The beautiful thing about learning a new language are the beautiful mistakes that come with it. It’s like giving birth to a new mind that thinks and puts together words differently. It’s like breathing new air – struggling with it first, of course. Slight changes in the words you would usually use give a very clumsy, but at the same time, fresh meaning.
Hyper conjugation
The other night I got hyper with my French conjugation. Three hours of our French lessons and still I wasn’t satisfied. Lying in the dark at around two in the morning, still shaking from conjugating you’d think it was a coffee attack, I shook Julien’s shoulder.
“Pssst. Give me another verb.”
He grunted. “A verb…? Dormir.” Then he turned over in bed. ‘Dormir’ means ‘to sleep’.
I conjugated it carefully, first in present tense, then struggling with the past and present tenses like it were a baby. I didn’t get another verb after that because he was already asleep when I asked him to ‘check’ my answer.
Actually, I mix up a lot of things, especially the ‘be’ and ‘have’ verbs, which are the basics. Does that mean I have no hope? I think not. I’m equipped with all the French words I still remember from watching TV5 movies. And anyway, Julien praised my ability to put together ‘interesting and creative sentences’. Ha! Then again, that could be bias speaking.
Wrong words first
Since I think I am definitely out of the “Je suis Kala” and “Bonjour Mademoiselle” stage, the first sentences I started putting together were insults.
“Tu es bete,” I told Julien lovingly, which means “You are stupid”.
He good-naturedly ignored me.
“Tu es con,” I whispered to my brother in passing. It also means “You are stupid”.
“Le monde? C’est con!” I shouted out a few months ago, during this said period.
That’s when Julien bought me a Grammar excercise book.
My shiny yellow grammar book was the arrow pointing towards socially-acceptable sentence construction.
But I guess nothing beats training to talk in French. The other night at Moomba I struggled to make him understand a sentence about not wanting to have a two-headed dog as a pet. All in French! Yip-yip-yip!
One evening I asked Julien what ‘sacre bleu’ meant, being one of the French expressions I remember from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. He told me it was a very old French expression.
“Hardly anyone uses it anymore!” he exclaimed, laughing at the thought.
“Can I use it?”
“As you want,” he said, which is his ‘diplomatic’ response.
“Can we both use it, especially in France?”
He didn’t look too enthusiastic about using “Sacre bleu” in conversation with friends.
“Please?” I pleaded.
“Okay,” he said sadly. “But I only hope that this ‘sacre bleu’ stage will be finished before it’s implemented.”
I know I used to say bravissimo, que horror, and muy caliente a lot, but for the meantime, at least till the stage ends, I’ll be sporting the corniest of all – sacre bleu!
If you’re curious about the robot
The robot on the left side of this page was created by Jul using 3dsmax (told you he was genius!). Isn’t it Astroboy-ish? Kneel before Mahmud, people! Mahmud, my rotating robot!
And
After all these years of meeting everywhere we possibly can, of crying at the airport departures and joyful reunions at airport arrivals, after the withdrawal symptons of being apart and the high of two-week-holidays together … it’s nice to tell you we’re getting married next month.
