Staz learns french

Staz occasionally tries to learn French when he's bored or procrastinating.

On this page you can kinda follow along with his progress.

What is French? (Qu'est-ce que c'est le français?)

I think these are french

French is a language spoken by an estimated 310 million people, and it is an official language of 27 countries, including France, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Canada.

The French language (or le français as it's called in French) was created by panspiritualist perverts who believe that inanimate objects all come with built-in gender, and that this ought to be one of the main features of their language. They also wanted to make sure that everyone knew how good they are at multiplication and addition, so they decided to call 'ninety-two' "20 x 4 + 12" (quatre-vingt-douze).

French is also characterised by its writing system, in which words often have several letters that are completely silent when pronounced. In fact, the singular and plural forms of many nouns in French (e.g. fille = 'girl', filles = 'girls') have distinct written forms, and yet are pronounced completely identically to one another, and in conversation can only be distinguished via context or other syntactic features present in the same utterance (e.g. Nicole et Yvonne sont les filles de Monsieur Duclos = "Nicole and Yvonne are the daughters of Mr. Duclos" where sont is the 3rd-person plural form of the verb "to be").

French is not only one of the most commonly spoken languages, it is also considered by many to be the most beautiful or romantic language in the world.

Staz's progress (Les progrès de Staz)

Staz studies French exclusively using the following:

• a PDF copy of Le Français par la Méthode Nature (1958) by Arthur M. Jensen
• a YouTube playlist of a native French speaker reading each of the main texts from Le Français par la Méthode Nature
• the French/English dictionary that comes bundled with macOS
• occasional web searches

2024/11/22 (le vendredi 22 novembre 2024)

Current lesson: Chapitre onze: "L'après-midi" (11/50)

Things really ramped up after chapitre 9. Not only did the length of the text increase, but a bunch of new vocabulary and grammar was introduced. It's honestly a bit overwhelming, but everything is still understandable, even if I'm unsure of some specific grammar points. For example, it's really unclear to me when you use des instead of de. You would think it would just be when the following noun is plural, but that doesn't seem to be the case. A note from chapitre 2 says "des = de les," and chapitre 6 has the example:

"M. Charles Leroux, c'est l'oncle des quatre enfants de M. et Mme Duclos,"

...which makes sense. However, later on in the same chapter we get this:

"Combien de langues votre père parle-t-il?"

...where langues is plural, and yet we have de. My guess is that "combien de" is acting as a set phrase, and is never "combien des." I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually. (I could just look it up, but since I'm not really outputting at this point I don't really care too much; whether it's de or des, it's comprehensible either way, and that's all that matters to me.)

Also there's the thing where all of the seasons use "en" like en été, en automne, en hiver, EXCEPT spring which for whatever reason is au printemps. (There's a note in chapitre 7 that says "au = à + le," kinda like how "du = de + le")

At this point the hardest part is definitely verb conjugation. Verbs can turn into something unrecognisable depending on whether it's 1st-person singular, or 3rd-person plural or whatever. Like va is 3rd-person singular for "to go," but 1st-person plural is allons which if you look carefully is completely fucking different. Really jarring coming from Japanese where every verb is the same and there's no concept of "1st person" or "singular" or whatever.