Joan in GE
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Posts posted by Joan in GE
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There is the modern time period in the Swiss matu list.
I do not know if this interests you, but some of the French publishing houses have 'romans historiques' - which fit into different time periods and would work well with WTM...
The problem is that I can't remember the Editor I had in mind.
A quick search produced this list
https://www.babelio.com/liste/5485/Roman-historique-pour-la-jeunesse
But you could probably find others...
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He has read the famous Verne stuff, but not the ones you linked, so please link again, and thank you :)
(we do dark. so much dark).
ah, Les cinq cents millions de la Begum
et Les tribulations d'un chinois en Chine
:-(
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At 13, can't he read Jules Verne? There are some very interesting ones...Trying to remember the names as ours are packed away....
well, the ones I proposed seem a little dark so I've edited them.
Sorry, I'm drawing blanks otherwise as now that they're not visible on shelves, I tend to forget and the young are not here to help.
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I forget how old your student is...
There's always the Swiss end of high school exam literature list to look through...(French, German, English, etc)
On this page
Scroll down to the link
Listes des œuvres littéraires, valables dès 2015 (PDF, 447 kB, 15.12.2014)
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Is this article from the same site but more recent:
Confirming your first one?
This happened after the Weinburg affairs came to light and there are the ensuing attempts at changes.
My comments might be outdated as here's another article about use in schools that came along since I was studying about it.
But just for anyone who doesn't know, écriture inclusive isn't exactly the same as the féminisation de métiers for example.
A pro article
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The position of the Académie on gender neutral pronouns is that French has no masculine, only a neutral and a feminine, and that therefore all neutrality must be expressed by the lack of feminine marker. Which in effect boils down to calling every gender-neutral person "he" even though everyone will assume male and nobody will get the "gender neutrality" aspect.
I would use 'il'.
I agree this would definitely be best and in addition the most simple as well as probably correct in your country looseje.
But even in France, I don't think the school system is obliged to follow the Academie. Hatier produced the first school manuel with 'écriture inclusive'. And where I am, the local university doesn't even accept the 1990 spelling changes that the Academy put out though they are accepted in the public school system obligatory level. As far as I know, those spelling changes are optional even in France.
I agree with Monica too, that it's important to stick to one method.
Isn't it possible to ask the exam center itself what they are expecting?
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I have a list of French films and I'm not having luck with google...Is there a French movie rating system and maybe a searchable database? I just want to make sure these are PG13-ish without having to watch all 10!
In the days when ours were younger...it seemed their rating here (don't know if CH is different than FR) was looser than in the US...but that was a long time ago so I haven't compared recently.
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I'm looking for an online American history class for my middle school son. As I've contemplated content, I realized, what I really want him to have is the opportunity for discussion of the history reading. To what extent do these online history classes incorporate discussion of the reading and history?
You'll probably get a lot more answers if you post this on the middle school or high school boards...
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Loesje has let me work on the document so here is a link to the 'past' section of the table so far....It is not finished and I'm open to all comments and suggestions...If there is something that was already said and it is not yet in the table, please forgive me as this is hard work going into a brain that has never liked grammar...I'll share the present and future sections in the future when they are in a more advanced state....
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VvRIZj93CuUXr9pE60H5ZRdtpw0fkZlNMT7PSy-djjo/edit?usp=sharing
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In all languages I speak, the present perfect is used to talk about the recent past. It's called "present" because the helping verb is conjugated in the present tense. The main verb is not conjugated in perfect tenses, you use the past participle.
I had meant to talk about the 'recent past' too.
Ok, in French, there is the very recent past with (conjugated) venir de + infinitive (eg je viens de manger une pomme).....It is translated in English...(I just ate an apple).
In the French verb table that I got ages ago, it was put into the present even though it is officially past.
Since it has the simple past verb form - you would count it as a regular past tense ? I wanted to put it in my table under the French passé immédiat (also called Passé du présent)....and then go down and put it in the same place for English :-)...You can see on the table that loesje linked for me...
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In all languages I speak, the present perfect is used to talk about the recent past. It's called "present" because the helping verb is conjugated in the present tense. The main verb is not conjugated in perfect tenses, you use the past participle.
In modern English you always use the verb 'to have' to make the perfect tenses; in Spanish you always use the verb 'haber'. I just figured out a way that French might help you here with German - in German (and it appears also in French) the perfect tenses can be formed with two helping verbs - haben/avoir (to have) for transitive verbs and sein/être (to be) for intransitive verbs.
