My French prof runs an email list of… well, a mixture of humour, observations and such, the sort that many people forward to your email. The good thing for me is that a lot of it is in French and try as I might, I often have to really work at reading it.
If I don’t understand a word, I’ll open google and translate it. If I still don’t understand it, I’ll translate a sentence. One word in the last email was “entuber”. Google didn’t know the english translation so I search the web. Entuber = to con, apparently commonly used though colloquial. The web site I found the answer on had an advert to “Learn French in 10 days”. Well, clearly I’ve not been trying hard enough. I followed the link to find out more (always looking to improve, to think I’ve spent years trying, on an off, to `parler en plus francais` [Sic]*) so I had to find out more.
The course contains a very comprehensive ‘More than 200 hours learning’…. Well, I’ve learn’t enough maths to know that 200 hours / 10 days = 20 hours per day of learning. Clearly I’ve been limiting myself by requiring more than 4 hours per day for sleep, eating, washing and such.
*[sic] because I know the grammar is wrong, the spelling is wrong, but that’s how I’d say it. Full marks for effort, ‘nil point’ for grace 🙂