Happy Easter, Everyone,
I do wish everyone a Happy Easter, but here I go with my frustrated comments.
Number One, before I even get into my frustration, let me say, I am trying my best to learn some important words in French. The one thing I have learned is that the French language uses far too many letters in each word. I wish I could tell someone (someone who would listen to me) that we need to be more conservative. May we, please, (S’il vous plait). Drop the “l”, the “s” and the “t”, and you have “See vu play”. Can we not just use the letters we need? For goodness sake!
For instance, the phrase in the subject, “joyeuses Paques ” means “Happy Easter” but it is pronounced, “joyous pac”. See what I mean? All those vowels absolutely wasted. Here is another: “un bon vin blanc”. That not only is confusing, because one would drop the last letter from each word, when speaking…but now…vin, I understand, but it is pronounced “Van” as in moving van, but drop the N. So the entire phrase is pronounced thus : “oo bo va blan”. Seriously?
Yes, that is not all….if a word ends in an “n” or an “m”, that letter is never pronounced. In fact, most of the ending letters in a word are not pronounced…that just doesn’t make sense to me. I have struggled for several years trying to learn Italian, but I want to say here, the Italian language is a piece of cake, compared to French. I do believe my Italian will improve by spending this month in Paris. I keep comparing words in French to the same word in Italian. Both languages are what are called Romance languages, as is Spanish. That doesn’t refer to romance, as we think of romance, but rather, these are languages that are derived from the Romans, with a Latin base. Therefore, many words in all three languages are very similar, some are exactly the same,
I am being a bit facetious here, but I am trying very hard to say the right thing in French when I need to converse with a waiter or a shopkeeper. I try to think how confused I can be, in the United States, trying to speak with an immigrant from another country. The French people thatI have encountered, have been very patient. If they laugh, they laugh with us, not at us. The Romantic languages are so beautiful to hear, until one hears the language being murdered by an American.
Therefore, I will continue to try to learn the important phrases, and also try not to cause a waiter to commit homicide.
Until then, the most important phrase I can remember, and say it often, is “Do you speak English?”
Au revoir, until next time,
Dolly
The post Dolly Travels – Musings From a Frustrated Language Student appeared first on Purple Roofs Gay Travel Blog.