the first exam of the beginners level french (i a) got over in the morning. stayed up till about 1 am last night mugging up conjugations of french verbs. everything revolves around verbs (the centre of everything).

and in french, there are regular and irregular verbs. though i wonder why, since all of them seem irregular to me! (with million apologies to all the french people). then there are accents, which apparently serve no purpose. and the ending of most words are not pronounced. and if you forget one little circumflex, beware, it might change what you are saying altogether.

for example, you might want to say, ‘can i have a glass of water’ and actually be saying, ‘my grandmother gave birth to twins.’ if anyone knows how to complicate a language, it is the french!

i realised how much i had taken for granted the basic rules of grammar over the years. i mean, do you think of past participles, conditional tenses, possessive adjectives when constructing a sentence? uhhh…

but the only way to learn french (and any language, i guess) is by getting the grammar right! hmm. and to top that, there are hardly any rules, there are about a hundred exceptions. and like hindi, everything has a gender. i haven’t figured out the genders in hindi as yet, so french is like taking very small steps and hoping to reach the moon someday 🙂

anyway, i’m having fun. someone asked me why i’m learning french. the reason actually is that i harbour this desire to turn into this multi-faceted, multi-lingual human being who can speak english, french, hindi, assamese, bengali, kannada (now i am dreaming!) at the drop of a hat and even tell you the subjunctive present tense of every verb in a jiffy! Ha! Comprenez-vous?