The following is an expert from David Sedaris' hilarious collection of short stories Me Talk Pretty One Day. In this, the title story, the authour is taking French lessons. On the first day the teacher asks her pupils to list things they like and dislike, and proceeds to insult their lists.The teacher killed some time accusing the Yugoslavian girl of masterminding a program of genocide, and I jotted frantic notes in the margins of my pad. While I can honestly say that I love leafing through medical textbooks devoted to severe dermatological conditions, the hobby is beyond the reach of my French vocabulary, and acting it out would only have invited controversy.
When called upon, I delivered an effortless list of things that I detest: blood sausage, intestinal pâtés, brain pudding. I'd learned these words the hard way. Having given it some thought, I then declared my love for IBM typewriters, the French work for bruise, and my electric floor waxer. It was a short list, but still I managed to mispronounce IBM, and assign the wrong gender to both the floor waxer and the typewriter. The teacher's reaction led me to believe that these mistakes were capital crimes in the country of France.
[...]
I absorbed as much of her abuse as I could understand, thinking- but not saying- that I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to crack pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied.
If you've ever been as frustrated with learning French and remembering the genders of nouns as I have, you should take a look at this book. Honestly, it is one of the funniest I've ever read.
2 comments:
I really enjoyed reading that book, and yes, coming from 'English as a First Language' group, assigning genders to words is quite possibly one of the most difficult things to achieve when learning a new language. I think it has to do with the fact that there is no way to tell if they are male/female/neutral (German sure is hard with those 3) - except to guess and eventually look it up in the dictionary. I don't know if I really see a point to genders, but I am not a linguist.....so I'll keep my mouth shut about this. Memorize, memorize, memorize!
There's no real trick to remember whether it's 'un' or 'une' is there?
One of the funnier bits in the book is when the authour decides: screw remembering the gender, I'll just refer to everything in the plural. Unfortunately, that got too expensive.
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