French Revisited

I was thinking whether there was any hope of reaching 150 posts by 15 November, to mark the one-year anniversary of this blogsite. But I guess I shouldn't even try, otherwise there'll be 10 'nothing much happened today' posts =P And anyway will I feel like writing during the exams?

Settling into a nice routine these few days...a nice mix of econs, maths, history. Now that there's nothing else to memorise things have definitely become more agreeable. And I realise that I like Cold War a lot! It's recent, so there aren't too many interpretations to deal with, and the timeframe's really limited, so there's less you need to remember to give an authoritarian account of a question. Was really having fun with Globalisation today. That topic comes up with the most interesting questions, and it's particularly satisfying when the argument just grows itself out of the facts that you have available. Kind of like a Braudel-ish experience, the facts compelling you to a self-evident conclusion.

Well actually I do have something interesting to report today. Was on the way home on the train, and I stepped on board at City Hall in the middle of Mason's Cold War, and then this voice suddenly pierces through the end of the Cold War, and it went something like this: "Sur les rues j'ai vu des étudiants qui lisent en marchant. C'est vraiment choquant!" Heh what are the odds that I'd enter at the very door where there also stood this French couple?

They seemed like uni backpackers, and it was really funny, cos I could just keep up with their conversation. They were talking about the bizarre behaviour of Singaporean students, and from their point of view it's easy to see how we may seem psychotic to them with our fixation on exams =P It was all I could do to pretend to read Mason while stifling my laughter. I thought it was only fair that I should tell them that I could understand what they were saying (on more levels than one) but it would have been too weird. At any rate they got off at Aljunied.

It's so cool to be able to hear native Francophones again. But I do realise that my French has become really rusty. Over the noise of the train and with their speed I could only catch snippets of them talking about the student culture here, and then the girl started giving an account of her lunch: "It's clean, it's cheap, it's good, so why not?" There's only that impression of receiving static, like you have a continuous sense that meaning is being transmitted, that there is a meaning in the air, but you just can't decipher it, and only intermittently does the signal break through. A carrier wave with an unreliable signal. And yet that carrier wave was enough to awaken those old faculties of understanding and speaking French. It used to be such a novelty to be able to keep up with a native Frenchman in a conversation; it was with some surprise that I discovered that I could still understand just enough to be functional, though I couldn't reply them with anything like that speed.

Yep, it's empowering to learn another language. Gives you all sorts of perspectives that you wouldn't otherwise have =P

pondered by phoenican @ 1.11.05