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)
2 comments:
En réalité, il y a une explication à chacune de ces règles et exceptions. Mais pour les connaître, il faut étudier l'ancien Français (la langue du Moyen-Age). Je l'ai étudié à l'université et c'est passionnant car on y apprend comment les mots ont évolué au fil des siècles (pour finir par donné quantités de règles compliquées). Il faut que tu sache que la langue française s'est beaucoup simplifiée depuis 5 siècles, mais il reste beaucoup à faire !
Le problème est qu'en France, nous avons "L'académie Française", (une sorte d'organisation de gens de lettres qui font toutes ces règles) et elle est composée de personnes qui aiment cette complexité de notre langue, il y sont attachés parce qu'ils pensent que simplifier la langue c'est l'appauvrir.
Voici un exemple : au début de ce post (oups!) commentaire, tu trouve le verbe "connaître", pourquoi y-a-t-il un accent circonflexe sur le "i" ? ça ne sert à rien... sauf à se souvenir qu'au 16e siècle, ce verbe s'écrivait "connaistre", et que par la suite le "s" est parti et a été remplacer par l'accent sur le "i"... boring me diras-tu ? sans doute...
Aller bon courage à Hannaya !
Bises
Hmmm Il y a sans doute une raison pour toutes ces regles, mais ces-jours-ci personne peut les expliquer et de toute facon, c'est enseigne sans explication... et je sais pas si les "simplifications" simplifient vraiment - "hospital" (comme l'on a garde en anglais) n'est pas si complique que "hopital"... all I know is that it drives this particular family up the wall during homework time!!
Post a Comment