the Friday Frenching

This past Friday, I had the chance to teach a student some French. A lady in one of my level 2 conversation classes is a French major, and she's studying Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince for one of her lit classes. Her homework, basically a Q&A worksheet, had some questions on it about the beginning of the book (the narration where the author talks about drawing a snake swallowing an elephant and being told by his elders that the engorged snake looked like a hat), and it was a pleasure to help the student with her grammar. Although my own French is showing signs of rust, I'd still love to be able to teach a French class at Smoo.

For those of you who read French, you might find this link interesting: it's a translation of some dialogue from "Full Metal Jacket"-- the scene where we first meet the drill instructor. The French version contains a bunch of slang I remember, a bunch of slang I could figure out despite not knowing it initially, and some expressions I simply never learned and couldn't quite figure out. Great vocab workout for yours truly. Matthew Modine's character, Joker, is renamed Guignol in this version, and Private Pyle (the dude who goes nuts and shoots himself later on) is renamed Grosse Baleine (fat whale). I guess the French wouldn't have understood the Gomer Pyle reference.


_