Friday, September 16, 2011

Je parle francais!

Tonight we watched "Flyboys" - a story about Americans during World War I who volunteered to fly planes for the French army. I wouldn't necessarily recommend watching it - very kitschy in many ways and tremendously predictable. That said, part of the love story is the American who meets a beautiful French woman in town, and they begin to like each other. However, they both know next to nothing about each other's language, so it's fun to watch them bumble through and finally get to a point where they can pretty much barely communicate. Needless to say, when you find out they don't find each other after the war, it's pretty much okay. They wouldn't be able to talk about much anyway!

Learning how to speak another language is always challenging and somewhat humiliating, and it's taken me a while to get the courage to bumble through a language which Jon can speak perfectly! However, once the film was over, my courage was bolstered as well as my vocabulary. For I learned the word "pourquoi" - "why"! Maybe it is because I saw them saying it in the film, however armed with the word "pourquoi" and its relative "quoi" (what?) I can keep a silly conversation moving along pretty well. It was a blast. Here is a small sampling:

J: Tu es marrante! [You are funny!]
S: Moi? pourquoi?! [Me? Why?] (please note, I have no idea what marrante is!)
J: Parce que tu me fais rire!  [ because you make me laugh! ]
S: Quoi? Fais rire? Pourquoi? [What? Laugh? Why?] (again, note, I now have no idea what fais rire is!)
J: Parce que tu marrante...... [Because you are funny....]
S: Moi? Quoi est marrante? [Me? What is "marrante"?]
J: Funny!
S: Je suis marrante? Et quoi est fais rire? [I am funny? And what is "fais rire"?]
J: Laugh! (at this point Jon is laughing either at me or with me, still not quite sure, but its absolutely fun!)

So - there's an inside look into our exciting Friday nights!
[on a side note, I just had Jon correct my spelling of this entire blog. That made him laugh too! apparently "fais rire" is two words - I thought it was just "ferrier"... oh figure. Always learning!]

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