Learn French with Hermes – A sailing we will go!

That’s ‘a sailing’, not ‘assailing!’ by the way!

The other day I had a little look at my blog stats, and noticed that my most popular posts are the ones involving Hermes scarves.  The ‘How not to learn French by buying Hermes scarves’ is an all time favourite and still scores hits despite having been penned quite some time ago.  And would you believe it, after looking at the Hermes posts my indulgent visitors move on to read my other musings as well!

So I decided to write a few more posts about my scarves, in the hope that they will (a) aid the absorption of a bit more French by the scarf loving public, and (b) hook a few more random visitors who will haunt the pages of my blog.

I am starting with a recent acquisition, which is extremely useful for learning French because it has French words written all over it.  Of course it could be counter-argued that the words the scarf depicts are pretty useless nowadays – all about sailing ships which are few and far between these days – but the sort of people who buy Hermes scarves to learn French are unlikely to be sensible enough to be distracted by this little detail.  Nevertheless I have endeavoured to increase the utility of this post by throwing in a few proverbs with a nautical origin, and also by quoting – in full! – the scarf description I found in the little booklet I was given when I bought this scarf.

Therefore I present to you Cheval de Mer!

The scarf depicts a three-masted frigate with 32 Canons.  Next to the masts and sails are written the terms that denote them, and the image of the ship is surrounded by ropes tied into knots, which are also named.  I note that I have disregarded the accents etc – too difficult with my keyboard.  But I note that ‘mat’ has a roof accent.

French	English
Cheval de Mer	Seahorse
Mat	Mast
Grand mat et voiles	Main mast and sails
Grand Perroquet	Main topgallant
Grand Hunier	Main topsail
Grand voile	Main sail (I think)
Mat de Misaine et voiles	Fore mast (not mizzenmast!) and sails
Petit Perroquet	Fore topgallant
Petit Hunier	Fore topsail
Misaine	Foresail
Mat d’Artimon et voiles	Mizzenmast (!) and sails
Hunier	Topsail
Brigantine	Spanker (?)
Fleche	?  means arrow, so presumably arrowshaped sail
Voile	Sail
Noeud	Knot
Corde	Rope
Noeud de chaise	Double knot
Beaupre et Grand foc et Faux foc	Bowsprit and ‘Jib’ sails

 

What Hermes wrote about the scarf, Printemps – ete 2012 (Spring – Summer 2012)

Les fregates sont des navires de guerre inventes au XVI siecle, tres legers, rapides et maniables.  La beaute de ces vaisseaux comme celle de leurs plans impregnent ce carre dont la composition n’obeit qu’a l’unique contrainte de l’harmonie.  Cette pure creation est baptisee Cheval de Mer, en hommage a la tradition equestre de la maison.  L’hippocampe, charmant petit poisson, doit son nom a sa ressemblance avec les chevaux : sa tete couronnee devient figure de proue symbolise le navire et protege l’equipage.  « Trois mats grees en carre et un beaupre a l’avant avec deux ou trois focs et une brigantine en antimon …»  Les mots de la navigation, aujourd’hui comme hier, racontent a eux seuls une histoire, l’evasion …

Frigates are war ships that were invented in the 16th century as very light, quick and easy to handle.  The beauty of these vessels and of their plans permeates this scarf whose composition obeys no laws except the constraint of harmony.  This pure creation is called Cheval de Mer, in homage to the house’s equestrian tradition.  Here too is that most charming of equestrian fish, the seahorse: its crowned head becoming the figurehead, symbolising the ship and protecting the crew.  “Three-masts squared-rigged and a bowsprit at the fore with two or three jibs and a mizzen sail …”  The vocabulary of the sea, today and yesterday, recounts a story of travel and adventure in itself.

The scarf was designed by Christian Renonciat.

And here a few nautically inspired proverbs:

Il fait fleche de tout bois – It is all grist to his mill

Avoir du vent dans les voiles – to be three sheets to the wind (ie drunk)

And , at last 'voile noir' – a blackout!  I wonder whether the people of la Bourboule would understand ‘rideau de voile voir’ (blackout curtains)?

It’s Been a Blah Sort of Day ….

