Unexplainable French Grammar Rule: Part II

Hana's not been doing very well in French lately. Up to now, she has been picking things up with remarkable ease, but nowadays I see that not all is intuitive, even to "native" speakers like my daughter.

Her trouble nowadays has to do with imperative sentences - brush your teeth, roll up your sleeves, don't pick out the onions, put away your Nintendo right this minute, turn off the TV before I go ballistic. Actually I cannot blame her for having trouble with this, since although I utter the above imperative sentences multiple times in a given day, I never do so in French.

So I delegated and asked PeeWee to help her study this. He looked at her workbook, then he looked at her study guide book, then he consulted the conjugation bible, the Bescherelle. He was at this for a good 15 minutes without saying a word to Hana. Finally I asked him, what you don't understand either? He looked up all forlorn, and says, it doesn't make any sense!

To hear him utter these words in regards to the French language felt something like a victory to me.

So here is Unexplainable Rule #1 in Imperatives.

When you want to say "Slow down" - for example - to your kid riding a bicycle, you will say "Ralentis" - a straight conjugation of "ralentir" in the familiar "tu" person.

However, if you want to say "Turn right", because the verb "Tourner" ends in "-er", you don't just conjugate and say "Tournes a droite". You drop that "s" and say "tourne a droite".

WTF?

Wait, did I say, for verbs ending in "er"? Well, actually that is also the case for certain verbs (not all, God forbid) ending in "-ir", such as ouvrir, offrir, cueillir and souffrir.

Here is Unexplainable Rule example #2 of what can go wrong, taken from Hana's workbook:

"Le verbe aller ne prend pas de "s" a la 2eme personne du singulier, sauf vas-y"

So "go do your homework" would be "va faire les devoirs", but "go there" is "vas-y"

Why? No explanation. No apologies. All very characteristic of this language.

Note: the title of this post (and an earlier rant) was originally "Stupid French Grammar Rule" - I decided to be a bit less judgmental and changed "Stupid" to "Unexplainable" in the spirit of being more open-minded (in this case, however, being open-minded is accompanied by being open-mouthed at the stupidity of it all)

I say "Ouch", they say "Aie!"

One of my favorite English words is onomatopoeia. I love how it begins with a happy "o" and ends in what to me is sunny Brazilian-sounding "oeia"

Here are some English ones and their French equivalents that I've been hearing:


Yumm --> Miam

Yuck --> Beurk

Ruff ruff (as in dog) --> Ouah Ouah

Oink oink --> Groin groin

Quack quack --> Coin coin

Hey (as in, watch out, watch it, wait a minute) --> He ho (without pronouncing the "h"s, so it becomes eh, oh)

Achoo (as in sneeze) -- > Atchoum

Burp -- > Rot

Bang bang (as in gun) --> Plop plop

Wee woo wee woo (as in siren) --> pin pan pin pan


My all-time onomatopoeia however is in Korean. It is bogul-bogul - it denotes the sound made by a boiling liquid. As far as I know there is no equivalent in either English or French. And that is a shame!