2. French words you already know

Sheila sketching in the garden in Tordouet

Bonjour mes amis!

Last night I was chatting to my son on the phone and I told him about this French blog that I’ve started. He related the following story of his son (my grandson) Lonny, aged 4. Until yesterday, Lonny had never heard French spoken but was intrigued when a French-speaking friend of his mum popped over. Afterwards he started asking about French words.

“What’s the French word for  ‘table’; what’s the French word for  ‘blue’; and so on”.

On hearing the answers he announced, “I think French words are just the same as English words except the French don’t say them quite right.” Lonny may have a point – well at least about many of the words being the same. 

Michel Thomas 

Over the past few months, our friend Ken has been working through the excellent Michel Thomas Audio CD,  ‘Michel Thomas French Foundation Course'’. Note: this course is no longer available but has been repackaged (more expensively) together with the Advanced course under the title, Perfect French with the Michel Thomas Method.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Perfect-French-Michel-Thomas-Method/dp/1444133039/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

Cover of the Michel Thomas course 

Ken has certainly enjoyed the Thomas series but he has been a bit frustrated that it is so totally oral (Thomas argues that there is no need to write anything down - just go with the flow and, he claims, you’ll absorb it without having to try). However, like Sheila and myself, Ken has felt the need to formalise his understanding of what he has been taught and then sit down and learn it through practice, otherwise he fears it will just not stick. This is the main reason that Ken has been keen to work on the written and the ‘rules’ sides of French with Sheila and me – not to replace the oral approach of Michel Thomas but to complement it.

Ken’s recollections from having listened to the Michel Thomas audio CDs have certainly helped us all with our French pronunciation.  But more than that, one of the gems we were delighted to hear from him was just how many words French and English share.  It seems that, during the Norman occupation (1066 and all that), something like 10,000 French words were adopted into English. Of these, at least three quarters are still in use today.  It is also claimed that more than a third of all English words derive directly or indirectly from French.  What this means is that even before you or I have picked up a French textbook and learned to say ‘Oh la là’, we already sort-of know up to 15,000 French words (although there is sometimes a bit of a problem with the pronunciation). But I think we can safely say – that gets us all off to a cracking start!

Ken’s gems...

According to Michel Thomas, you already know hundreds of French words – it’s just a matter of tapping into them.

So French vocabulary is all around us and it seemed to me that there are three key categories of words and phrases worth working on here: 

• French phrases used in English, 
• vocabulary that is the same in both French and English, and 
• French vocabulary that can be worked out from commonsense. 

We quickly came up with a longish list in each of these ‘gateways to French’ and no doubt you’ll be able to think of many as well. Here is a short summary of some of our ideas.

Three gateways to French

A. French phrases in common use in English

Together we were quickly able to come up with at least two dozen French words and phrases that are in common usage in English, of which here are five.

French	English
à la mode	stylish, up-to-date
à propos	on the subject (of)
au fait	informed
avant-garde	innovative
c’est la vie	that’s life

Over the next few weeks we’ll try to expand our list to include some of the less well known ones, as they all serve to extend our French vocab. We hope that, as well as giving us a range of handy French phrases at our disposal, these expressions will all feed into our basic understanding of how sentences are constructed in French.

B. Words and phrases shared by French and English (some with slight spelling differences)

Our second category is words that are virtually identical in both English and French. However, we’re aware that we’ll have to remember which words do have this property and which do not. There is clearly a great danger of overgeneralising here. For example, a couple of years ago I attempted to refer to the English word ‘vegetable’ as ‘le vegétable’. In fact, however convincing it may sound, there is no such word in French as ‘le vegétable’, the correct term being ‘le légume’ (Sheila pointed out that, in English, a legume was a vegetable with a pod, such as peas, beans, lentils, etc.)

