7.1 Une journée à Paris — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read a continuous French text of 420 words and follow it without translating word by word. Recognise how much of the vocabulary you already own, and put a number on it. Use the gender and article rules from the grammar volume to tell a noun from a verb when you are not sure. Read a paragraph aloud at something close to a natural pace. Here are 4 sentences taken from the text itself, before you read any of the explanation. Read them aloud now, at whatever speed you can manage, and do not look anything up; you will meet all of them in place. Le matin, la ville est calme. Claire habite dans un petit appartement près de l'université. À l'université, le professeur parle de la Révolution française. Claire et Sophie mangent une salade dans un petit restaurant italien. Prerequisites : 2.6 and 4.2 — you need the suffix correspondences and the false-friend warnings from the cognates volume, and the rules about gender and articles from the grammar volume. This is the first continuous text in the course, and it comes early on purpose. Most French courses make you wait, on the grounds that you cannot read before you have grammar. For a speaker of English that reasoning is wrong, because a large part of French vocabulary is already in your head. What you lack after the grammar lessons so far is not words. It is the confidence to run your eyes along a line of French and let the words you know carry the ones you do not. So read the companion document first, before you read anything below. Read it straight through, once, without stopping at unknown words and without looking anything up. Then come back here. About this text The text is called Une journée à Paris — a day in Paris — and it follows a history student called Claire from seven in the morning until eleven at night. It was written for this course and it is not an adaptation of anything. That matters for two reasons. First, it is honest about its own artificiality. Every verb in it is in the present tense, because the present is all you have been taught, and a real French text of this length would use at least three past tenses. Second, its vocabulary was chosen so that roughly a third of the content words are cognates you can read without help. A genuine French text would not be so generous. You will meet genuine texts from the second phase onwards, and the first one you meet will feel much harder than this. That is not a step backwards; it is the point of building the habit here first. The text has eight paragraphs and 420 words. It is licensed for reuse, like everything in this course, and the reference at the end of this lesson gives the terms. How much of it did you already know? Go back to the first paragraph and count. Of the content words in it — the nouns, verbs and adjectives, not the articles and prepositions — how many did you understand on the first reading? Most readers at this point recognise between a half and two thirds. The reason is visible if you list them. In the first paragraph, a third of the text was free. Below are the transparent words from the whole text, grouped by why they are transparent. Nothing in this table needs a gloss; it is here to be counted, not learned. Why it is transparent Words in this text Identical spelling in English taxi , station , menu , service , total , simple , silence , question , table , place , dessert , patience , statue , omelette , direction , restaurant , culture , photos , monuments , addition A letter or a few letters different calme , hôtel , violon , café , guitare , appartement , université , professeur , salade , restaurant , culture , région , fontaine , marbre , monuments , cathédrale , touristes , photos , température , soupe , dictionnaire , palais , carte Built from a suffix rule you learned in 2.2 and 2.3 révolution Verb whose English cousin is visible prépare , passe , arrive , cherche , regardent , entre , répond , consultent , téléphone , range , pense , traverse , descend , reste That is sixty words of the text that cost you nothing, out of about a hundred and eighty content words. A third of the text was free, and none of it was free because the text is easy: it is free because English spent six centuries borrowing from French. One warning, and it is the reason the cognates volume ends with false friends. Four words in that table do not mean here what they look like. Une place in the first paragraph is a space or a spot, not a town square in this context and not usually a place in the general English sense. Consulter une carte in paragraph 6 means to look at a map; une carte is a map or a card, and only in a restaurant is it a menu. L'addition in paragraph 4 is the bill in a restaurant, not a sum. And range in paragraph 5 is the verb ranger , to put away or tidy: Claire puts her books away. Recognising a word is not the same as knowing it, and the gap between the two is where the work of the next fifty lessons lies. Reading it a second time, paragraph by paragraph Now read it again, slowly, one paragraph at a time, with the notes below. Do not look for a translation; look for the grammar you have been taught, because seeing it work in continuous prose is what turns a rule into a reflex. Paragraph 1. Six sentences, all of them built on the pattern from lesson 4.1: subject, verb, then the rest. Notice that every noun arrives with an article, and that the articles are doing the work you learned about in 4.2. The definite article marks what the paragraph treats as already known — the morning, the city, the street — and the indefinite marks what is being introduced: a woman, a dog, a taxi, a musician. English does the same thing with the same two words, so this costs you nothing; but French will not let you drop the article the way English does in coffee shops open at seven . Paragraph 2. Here the adjectives start to move. In un petit appartement the adjective comes before the noun: it is one of the short list that lesson 4.4 told you precede it. In