I just discovered the band Pink Martini and I’m deeply in love. I’m not quite sure how to describe their sound, but it’s like jazz/pop/latin/blues music in three different languages. It’s very classy and low-key.
One song that I find particularly striking, however, is Oú est ma tête? (Where is my head?). It’s completely in French but it’s so romantic and beautiful and I really feel this song. Check it out below! (Google for the lyrics in English, they’re not as beautiful as the French but they’re still romantic).
Ashley and I made our “The Secret” boards tonight. I sort of made one last year when I hung a picture of an iPhone on my wall but I decided to update it for this summer. Here is my new board:
The contents of my board, in no particular order: 2009 Jeep Compass (driving my parents’ 2004 Liberty right now, need my own wheels!), MacBook Pro (my mother just got one for work – it is amazing!), the Eiffel tower as a symbol for a European vacation and learning French, and money…it makes the world go ’round! Also pictured is an iPhone 3G (put it on the board last July and guess what I got on August 21, 2008!), my Kathy Griffin shrine to the left, and a coupon to California Tortilla.
I’ve been sort of struggling with my French studies for the past month but I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of it. Whilst studying, I have noticed that I’m getting hung up on a lot of the things that I gave me trouble when I started studying Spanish, too; the alphabet, numbers, etc. Somehow I managed to skate through Spanish for the past five years without knowing the alphabet (eventually, I picked up numbers) but I am determined to not make the same mistake in French.
That being said, I finally started conjugating verbs today. I learned how to conjugate parler in the present tense and it’s basically the same as verb conjugation in Spanish – there’s the je (yo), tu (tú), il/elle (él/ella), nous (nosotros), vous (vosotros), and ils/elles (ellos/ellas) forms and all that’s really different is the endings (which happen to be the same in both languages for the il/elle and él/ella forms). Il n’est pas trés dul!
So from now on I’ll get to start doing less rote memorization of words and phrases and more learning different verbs and forming sentences and adding the vocabulary from each unit that I study. It’s a very frightening prospect but it’s also very empowering and exciting. I love languages. :)
J’aime parler le francais, l’espagnol, et le anglais.
