ok, so i somehow found your blog and i'm taking a pretty small course in french (after DYING to learn , french), and i feel like i'll never reach to the point where i'll learn how to talk, because it's so freaking difficult. so i just wanted to ask someone french, is it actually possible to learn to speak french and write and etc.? because i can't even imagine myself knowing it (and we didn't even study the tenses except futur proche and passé récent)
The trick to get there is to understand the logic of it. It will seem obscure and pointless until you actually understand how it works.
A couple issues when you’re an anglophone learner tackling French for the first time:
- English is an “active” language, French is a “passive” language. That means that English goes straight to the point, while French will try to find a longer, “deeper” way to say it. It literally can happen by using passive forms, or just plain poetic phrases.
The most significant example ever : I miss you. > Tu me manques. (”You’re missing from me”)
English is soooooo useful to speak face to face, to be fast and efficient. French takes time (and length…), it’s about long sentences and long idioms. At work, people use more and more English idioms/English vocabulary because they’re easy, short and clear. Ex:
Clients give feedbackabout their stay. > Les clients font part de leurs impressionsà propos de leur séjour.
The movie’s soundtrack was on point. La bande-son du film était proche de la perfection.
__________________________________ - French is a deeply poetic language. The phrasing is crucial, and some rules/words only exist to make the language sound better. Don’t try to understand why, just feel the vibe, baby. Examples:
The article “au/aux” - contraction of “à le/à les” (to the). Much classier to hear than “à le”. Ex: I love going to the theatre with you. > J’aime aller à leau théâtre avec toi.
The absence of “pas” in the “ne…pas” negation. “Pas” vanishes for aesthetic purpose: I won’t be able to come to your party. > Je ne pourrai pas venir à ta fête.
Speaking for myself, and regardless of how much I love English, English can’t “handle” poetry to me. I just don’t feel it when I read English poems. I don’t see a single difference between poetic English and regular English, I really don’t feel it. It’s mostly because French has shit tons of rules and tricks to enhance phrasing and poetry, in quite a spectacular way. French poetry sounds like torrents of flowers flowing down your ear, it’s grammatically thought to feel like that. I can’t find that back in English :/ _____________________
This may be TMI for you at the moment though, the point is to show you with concrete examples that learning grammar and vocabulary without understanding the logic of it do feel pointless (at least, to me).
My advice to get that logic is to use and abuse of translations, or translating stuff you already know, compare, sharpen your impressions and get used to the language. My basic trick for that is watching Disney movies with subtitles. > Basic French, stories you already know = perfect combo to gain logic, basic vocabulary, basic grammar.
All the apps listed are free to download (iOS). However, those that are not bolded offer in-app purchases and may require you to upgrade to premium or pay extra to access everything. Bolded = completely free.
i figured i would never be 100% content with this masterpost because i keep finding new things i want to add, so i’m just going to post it now and update it every now and then! bonne chance!! :)
I love that Chris Riddell is drawing illustrations for some of my poems for no better reason than pure enjoyment (and what better reason for making art could there be?)
When you make an animated film, you end up making A TON of drawings. A lot of those drawings are just to help describe how something is constructed or how it should move. Those drawings can get boring. So to keep it fun, the Zootopia drawings got weirder and weirder. Here’s some mildly weird ones.
On this day in 1877, by the old-style calendar, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake had its debut at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Tchaikovsky, already a noted composer, was commissioned to compose the ballet by Vladimir Petrovich Begichev, the intendant of the Russian Imperial Theatres. Borrowing from Russian folk tales, Tchaikovsky wrote the ballet in 1875-6, telling the story of princess Odette as she is transformed into a swan by an evil sorceror. The original show - then called The Lake of the Swans - was performed by the famous Bolshoi Ballet, and was choreographed by Julius Reisinger. This first performance was not well received, with its score and choreography criticised as too complex, and Tchaikovsky never saw his ballet achieve the iconic status it now enjoys. Only after the composer’s death in 1893 was Swan Lake eventually revived, with a new version of the music produced by Tchaikovsky‘s brother and others, along with new choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. The 1895 version of Swan Lake was a success, and subsequent productions owe more stylistically to this version than the initial 1877 performance. Swan Lake is one of Tchaikovsky’s most famous compositions - alongside other iconic pieces like The Nutcracker and the 1812 Overture - and remains one of the world’s favourite ballets.
Old style guide I did for Tangled back in the day.. Some great quotes from Bill Moore, famous design teacher at Chouinard, establishing a great way of approaching and studying shapes*
Hope everyone has a great Christmas and New Years!!! Thanks to all 20,000+ followers following this tumblr; truly it encourages me that there is a audience out there and motivates me to do more work*
In 1928, Virginia Woolf was invited to give a talk at a couple of women’s colleges at Cambridge University on the subject of “Women and Fiction.” This (long) essay is an extended version of those talks, published in 1929.
Confession: I’d never read any Virginia Woolf before. I’d heard of this essay for years, but somehow, my idiotic brain confused it with A Room With A View. I finally picked it up after Michael Pollan mentioned it a couple of times in A Place of My Own.
It’s a remarkable essay that reads like it could’ve been written yesterday. Woolf’s thesis is very simple, outlined within the first couple of paragraphs: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
At the core of the essay is the idea that books don’t come out of thin air, that they “are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” You cannot detach art-making from the context of the condition of the lives of the artists. “Intellectual freedom,” she says, “depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.” You need money to provide you with the time, and you need a room to provide you with the space. Therefore, historically, women have had almost zero chance to make poetry.
She says that the first obstacle of any artist is “the world’s notorious indifference”:
It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want.
But for a woman, even if she does have some money and a room with a door that locks, the world is not just indifferent to her artistic endeavors, it’s downright hostile to them:
The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What’s the good of your writing?
She points out the huge disparity between how women were/are depicted in art and how they were/are treated in real life — that “women burnt like beacons in all the in the works of poets from the beginning of time,” but in reality were “locked up, beaten and flung about the room”:
A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.
Woolf herself was freed up to write when her aunt died suddenly and left her an inheritance:
The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important. Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918.
The heart of the essay, for me, is when she imagines if Shakespeare had a sister with his talent, what would have happened to her: because of the rights denied to women at the time, “it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”
“any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty”
She says to the women in the room that “this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives.”
She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think.
Here are some great one-liners, even taken out of context:
“how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.”
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
“[W]e were able to draw up to the fire and repair some of the damages of the day’s living.”
On doodling: “Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning’s work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
This one is a Slaughterhouse 90210 post waiting to happen: “it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry.”
“One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember.”
“Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
It’s an astonishing essay. I’m ashamed not to have read it sooner, and I recommend it to every writer of every gender. You can get a free ebook version here.
Photographer Joel Goodman spent NYE out on the streets of Manchester, U.K., snapping photos of drunk people stumbling through the streets. But only one of his photos is being compared to the great works of history. Naturally, the memes followed.
