Monet's Garden
A great feature of holidays in France is the wealth of happy memories they provide – memories that stay with you long after you have come back home. The other side of this coin is the pleasure of anticipating the next Normandy holiday and before each trip we often play the game of, “This time next month/next week/tomorrow we’ll be doing ...”
One of the most enjoyable trips we’ve made in Normandy has been to Monet’s house and garden in Giverny.
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| Entering the main gardens |
Although Giverny is a fair drive from Tordouet (about 90 minutes each way on a good day) it is definitely a trip that we plan to return to next year. Monet’s house alone is certainly worth the trip but the garden is even more spectacular.
Those water lilies
Their current head gardener (an Englishman named James Priest) has managed to maintain the overall look and feel of what the garden must have been like in Monet’s time there (1883-1926) while still managing to avoid turning it into a fossil.
Here’s a link to a short clip from an excellent BBC documentary about the gardens, broadcast in August 2011.
More water lilies
One striking image that I still remember from the Monet gallery is the great man wearing thick-lensed glasses and peering intently just a few inches away from the canvas he was working on. Particularly in his later years, his vision was greatly reduced, due to cataracts in both his eyes. Apparently, after being fitted with a pair of glasses to correct his severe astigmatism, he flung them away saying,
“If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!”
Monet's Water Lilies, painted in 1916
It is possible that the swirling images with its rather garish colours that he created of the water lilies in his garden may indeed be what he was actually seeing from that bridge.
Ken, Sheila and Rosie on Monet's bridge
The future tense
It was the wish of Sheila, Ken and myself to be able to speak French using tenses other than the present, that really kick-started this blog in the first place. In this post, I’ll cover the future tense.
There are basically two ways to speak in the future:
* using the construction ‘I am going to xxx’ or perhaps ‘I want to xxx’;
* using a future tense verb ending.
(a) I am going to, I want to
Rather than saying ‘I will visit Monet’s garden’, you could simply reorganise the sentence as:
I’m going to visit Monet’s garden. Je vais visiter le jardin de Monet.
or
I want to visit Monet’s garden. Je veux visiter le jardin de Monet.
There are still other possibilities here, such as:
‘I hope to visit Monet’s garden.’ J'espère visiter le jardin de Monet.
or
‘I would like to visit Monet’s garden.’ Je voudrais visiter le jardin de Monet.
But whichever way you choose to say it, the word ‘visit’ is always given in its infinitive form, to visit – visiter.
(b) Using the future tense verb ending.
It turns out that, with a couple of exceptions, this ‘verb ending’ approach is easier than it might be. There are two basic steps.
Step 1: take as the stem the infinitive form of the verb (except in the case of -re verbs, drop the final ‘e’)
Step 2: for the six conjugations, add these endings:
ai, as, a, ons, ez, ont.
Examples:
Infinitive
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Stem
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Example
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parler, to speak
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parler-
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I will speak slowly. Je parlerai lentement.
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choisir, to choose
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choisir-
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We will choose some pears. Nous choisirons des poires.
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prendre, to take
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prendr-
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Will you take an apple? Prendras-tu une pomme?
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There are some irregular verbs that don’t use the infinitive as the stem but something else instead. However, the good news is that they do use these same endings as the regular verbs – ai, as, a, ons, ez, ont.
Examples:
Infinitive
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Quirky stem
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Example
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aller, to go
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ir-
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I will go to Tordouet. J’irai à Tordouet.
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avoir, to have
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aur-
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We will be hungry. Nous aurons faim. *
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être, to be
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ser-
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You will be tired. Vous serez fatigué.
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faire, to do
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fer-
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She will do nothing. Elle fera rien.
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* Note that in French ‘I am hungry’ translates as ‘I have hunger’, so the verb here is avoir, not être.
Ken’s Gems
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"The French sometimes use the present tense to express the future using only inflection to indicate this:
‘Je vous appelle demain’ – ‘I you call tomorrow’, ‘Je vous vois ce soir’ – ‘I you see this evening’, where we would say ‘I’ll call you tomorrow’ , ‘ I’ll see you this evening’. Interestingly you can sometimes hear native French speakers with a good command of English use this in everyday speech when speaking English – 'I see you tomorrow!'
When I look at how these two simple sentences are structured it helps me to learn and better understand the French language.
This is very useful and interesting when looking at future tenses.
In French, for instance, ‘I leave tomorrow’ or ‘I will leave tomorrow’ is contracted from its French origins of:
“Je partir ai demain” – “I to leave have tomorrow” to “Je partirai demain – I shall (will) leave tomorrow” by adding ‘ai’ (in this example) to the infinitive.
For tu, il/elle, nous, etc, you then add the relevant endings:
“Tu partiras demain”, “il partira demain”, “nous partirons demain”, etc ..."
Ken
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Video
I’ve put up on YouTube a short video that deals more fully with the regular –ir and -re verbs in the present tense:
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