This photo sums it up pretty well, actually.  See the blackbird sitting on top of my bathroom exhaust pipe, trying not to look too miserable in the wind and rain?  It’s been that sort of a day.

Last night I hardly got any sleep, on account of miscellaneous idiots celebrating something or other with firecrackers.  It went on for hours and was incredibly loud.  I have never heard such a din.  They set off any number of neighbourhood cats and dogs, who added their barks and miaous to the noise, and even the birds could be heard becoming frightened and agitated.  I tried to make the best of the situation by sitting up in bed reading The Hobbit in French, but it was hard to concentrate.

This morning there was some sunshine, so I took my tired self off to Valerie’s for bacon & eggs and coffee with the newspapers.  Then I had a little amble through the shops and perused the sales.  Unsurprisingly enough I did not find anything, I pretty much have what I need.  Still, it is nice to look.  It satisfies my inner Hunter & Gatherer, I suppose.  I ended up in my favourite leather shop in the Covered Market, as usual. 

My Handbag-Guru died a few weeks ago, and I am still very sad about it.  He was still quite young, only 68 years old.  When I went a few weeks ago it was three days after he had died, and everyone in the shop was very tearful.  His wife is continuing the business.  When I went today they were a little brighter.  There was a bag they had on sale, which I had almost bought on previous occasions but did not, firstly because I did not really need it, and secondly because it looks like a copy of the Bolide by Hermes, and I don’t like copies.  Today the widow of my Handbag-Guru saw me looking at the bag again, and told me that it had been the favourite bag of her husband, and indeed she herself used one.  So I bought the bag, as a sort of memorial.  Now I have enough bags to last me a lifetime!  But I shall continue to go to the shop and perhaps even buy a few more bags, to show support to the widow of my dear old Handbag-Guru.

On the way home I stopped by the local grocery cum liquor store.  The owner was busy upbraiding one of his customers for buying cigarettes.  “You had promised me you would stop,” he said, “and here you are buying another package!”  I tried to calm the situation by suggesting that the lady only smoked to give him some business, but he said he made very little on cigarettes.  His profit margin on sweets was much greater, he added.  The guilty customer promised to seriously cut back, and I bought a bottle of root beer (a sweet non-alcoholic malt-based beverage) and some perry (a sort of cider made from pears), and went on to visit the French patisserie. 

The patissier is still trying to learn English.  All his customers are trying to improve their French by talking to him, and he is very frustrated about it.  Or they speak English so fast that he understands nothing.  Either way is bad for him learning English.  We had a long chat about learning languages, slowly and in English.  He has to return to France in November, and someone else will take over the shop.  I shall miss him.

When I got home it started to rain again.  We have had more rain in a few days then normally in a month.  To add insult to injury we have been informed that the hosepipe ban has been lifted!  Great, like anyone is going to go out there in the rain and water their soggy gardens!  It is quite cool as well, I am back to wearing my cords & woolly waistcoats about the house.  Oxford isn’t the only waterlogged area in Europe, incidentally, the rest of England is in the same boat (near enough!) and so is Paris.

To cheer myself up I drank the rootbeer.  It worked fine while I was drinking it, but had no lasting effect, I still felt downbeat.  So I drank the perry as well.  It was only a small bottle, but it takes little to get me drunk and by 4pm I was quite inebriated.  Having thus liberated myself from all moral constraint, I abandoned any pretence of turning this into a productive day and fixed myself some unsuitable food to eat.  Viz, roast beef (my freezer is full of the stuff), boiled eggs, pickles, and Caesar salad dressing.  Not a vegetable in sight!  I wonder whether the perry counts towards my five daily fruit & vegetable allowance?  I also had the little cake I bought from the French bakery as my after supper morsel.

Gazing out of the window as I am writing this I see the wind bending the trees this way and that, and the rain still coming down in unseasonably large amounts.  This is supposed to be June?  Usually we have this sort of weather in August!

I shall now don my cashmere robe and snuggle up in front of my PC to watch a nice movie – Spaceballs in French sounds about right!

Pip pip and tiddledipom and all that sort of thing!

How to learn French the hard way – By knitting waistcoats!

