Since the book is popular in classrooms there are lots of resources available online, including a DIY audiobook on youtube if you want to work on your listening skills.

I loved it. The narrator is a new widow living in Dakar, Senegal, writing to her friend to process her feelings and memories while she is housebound for the mourning period. She reflects on the post-independence generation in Senegal, the education and political rights of women, problems in her marriage and those of her friends, her relationships with her kids, how class and ethnicity work and how they are changing, and all sorts of interesting things. All of the social commentary comes up naturally during dishy gossip– the best possible format for a book?