#and i already had some latin background so understood the concept of conjugating verbs and was really bored | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

coquelicoq · 5 months ago

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i do love that they're very meticulously defining in footnotes every single word that does not appear in the list of the 1500 words most frequently used in written french, but when it comes to the passé simple they're just treating it like it's self-evident. there are two pages in the back of the book listing the 3rd person forms for irregular verbs and that's it. these are second-year students. do they even know what the passé simple is?? i don't think they even told me about it until like french 4 or maybe even 5. how were they teaching french in the 50s i wonder.

to self-soothe i have started reading a 1957 textbook for second-year french learners. as one does.

#i feel like in french 1 we learned the present the passé composé and the imparfait #plus like aller + infinitive and venir de + infinitive. and the imperative. but that is IT.#all of these stories are in the passé simple and feature the future the conditional the present subjunctive the plus-que-parfait...#they MUST have been frontloading the conjugations back then or none of this makes any sense #they did at one point have a footnote for a verb conjugated in the plus-que-parfait of the subjunctive but that's the only thing i've seen #and like. i should hope you would have a footnote for the pqp of the subjunctive for SECOND-YEAR LEARNERS jfc #like that is pretty advanced lol. but what about the present subjunctive? they're supposed to know that already? madness #i'm just trying to imagine teaching the subjunctive in the first year of french and can't wrap my mind around it #i guess back then it was more common to teach english grammar in school. and if you already know that the subjunctive is a thing #in your own language maybe it's not so hard to learn about it existing in other languages #but i feel like if you tried it nowadays (in the us anyway) there would be screaming crying throwing up in the streets #one of the reasons i skipped years 2 and 3 of french was because it was taking so effing long to go through the tenses #and i already had some latin background so understood the concept of conjugating verbs and was really bored #so i know just learning the present indicative in a language that actually inflects by person and number #(as opposed to english where it's the same for everybody except for 3rd person sing. and we just use auxiliaries for other tenses)#takes a while for usamerican monolingual anglophones in this day and age #french #education

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