Me Talk Pretty One Day

I thought I was making progress in French until we had our first language lesson with Sara. She told me that an email I sent her recently was “charabia” (gobbledygook) and proceeded to correct it with a big red pen.  When she finished it was pretty much covered in red.  As a Stanford man, I guess I should be flattered.

Sara gleefully pointed out my many violations of what she called “rules” and “grammar” but I think she made up most of it.  Here’s what she told me.

1.      Adverbs and adjectives cannot be used interchangeably, even though they both begin with “a”.

2.      My use of the imparfait (imperfect) verb form was, indeed, imperfect.

3.      My use of the plus-que-parfait (more than perfect) verb form was, in fact, less than perfect.

4.      All nouns have a gender, either masculine or feminine.  These should not be confused, even though gay marriage is now legal in France.

5.      The subjonctif verb form must be used when discussing Existentialism or Man’s Fate and/or wearing all black, preferably while smoking a Gauloises cigarette and looking bored.

6.      The conditionnel verb form may only be used on national holidays, which is to say most of the time.

7.      When a direct object pronoun precedes a verb conjugated into the passé compose verb form, the past participle has to agree with the direct object in both gender and number.  I am not making this up.

She went on and on with a bunch more of this nonsense.  Of course my French isn’t perfect but come on!  I consider it a failure of poetic imagination on Sara’s part but I’m too polite to point that out.

KVS