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Hitting the books...
Feb. 23rd, 2010 10:05 pmI am in no danger of coming down with cabin fever (at least as long as the Internet connection doesn't go down).
A couple of jobs came in this morning, which were sent back with dispatch, and I happened to be near my computer when an inquiry came from the old/new client to clarify a couple of points in my recent huge translation from them, so I was able to respond within minutes.
The sun came out for the first time in several days, which is always a pleasant thing.
In the clean-up-around-the-house-department, I decided that if I am to winnow down my accumulation of books, I need to get them all out of the many boxes in the garage and under the verandah, and I have found some good old friends (and some items I didn't even know I had).
Among the items I found was a fascinating old book published by David McKay, titled A Complete Treatise on the Conjugation of French Verbs, by a certain Castaréde, described as a French professor and graduate of the Académie de Paris. The book has no publication date (though the listing for one on sale in an eBay store says 1966), but just by flipping through the first few pages, it's changed my view of what, in high school, I used to call "the French swamp," which was my description for verb conjugations.
In distinction from what I was taught, Castaréde's book states that there are actually four verb forms, i.e., verbs ending in er, ir, evoir, and re. (When I studied French in high school, there were only three endings: er, ir, and re.)
In my experience, language study consists basically of three skills: identifying patterns, (re)constructing patterns, and learning a vocabulary with which to (re)construct patterns.
This if why, often, language study is so dreadfully boring. It's why I've found hundreds of pages of my late mother's handwritten exercises in which she used the tactile feedback from writing to help "burn in" items to be memorized. (I used to do the same thing in engineering, with equations.)
It's also why basketball players spend hours on the court repeating the same move over and over, such as shooting baskets from the foul line.
So, with this new view of French verbs, I experienced something of an epiphany and managed to figure out a way to represent 8 fundamental tenses, graphically, for all four forms of regular verbs on an 8-1/2 x 11 page.
The good news is that regular verbs, numerically, make up a vast majority of verbs in the language; the bad news, though, is that in terms of frequency of use, the verbs most often used are typically irregular as all get-out. The verb être is, perhaps, the poster child for this phenomenon.
However, walking comes before running. Once I get the regular conjugations down, I can then go apply myself to the irregular verbs, on a target-of-opportunity basis.
Cheers...
A couple of jobs came in this morning, which were sent back with dispatch, and I happened to be near my computer when an inquiry came from the old/new client to clarify a couple of points in my recent huge translation from them, so I was able to respond within minutes.
The sun came out for the first time in several days, which is always a pleasant thing.
In the clean-up-around-the-house-department, I decided that if I am to winnow down my accumulation of books, I need to get them all out of the many boxes in the garage and under the verandah, and I have found some good old friends (and some items I didn't even know I had).
Among the items I found was a fascinating old book published by David McKay, titled A Complete Treatise on the Conjugation of French Verbs, by a certain Castaréde, described as a French professor and graduate of the Académie de Paris. The book has no publication date (though the listing for one on sale in an eBay store says 1966), but just by flipping through the first few pages, it's changed my view of what, in high school, I used to call "the French swamp," which was my description for verb conjugations.
In distinction from what I was taught, Castaréde's book states that there are actually four verb forms, i.e., verbs ending in er, ir, evoir, and re. (When I studied French in high school, there were only three endings: er, ir, and re.)
In my experience, language study consists basically of three skills: identifying patterns, (re)constructing patterns, and learning a vocabulary with which to (re)construct patterns.
This if why, often, language study is so dreadfully boring. It's why I've found hundreds of pages of my late mother's handwritten exercises in which she used the tactile feedback from writing to help "burn in" items to be memorized. (I used to do the same thing in engineering, with equations.)
It's also why basketball players spend hours on the court repeating the same move over and over, such as shooting baskets from the foul line.
So, with this new view of French verbs, I experienced something of an epiphany and managed to figure out a way to represent 8 fundamental tenses, graphically, for all four forms of regular verbs on an 8-1/2 x 11 page.
The good news is that regular verbs, numerically, make up a vast majority of verbs in the language; the bad news, though, is that in terms of frequency of use, the verbs most often used are typically irregular as all get-out. The verb être is, perhaps, the poster child for this phenomenon.
However, walking comes before running. Once I get the regular conjugations down, I can then go apply myself to the irregular verbs, on a target-of-opportunity basis.
Cheers...
