French students can't "cope"

There's (yawn) another student protest in France with week - but wait, before you tune out, this one involves language! The students are protesting the appearance of the English word "cope" in the English proficiency section of baccalaureate exam (which requires students to be proficient in not just one, but two foreign languages!). To quote from the NY Times:

The students said they were baffled by a passage from the best-selling novel “Atonement,” by Ian McEwan, in which the word “cope” appeared. Then came two questions about a character named Turner: “What concerns him about the situation?” and “How is Turner coping with the situation?”

Twelve thousand students signed a petition claiming that the word "cope" is not easily translatable into French. Some say the very concept has no exact equivalent, although a letter to the Times refutes this as "utter nonsense," pointing out that there are two verbs, se débrouiller and s'en sortir, that mean precisely that.

I won't enter the fray, except to point out that this same week, French taxi drivers, unable to cope with competition from Uber, were staging disruptive, even violent strikes, prompting Courtney Love to tweet that Baghdad is safer than Paris. Ouille!

One final note: Only 4 days left to buy Flirting with French on Kindle, Nook, or Apple for the appropriately insane price of $1.99! At that price surely it's worth the e-ink it's written on!

Flirting with French still only $1.99 on Kindle

Ever wonder what the French call "French kissing"? Why they have the most advanced transportation system in the world but haven't yet discovered the shower curtain? Whether you can learn a language as a adult?

This is the week to find out, as the New York Times bestseller Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart is just $1.99 on Kindle and Apple. Raved about in the Wall Street Journal, praised in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Flirting is cheaper than a croissant -- but just till the end of the week, so dépêchez-vous! (hurry!)


He throws himself into learning to speak French with Gérard Depardieu-like gusto -- The New York Times Book Review

"One of America's funniest writers...has done it again" -- Counterpoint

Chewie, on est à la maison

Skip the usual drivel on my blog this week (it will still be there next week) and zip right over to FluentU for the  trailer of the new Star Wars movie -- in French!  Make sure you hang in to the very end for the line by our favorite pilot and his furry copain. You might even understand the line.

Que la force soit avec toi!

French is un pain in the pan

That's "pain" as in pain (pronounced roughly "pah"). In a previous post I started a discussion (okay a monologue) on using a memory technique known as the memory palace to remember French vocabulary. (Go ahead, read it now, we'll all wait....)

Frankly, I couldn't see how it was going to help me learn French, so I abandoned it, but not long afterwards, I came across another "trick" that has been around for at least 30 years called the keyword method. The way this one works is that you associate the foreign word with a common English word, and visualize that English word. So, for example, to remember that pain is "bread" you  visualize a pan. Now picture that pan coming out of the oven filled with bread, and concentrate on that image for a few seconds. Bake it into your brain. Now, the next time you see the French word pain, you should be able to conjure up this picture, and say, “aha, bread!” As with the memory palace, the advantage of this method is that it uses imagery, and the human brain is far better are retaining images than at retaining words

Does it work? I tried it with a children's French/English dictionary I'd been trying unsuccessfully to memorize  For se plaindre (to complain), I pictured a bunch of talking plantains complaining about me every time I walk by. Funny. One word that had evaded me for weeks was autoriser, a verb meaning “to give permission.” I closed my eyes and pictured myself in my mechanic’s garage asking him for permission to put my car on his lift — his auto riser. Bingo. Ten minutes later, I tested myself with a handful of new words, and passed. But as I added words, I started forgetting earlier words. So I dismissed the technique aside as yet another gimmick.

So, neither the memory palace nor the mnemonic keyword technique seemed to work for me.  But stay tuned: next week I'll tell you how 1+1=5, or what happened when I combined the techniques...and the email I received from a proponent of one of them. Très intéressant!

Cheap Flirting

For those of you who follow my blog, but haven't read my book, Flirting with French, here's your chance. For the month of June, you can get an e-book of Flirting (Kindle, Nook, Apple) for only $1.99!  If you have read it, surprise your Francophile friends with a gift. They'll never suspect how little you spent.

Buy the Kindle edition here

Buy the Nook version here

or visit the Apple Bookstore from your iOS device.

Act now, before they're all gone

Raining milk in the memory palace

I thought that maybe for at least a few posts that I might return to topics related to the reason I started this blog -- namely, the business of learning French, at which I've proven remarkably inept. Why this should be so is anybody's guess (Je suis idiot is mine), but I did have a little success, and did learn some techniques along the way, so let's dwell on the positive for moment.

One technique which I discovered during my quest to memorize French vocabulary is called the "memory palace." In Flirting with French I discuss the fascinating origin of the term (too lengthy to go into here), but the way it works is that you place the object or word in a room (or if you're a king, a palace) but represented by a vivid visual image that will remind you of that word. So if you have a list of objects for the grocery store -- bread, milk, chicken, and potatoes -- which is one more item than I can memorize, you place memorable images of those items in a room or rooms, which you picture yourself walking through. So, to memorize this list, I picture myself coming home from work, and as I pass the mailbox a chicken pokes his head out and clucks. As I approach the house it starts raining milk, so I dash inside, only to slip on the potatoes that are covering the kitchen floor, and as I lay there the oven door flies open and a loaf of bread pops out. (This is particularly vivid use of the technique -- all the action isn't the norm, but I find it helps.)

So that's my list, converted to a little tableau. When I get to the store I picture myself coming home from work, and the rest follows (we hope). Memory experts have used this technique to memorize hundreds of objects, or,say, the order of cards in a deck. It's effective because the mind is better at remembering images than at remembering words. But how can it help you with a language? To help you to remember, not to bring home the bread, but that "bread" is le pain? Ah, that's a topic for another day, but give it some thought -- you may come up with the answer yourself.