To go (intransitive): I have gone; ich bin gegangen; je suis allée
To cook (transitive): I have cooked, ich habe gekocht, j'ai cuit
So that should help you; figuring out that transitive/intransitive thing is a pain for most English speakers. We used to also differentiate back in the time of Shakespeare; that's why we say "He is risen" on Easter; it comes from the King James, from Shakespeare's time - that would be "He has risen" in modern Engllsh - and it has been changed to that in contemporary translations. (To rise is an intransitive verb).
Along with 'to be' for intransitive perfect tenses, we also dropped 'thou' from the same time period. Thou was our informal 2nd person. If you have read a lot of Shakespeare and/or King James, you might be familiar with how 'thou' is conjugated, which is almost the same as 'du' (informal 2nd person in German).
Thou hast
du hast
Thou willst
du willst
I never thought about the verb form with 'Thou'....thanks for these extra aspects that are helping tie these languages together :-)
I'll have to study the transitive/intransitive thing more....
Thank you Matryoshka!
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So is Present perfect in English considered a Past tense or a present tense ? I like my tables to be neat and easy to understand though I don't know if this is possible.
I ask because I read that Passé composé in French can equal the Present perfect in English OR the Simple past....So I want to know if Present perfect should be in the Past column or in the Present column....
ETA And I'm reading about English Imperfect - is that the same as Past continuous ? and Past progressive ?
Any help greatly appreciated!
Joan
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Simple past is mostly not used in spoken French, so passé composé takes its place.
My brain is like a sieve when it comes to grammar - you would never know I got my kids through high school with the help of a TE for English. Nothing stuck here.
Anyway, now I see that Simple past is strickly speaking equivalent to Passé simple in French. Which is why you said 'not used in spoken French'. I had not made that connection even though it was in my table but in reading more online I finally understand.
This is not so clean as I was hoping for...and it's hard to do in a Word document with these mixtures...Best with pen and ink...
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Joan, your native language is English, though, yes? English is Germanic. The tenses in English have a lot more in common, both in how they're formed and how they're used, with German than the Latin languages.
I do find Spanish helpful as a reference, but those Latin languages have forms (like the two kinds of past) that just aren't at all relevant. Also similar in English/German are that the future and conditional tenses are compound tenses formed with a helping verb (will/would and werden) + the infinitive.
English and German also share phrasal verbs. In German these show up as prefixes on the infinitive of the verb, which can be either separable or inseparable - if they are separable they move around the sentence away from the verb stem. Native English speakers don't even tend to be taught about he existence of phrasal verbs, but they are talked about extensively in ESL programs, as we use them all.the.time. I have entire book for ESL learners that is nothing but phrasal verbs.
In English the adverbial parts of the phrasal verb come after the stem verb in the infinitive. To stand is not the same verb as to stand up or to stand down or to stand aside. To look is a different verb than to look for or to look up (like in a dictionary).
Yes, my mother and best tongue is English.
The explanation of phrasal verbs is extremely helpful.....I'd seen the separable German verbs and thought there was nothing similar in English...very helpful...
Thank you!
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Loesje, your chart makes me curious....in French, passé composé comes into a time in the 'imparfait'....eg je lavais la vaisselle et j'ai entendu un bruit. But on your chart, it looks like it comes in between the imparfait and the present. Or is it just how it is represented ?
I put the little arrow on the French chart to show that the P.C. was coming at one point of time while the imparfait was going on ....
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This paper is a bit linguistically dense but starting on p. 47 is a comparison of German and English tenses and on p. 58 is a chart.
https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/sections/linguist/documents/Duerich_MAGarete2.pdf
So now I've copied my French chart (the one that loesje posted and am trying to plug the items from the German chart in, but I don't know what 'neutral' means...Could you please look at the French google drive link and see if the 'present perfect' is equal to 'le passé du présent'?
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Yeah, analyzing the structure of a language is rather different from speaking/using the language. Most native speakers wouldn't know how to analyze verb tenses.
What is your end goal?
I have two goals...
I'm finally getting time to study German and find it helpful for studying to be able to compare the three.
I also am tutoring English for a friend's son and all of the sudden I find I know nothing of English tenses. Unhappily, tutoring cannot be a job for me here because schools use British English which is actually more different from American English than people imagine. So if something is right for me but wrong in the UK, I don't want them to lose points. (My dd lost points in the past when tested with local tests). My friend has US relatives so is more interested....Anyway, for him and myself, French is a reference language...
This is the table Joan tried to upload:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B95KJ31I-LlPT0pNVG5LSHY4QTQ/view?usp=sharing
Thank you so much !!!
