I am really enjoying Fluenz French, the software package I'm using as the formal backbone of my French studies, in part because it doesn't shy away from painful truths. I had long been baffled by the the way possessives (mon and friends) behave. Okay, I sorta get it now, in a rueful, disappointed way.
These words agree in gender with the noun they modify. Well, that is fine and to be expected in a Romance language. The wrinkle that is a trap for people with brains like mine: the words for "his" and "her" are the same. So you must say sa chemise and son mobile, because shirts are feminine and cellphones are masculine, regardless of who owns which. Arrrgh! There is information in my brain (the sex of the person I am talking about) that I am not allowed to share! I do resent being told to hide my candle under a bushel.
My personal gripes notwithstanding, this is all logical enough so far. Now for the further wrinkle: suppose your feminine noun begins with a vowel, such as écharpe (scarf). Because vowels back-to-back are yucky, you must say son écharpe. And you must still keep whether it's his scarf or hers out of your head. Luckily for me, the trade name for ibuprofen in France (Nurofen) begins with a consonant.
Can you share a little bit about how, or why, you selected Fluenz over the other products available? As an aside, I just learned that Colorado enacted some anti-business legislation that drove Amazon to shut down the Associates program in my state. Bloody brilliant...
ReplyDeleteWill do! The topic of Fluenz versus its competition is in my list of things to write about ASAP. Micro-preview: Fluenz seemed the best fit for how I like to learn; the others seem calibrated for different learning styles.
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