Over my three years of not learning French I have acquired all sorts of useful wisdom, which I am going to decant into my blog for the benefit of the masses.  I analysed my failures and came to the conclusion that there is one main reason why I did not learn much:  Because learning languages is boring!  Any of the methods I tried would have resulted in my learning French if only I had stuck with it.  And why did I abandon all these methods?  Because they required endless repetition to etch new grooves into my ossified brain, and I got bored after the sixth or tenth repetition.

People believe that children can learn more quickly because their brains are younger and more malleable, but I believe the real reason is that they are small and powerless and can be forced into doing as they are told.  If things get boring in school a child can’t just get up and make a cup of tea and switch off the teacher.  Children are stuck in school day after day in the most incredibly boring lessons, without getting paid.  After struggling for a few years even the most rebellious tend to throw in the towel and start to listen to the teacher occasionally and even do their homework.  As a result they eventually absorb enough information to scrape by.  Those who don’t come a cropper in all sorts of ways, but you get my drift.

That’s how I learned English, sort of.  Not real English, you understand.  Just the usual basic horrible being able to get by sort that gets you a D and is irritating beyond belief to all native speakers.  But it provided a basis on which I could build when I went to America and actually needed to speak properly because I went to university.  I still remember the shock when I opened my first textbook:  I only knew about half the words in it, and the words I did not know where the important ones!  But well, I knuckled down and dictionaried and at the end of the term three months later I knew 90% of the words in that book!

The way to learn a language properly is by immersion and exposure after one has absorbed the basics.  I learned English by reading and listening on a grand scale, and that’s how I planned to learn French.  But for English I had the basics from my school days, while for French I had nothing.  And since I am now strong and powerful, no one can force me – for my own good – to spend endless hours in boring pursuits (except at work, but I get paid for that).

So what’s a body to do?

This is where the waistcoats come in.  The principle is similar to that of counting sheep to go to sleep.  The idea is to quiet that part of the brain that gets bored easily and wants to do something new and exciting.  By counting sheep the excitable brain gets distracted, and while it is busy counting, another part of the brain takes over and dozes off.  By the time the excitable brain part notices what is going on the body is asleep, and so the excitable bit seeks refuge in vivid dreams.

Anyway, imagine listening to the same CD by Michel Thomas a dozen times.  The man is a good teacher, but can be very patronising and authoritarian, and I hate that.  So not only am I bored because I have listened to him a dozen times already, but I am angry at his tone as well.  So I switch off and play solitaire instead.

However, now envisage the same scene with the addition of knitting a waistcoat.  Whenever I get irritated or bored I focus my attention on the knitting until I calm down.  The regular click click of the needles also has a soothing effect, of course.  Once I calm down I listen to the CD again.  The knitting keeps the excitable part of my brain engaged, so it can’t complain too much about having to listen to the same CD over and over again.  It has to be a simple pattern, because something complicated like a sock would be too distracting.  The idea is to do something simple, just enough to engage the excitable bit of the brain so it doesn’t run off to do something more interesting, without being so distracting that I stop learning the new language.

Of course this does not have to be knitting.  You could try whittling or painting your toenails or riding your exercycle.  The important part is that whatever you do will not engage you so much that you cease to pay attention to learning French.

I have knitted about a dozen waistcoats in the last year, and slowly my labours are paying off.  Of course the good people of La Bourboule will be the final judges of my progress, but I have managed to absorb a modicum of grammar recently, and my vocabulary has become extensive, if patchy.  I now know what ‘colocataire’ means – roommate – how cool is that?  And when someone claims to be ‘mi-homme mi-pizza’ I know that he is half man half pizza – I have been watching the movie Spaceballs in French for quite a few times now.

I am making progress, at long last.  What I am going to do with all those wretched waistcoats is anybody's guess. 

How not to learn French - Lessons 7 to 10

How not to learn French - Lesson 7 – Reading a French Grammar

When I desperately want to learn something, I read a book.  Sometimes it gets a little ridiculous – I once read a book about ballroom dancing and expected to be able to dance afterwards (it did not work).  Then there was the mathematics book I copied from front to back in the vain hope of absorbing enough maths to get me through high school – I learned nothing, but my teacher was so moved by my efforts that he gave me a D and I managed to scrape through. 

