PG-Michelle

I found a pretty decent language learning tool today while looking for language learning tools. Coincidence? Obviously you don't watch NCIS enough. What I found was a bunch of Brothers' Grimm fairy tales in French. Usually when I learn a new language I download my trusty Harry Potter / Harry Potter (French) / 哈利波特 from my trusty internet pirates, which is why half the words I know in all but my mother tongues were made up by J.K. Rowling. But this time I was feeling adventurous and looked for some other sources of useful vocabulary.

The story I read was The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs. Turned out that the devil had more than three, but each being so potent, three were all one story could hold.

You know when there's three of something in a fairy-tale, you're going to hear every damn sentence three times. It used to be the bane of parents' existence. Imagine reading the same story to your kid every night. Now imagine reading that story three times every night, with slight asymmetries interspersed here and there. The new generation thinks the Brothers Grimm are Matt Damon and Heath Ledger and there's not a parent from infinity to beyond who's going to shatter that illusion and subject themselves to playing broken record every night.

But. For learning languages, and especially for memorizing useful phrases like "what are you doing, woman! If you pull out one more of my hairs, I'm going to slap you silly!", it's a pretty good device.

Hmm...there's something else here. Those clever Brothers Grimm were probably being paid per word. Maybe that's why the number 13 is so unlucky: originally they repeated everything 13 times, driving everyone up trees with madness (the ones left over after all that printing). Somehow they narrowed down the acceptable number of repetitions to three. And then pop and rock artists shamelessly stole their idea.

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One of the problems with reading French (provided one has the intent of learning it), is that it is quite different from spoken French. I don't mean the ritual sterilization applied in the process of writing, making regular sentences like "I, like, TOtally don't get this stuff, I mean what the F!" into cleanly-packaged PuTTy-approved "I don't understand this at all. Praise Jesus." I mean that when you pick up your first French book, you start seeing all the verbs you just drilled in a tense you've never encountered during your sheltered prancing outside the reading rainbow: the simple past tense. Put down the book and simple past vanishes from your vocabulary. Pick it up and your regular slightly-more-complicated past tense gathers dust in the corner, except in occasional phrases of dialogue. Most non-triumphant.

Albright Knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Fishing lines. Learning these knots is getting less interesting by the day...