French

Have left DuoLingo alone for a few weeks; fun as it is, I was getting irritated with its rough edges.  I know it's a work in progress but when one keeps getting penalized for not guessing correctly the exact English translation that's wanted as an answer, or the right one of two German pronouns to slot into the sentence, it wears me down a bit.  And being offered real-world translation exercises right from the start still strikes me as daft.

I was thinking of using it to brush up my French, but perhaps I'll just use textbooks instead.  Am listening to France Inter right now; we're getting music rather than talk as they're on strike against austerity:

It always surprises me when I stop dabbling in languages that are newer to me and return to French that my listening comprehension is a bit better than I think it is.  Listening to languages you really don't know very well makes listening to one you first heard thirty years ago seem much easier.  I took seven years of French at school, age 9 to 16.  The first years didn't cover much: "forced to exchange banalities in the language" as Helen DeWitt damningly said.  A lot of drilling of the basic irregular verbs, and then gradual introduction of the regular conjugations and not enough vocab to be able to read anything of interest.  I still remember a lot of it so possibly, as far as it went, it was actually taught quite well, but it was no preparation for dealing with genuine French texts.  Did I really study French for seven years and never meet with the past historic tense?

At middle school we all had to do French, but when we went to high school there was a telling bit of streaming depending on French proficiency: top set continued to do French and had to do either Spanish or Latin as well; middle set continued to do only French; bottom set abandoned French and started Spanish.  I did Latin, which was very instructive in terms of seeing a language taken to bits and examined analytically, but it's a shame that French and Latin weren't used to inform knowledge of one another.  One would think that they weren't related, so tightly-contained in silos the syllabuses were.

Apropos of that I recall this anecdote about Catullus in French and Italian: French for muck, Italian for absolute filth.

Textbooks.  I have copies of Teach Yourself French (1938) and Teach Yourself Everyday French (1940) by N. Scarlyn Wilson (that stranded initial at the start somehow evokes a lost world of affable bookish textbook-writers), the first being a standard TY textbook of its era covering all the grammar briskly, the second being a more wandering and discursive look at literature and 'situational' stuff (Motoring, At The Dressmaker's).  Working through the first one shouldn't be too hard as most of it is stuff that I've known for decades, more or less.  And the exercises are full of Thirties charm.  An older textbook still: William Cobbett's French Grammar, written in odd moments when he wasn't busy mislaying the bones of poor Tom Paine.  It's charming.