Given this troubled history, it will surprise no one to hear that I read an entire French Grammar front to back, hoping – vainly, as usual – to learn French grammar that way.  The book sported ‘Dummies’ somewhere in its title, so I figured it would work.  But it did not.  Instead of admitting defeat I decided that I obviously was not dumb enough to learn anything from this grammar, and read another one, an Introduction to French Grammar.  This book was even thicker and quickly got very complicated.  While I managed to understand what they were on about, I did not manage to remember anything!  Then I reflected that it was a silly idea anyway, because if I had to remember and apply 500 pages worth of grammar every time I spoke French I would find myself very quickly without an audience.

I well remember a man I once knew, who tried to engage me in German conversations.  One could positively hear how his brain was working to create a perfect sentence, and although every sentence he enunciated was indeed perfect, I usually ran out of patience before he had managed to make his point.

So I decided to give up the French Grammars as a dead loss, and tried yet another approach.

How not to learn French - Lesson 8 – Buying appliances with French instruction manuals

I happened on this approach after I had bought a radio in La Bourboule.  It was one of those complicated digital affairs, which requires various sophisticated operations to set the alarm, find a radio station, switch an internal light on and off, predict the weather, set the volume, and heaven knows what else.  Since I am used to radios that just turn on and off, permanently tuned to Radio 4, this presented me with a serious challenge.

Having tried for an hour or so to get the thing going by sole use of my innate wit, I turned my attention to the instruction manual, which was in French, Spanish, and Japanese, which all elude me.  What’s a person to do?  I decided to knuckle down and learn French by deciphering the manual.

Although I managed to learn enough to operate the radio, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this method, partly because the words thus obtained have little application in everyday life – well, my everyday life, but principally because the grammar is atrocious.  Apparently these manuals are usually translated by the pre-teenage children of the production manager of the factory where these electronic devices are produced, and while I have the highest regard for their linguistic precocity I must regretfully conclude that it does not yet suffice for the task on hand.

Lest you think that I malign them – after all I did manage to get the radio working – I should add that I finally discovered a German and English version on the back of the manual, and although these version were pretty pitiful as well, between the two of them I managed to glean what information I needed.  That’s why I know about the awfulness of the grammar, by the way; I was in no position to judge the French version.

It is rather unfortunate that I cannot recommend this method, because there are so many instruction manuals blighting everyone’s life.  Justifying their existence by utilising them for linguistic purposes would really take the sting out of their loathsomeness, but alas I cannot in good conscience advise this course of action.

Sighing deeply, I turned to the most pleasurable approach to date.

How not to learn French - Lesson 9 – Spending time in Paris

Finally, I hear you say, a sensible approach to learning the French language.  I should have done that in the first place.  Go somewhere crawling with natives eager to teach me their language, and fluency will surely follow soonishly.

Hah!

Double Ha!

Cubed and to the power of n (I learned some math, you know!) Hah!

Paris is full of natives who want to practice English!  Trying to learn French from them is like drawing teeth or wading through treacle, ie theoretically possible but too exhausting in practice.  As soon as people hear you are fluent in English they look at you hungrily and say something in English.  When they hear that I live in Oxford they get really excited, because when they learned English in school they used the Oxford English Dictionary, and now they consider Oxford to be the source and guardian of all that is excellent in the English language.  When I was once stupid enough to confess that I used to work for the OUP and helped compile the dictionary their enthusiasm knew no bounds, and they quickly concluded that I was a rare gem whose perfect English must not be endangered by learning French.  For the rest of that day, whenever I tried to utter something in French they listened politely for a minute or two before guiding me firmly back to the language of Albion.

No, trying to learn French in Paris is like selling coals in Newcastle.  Don’t even try!

 

How not to learn French - Lesson 10 – Reading French Books

This was my last abortive attempt to learn French.  Remembering how I had learned English all those years ago, I bought a few French books which I had read so often in English that I practically know them by heart, and settled down.  The idea was that I would not have to look up unknown words all the time because, knowing the English version, I would already know what every words meant.

Well, it did not work that way.  Although I read entire books, I learned very few words, because, although the two languages are very similar, they are not translated words by word, and anyway my memory is so truly sievelike that I forgot every word almost as soon as I learned it.


