I've not been particularly involved with many people for a while. Isolation has prevailed somewhat. However, I have had one or two meetings and the last two days has involved meeting two French speakers for two completely different purposes. One, as a language exchange and the other as more of an interview situation. I have to admit, it's been a bit disheartening to find that the fact that I've been learning Czech so avidly lately means it infiltrates my otherwise reasonable-ish French. I've found myself saying some astonishing things.
The first was mixing up a number; 'vingt tisíc' instead of 'vingt-mille' or 'dvacet tisíc' (= 20,000). Then I mixed up little linking words like 'mais' with 'ale' (= but) and 'et' / 'a' (= and) and 'ou' / 'nebo' (= or) and it was quite funny really, although pretty confusing and incomprehensible to someone who doesn't speak both languages. Which would be me, in fact, because I really can't say I speak Czech yet. I can 'get by', i.e. communicate, though it takes some considerable time and all of my case endings are wrong, but it is no doubt the clumsiest, pigeon-Czech imaginable. Alas.
Whereas, with French, I've recently had a number of compliments. It's been rather lovely. Today it was, "your pronunciation is very good", and last week's language exchange was, "ton français, c'est vraiment top". But then I discovered, I mispronounced something as simple as 'culture'. I was hesitant to pronounce the 'cul' (= bum) in 'culture' basically. So it came out sounding like 'couture' ('sewing'), which, as you can imagine, was rather confusing. So now every time I try to say 'culture' in French, I think, "dans ton CUL!", without meaning to, but as a way of remembering, yes, I really have to say it starting with the word for BUM. Hmm. How, erm, cultured.
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