French and English	French and English
acteur / actor	batterie / battery
âge / age	bébé /baby
arriver / to arrive	bleu / blue
balle / ball	broche / brooch
banque / bank	café / coffee

C. French words or phrases that can be worked out from common sense

This third category of words is an interesting and very helpful one. All three of us like to think that we’re older (certainly) and wiser (hopefully) than when we were at school, as a result of which we now have a more extensive vocabulary than when we were 15. A very useful trick, when trying to decipher a French word is to look for a similar English word that it sounds like or might be associated with and then make an inspired leap. For example, suppose you are faced with the French word ‘mer’. You may associate this with the English word ‘marine’ and then deduce that ‘la mer’ means ‘the sea’. 

Here are a few of the words in this category that we uncovered.

French	sounds like / is associated with	English
aimer	amiable, amorous	to love
chambre	chamber	room
déviation	deviation	diversion / detour
faim	famished	hungry
habiter	inhabit	to live

‘Déviation’ means diversion

‘Chambre’ means room

If you don’t know, just have a guess!

So, the message here seems to be that if you don't know the French word in question, just guess the same or similar word in English, but say it with a plausible French accent – you might just be right. However, on occasion this principle can let you down badly.  For example, on one occasion while staying at Tordouet, our car started to drip petrol. ‘‘Est-ce qu’il y a un mechanic?” I asked a neighbour, hoping to find a mechanic in the village. Seeing that I was getting nowhere, I went back to check my vocabulary and found that I was asking if there was a robot. 

In June of this year, our trip from Portsmouth to Caen was rather choppy and I ended up quite ill. So, while in St. Pierre sur Dîves I tracked down ‘une pharmacie’ and asked madame, “Avez vous du medecin pour le mal de mer?” All went well and I congratulated myself on a job well done, until I checked the dictionary that evening to find that the word for medicine was ‘medicament’. What I had actually asked for was a doctor!

Two videos

To support this post I’ve put up, on Youtube, two short videos ... and please remember that my French pronunciation is still very much ‘work in progress’. Here are the links:

Basic grammar, covering six key parts of speech (noun, adjective, verb, adverb, conjunction and pronoun)

French words you already know (summarising the three gateways to French set out in this blog:

- French phrases used in English, 

- Shared words and phrases and 

- Words or phrases that can be worked out from common sense. 

On this video I’ve also included a useful general pattern of how many of the adverbs are formed in French. 

Each week, over the next year, I aim to upload a new video to YouTube. To see them all, type in TeachingMyWifeFrench or my user name, slievegarth1.

Exercises

1. Based on gateway ‘A’ in this post, try to extend your repertoire of French phrases used in English. Then fire up the link below and see how many of these you are already familiar with.

http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/frenchinenglish_2.htm

2.  Based on gateway ‘B’ in this post, try to extend your repertoire of French and English words and phrases that are identical or very similar.

3. Based on gateway ‘C’ in this post, try to extend your repertoire of French words and phrases that can be translated by finding a similar English word that it sounds like or might be associated with it and then making an inspired leap. 

4. Take every opportunity to practice your French pronunciation, even when the circumstances are unpromising. For example, Sheila and I tend to get quite a few ‘cold-calling’ sales or scam call from the Indian sub-continent (the tell-tale sign is when the words ‘International call’ appears on the telephone display). After replying with, ‘Bonjour, qui est là?’, we like to spin off into a random list of French vocab. A current favourite is the very French-sounding place names of the small villages around Tordouet: St Martin de Mailloc, Notre Dame de Courson and so on. I’m always disappointed if they ring off before I get to my particular favourite – St. Cyr du Ronceray. It’s a chance to really go for it, French accent-wise, so we try to give it some welly!

5. Look through French magazines, books, adverts, etc and try to make sense of what they say. For example, Sheila remembered looking at a French atlas and noticing that their word for the English Channel was ‘la manche’ (the sleeve). I wonder why they decided to call it this...

So that’s it for Post 2 and I hope you now feel you know a few more French words than you did before reading this post.

Au revoir!