How not to learn French - Conclusion

I had comprehensively failed to learn French, despite having used every method I could think of.  Incidentally, I have not described every attempt I made to learn French in this little series.  There were also language CDs (three different types), newspapers, the language lab of the university, reading the jokes in carambar wrappers, etc etc.  Nothing worked.  I had failed.

Now, I am nothing if not persistent.  To me NO! is simply a shy person’s way of saying yes, and a defeat is just a signal to try a different approach.  But I had tried every approach!  What could I do?

Stay tune for my new series, Learn French The Hard Way With DB!   I shall kick off soon with my first sure-fire way to learn French by knitting waistcoats.

Au revoir & bonne journee!

Confessions of a Glider Groupie – my Glider Collection

Part 5 – Scheibe Zugvogel III – Not quite a Tiny Visitor

Given the size of my The Little House, I have to limit my personal possessions and furniture somewhat.  Despite my dictum ‘My House maybe small but my Dreams are Big!’ I have to admit that one can’t put a gallon into a pint jar (though Heaven knows I tried), and therefore, painful as it is to me, most of my gliders are small, if not to say, tiny. 

In the previous posts about my glider collection I covered its large members, not because they are my favourites but because they are easiest to photograph!  Taking pictures of small objects with my little camera, especially in dark conditions, frequently results in blurry photos, giving the impression that they depict not so much little gliders as visitors from Fairyland.  This is unfortunate, because the story of the Tiny Visitors, which I shall recount in due course, is unbelievable enough, and I have no desire to further undermine my credibility by accompanying it with fuzzy photos.

However, today’s post is not about the Tiny Visitors, but about Zachary the Zugvogel.  He is even tinier than the Tiny Visitors, in fact 1:250, while the Tiny Visitors are 1:200.  Another difference is that Zachary came in a box from EBay, whereas the Tiny Visitors arrived of their own accord.  Lastly, Zachary is a child of the late 1950s, whereas the Tiny Visitors were all hatched before WWII.  Well, perhaps they were hatched.  I used to think they were manufactured by glidermasters just like the big gliders, but recently I saw one emerge from a Kinder-egg so I am not sure any more.

Anyway, since Zachary is so much younger than my other gliders, and has very little real life experience, having lived in his box most of his life, the other gliders have taken him under their collective wings and try to instil some sense into his frivolous soul, so far to little effect.  Most of the time he just hides in the Clock-Tower, it being dark and safe, rather like his box, which I have taken away to stop him from hiding all the time.  But when he does get out he tends to make a nuisance of himself and likes to irritate the other gliders, as well as Goncalo Alves, the wooden cat.  I tried to get him to fly in my mobile with the Tiny Visitors, but he upset their harmonious balance by slipping out of harness without telling them, so I had to give up on that idea.  I should note that the Tiny Visitors also leave their harnesses, but they do so in concert to ensure that the balance is never disturbed – oh well, you can’t expect wise cockpits on baby gliders, I guess.  One of the Reiher Quartet tends to keep him company on the Clock-Tower and makes sure he stays out of trouble.

In 1951 Egon Scheibe founded the Scheibe-Flugzeugbau company.  The Zugvogel was their first high performance glider, and won first prize in 1955 in the German National Gliding Championships, flown by Hanna Reitsch.  The design continued to be improved, and in 1957 the Zugvogel III was launched.  My little Zachary is a tiny scale model of this Scheibe Zugvogel III, on the scale of 1 to 250.

The original has a wingspan of 17 meters, and although it would no doubt look impressive stuck into the belfry of the church around the corner, my little finger tells me that neither priest nor congregation would welcome such an addition.  So it is lucky, really, that I spotted little Zachary on Austrian EBay a few years ago.  At night before I go to sleep, when I watch my little glider collection without wearing my glasses, and everything is a bit blurry, it seems almost credible that Zachary is a real glider hiding in a real clock-tower.

That said, I have to admit that I much prefer my illusion to the reality of life size gliders.  Although I do not consider my life worth more than that of any other person, I nevertheless feel much attached to it, and risking it by flying in a real life glider is not something I would do without need.

Next time I will introduce the Tiny Visitors, starting with the Red Reiher Quartet!