Reference
French
By and large, universities in English-speaking countries no longer offer direct curricular access to academic French. Instead, the French majors spend three years learning to get on and off the bus with fluency and grace, and the majors in other subjects simply ignore French scholarship in their fields. In that vacuum, anything the self-student can pick up is welcome. We offer by way of assistance:
Preface. A few general tips about the way French works, and about how the Dictionnaire and Readings sections are set up.
Mots Français. The little French one knows should at least be memorable. By great good fortune, it happens that France has always valued the sort of wit that produces quotable sayings (mots), and these sayings in turn make ideal mnemonics. Here is a selection:
13c 14c 15c 16c 17c 18c 19c 20c
Readings. There are paragraphs in French that every Sinologist, whether as such or as a student of the past, should know by heart. Here are a few of them:
Culture
Pascal: Thoughts on Writing (1662)
Fontenelle: Ancients and Moderns
Langlois: The Importance of Philology (1898)
Bloch: Doubt (1944)
Bloch: The Persistence of the Past (1944)
Bloch: The Zone of Myth (1944)
Chavannes: The Great Embarrassment (1900)
Chavannes: The Role of Szma Tan (1900)
Maspero: The Romance of Su Chin (1925)
Maspero: Su Chin (1929)Dictionnaire. The other angle of attack is by learning words. You already know the cognates and the special Sinological vocabulary, so you are almost there. By picking out function words in the Mots and the Readings, and by noting the frequency curve of French in general, one might come up with the following lists, for browsing at odd moments:
A B C Co D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S So T U V W X Y Z
Personalities. The style of French and the style of French people are somehow connected; a sense of either can help with the other. We cannot go into great detail, but here are a few people who figure in the above materials:
Blaise Pascal
Marc Bloch
Edouard Chavannes
Henro Maspero
Paul Pelliot
Charles de GaulleAnd (speaking of De Gaulle), should you suddenly find yourself about to visit France, here is your emergency kit:
Practical French
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30 Nov 2005 / Contact The Project / Exit to Reference