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This paper is a bit linguistically dense but starting on p. 47 is a comparison of German and English tenses and on p. 58 is a chart.
https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/sections/linguist/documents/Duerich_MAGarete2.pdf
Thanks for finding that chart!!
Ok, I see I don't have to worry about progressive for German...(though I don't even know what it means in English :-( ) but I like to be systematic when studying so now at least it's on the agenda.
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We have for each language little booklets about 60 pages with only explanations about how to use and conjugate verbs in that language.
Is n't that what you are looking for?
It would probably help but I start to get lost when I read the texts about tenses...so I thought the visual would be helpful...
You ask about my reference language - for some tenses it's French....though I never mastered conditional and subjunctive, nor plus-que-parfait and others...But since I studied the other tenses more recently than studying English...I can at least access them in my memory...
Not a chart, but here is a comparison of English and French verb tenses:
http://www.academypublication.com/issues/past/tpls/vol04/11/15.pdf
That is interesting but I start to get lost when I can't get the visual picture there too. It will be a useful reference though to try to sort this out.
I get so easily hung up on such words as 'Perfect' 'Preterit' 'Progressive' and the like....I think my brain functions intuitively and has trouble grasping such concepts...
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Simple past is mostly not used in spoken French, so passé composé takes its place.
This is exactly the kind of info I'm looking for and want to put in one big table....Thank you!
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Gah, I don't know the names of French verb tenses, so I hauled out my 501 French Verbs (yes, I have one lying around. Such a language nerd... ;) )
Looks like passé composé is the present perfect (in English present of to have + past participle)? Does French have what is pretty much two simple pasts like Spanish (imperfect and preterite)? I see on the list imparfait de l' indicatif and passé simple - would those correspond? In Spanish you use the imperfect for past situations that are habitual or go on over time, and preterite is used when something happens just once or has a defined begin/end point.
I also have 501 Verbs in German and Spanish so I can compare. But not in English. I'd love to have one sometimes just so I could compare. NO English grammar books I've found have ever laid out all the tenses on one nice table like these 501 Verbs books do.
ETA: Does French use progressive tenses? (to be + present participle) I don't see them listed, but I see my Spanish version of this book doesn't either, and Spanish uses the progressive forms all the time.
I really like the 501 Verbs books too and have French and German :-)
The only problem is that if you don't know how to use the tenses, they don't help that.
The passé simple in French is for literature. And passé composé uses avoir (to have) and etre (to be).
I'm terrible at tenses - that's why I want this table...when you say progressive tenses - I don't know.
Thanks for your help!
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I speak Spanish/German/English - I'm under the impression that French tenses are quite similar to Spanish?
If I got a visual of what you're thinking of, I'd be happy to think through it with you - are you talking about making a table with rows and columns, or something more free-flowing? I love to make tables - free-flowing stuff gets away from me. ;)
One thing that is difficult with tenses among languages is that a tense you use in one language is not necessarily the right one to use in the same situation in the other. English uses the present progressive all.the.time. where other languages would use the simple present. And German doesn't even have progressive tenses. And you already know about the subjunctive, which English barely uses. German often uses the past perfect where other languages use the simple past.
English is also really slippery in that we make all theses compound verb structures with modals and such (could, would, might), and it's super hard to even find information about what those constructions are even called, although they'd most often end up conditional in other languages. Though as someone pointed out in another thread, sometimes we use would+verb to indicate a past event that is in the future of another past event. A future past?
Yes ! table/time line type of thing...
I can't tell you about Spanish compared to French...do they have passé composé that shows when something happens in the middle of an imparfait situation ?
I'm trying to compare the Simple Past in English, to the French tenses...but it seems that it can be used for both passé composé and imparfait situations...adding -ed at the end is quite simple...though I'm not sure if that's all....
Do you know how to post tables ? is a photo the best way as it won't upload Word or Excel....?
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French as Second Language (vs ESL - English as Second Language)...
I'm sorry, the programs we used ages ago are all outdated and then mine were using regular French textbooks.
I'm using Babbel to learn German and think it's pretty good except that if I didn't make a notebook myself of phrases, vocab, grammar rules, conjugation, and noun/pronoun/articles (so far)...I would go crazy as there doesn't seem to be a place where you can reference what you have learned.
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Well I made a table and tried to paste it in. It did copy in but when I 'posted' it lost all the lines, etc.
I don't use Google drive much after it got more complicated....will think about how to do this...
And I tried making it into a Word doc, but it says we^re not permitted to upload such files...Trying again with excel
which didn't work either...
Long shot: online database for old french books?
in Bilingual Education Board
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What's the name of the book? If its in the library here, maybe I could take pics of the first few pages so you could start reading awhile.