another quickie…
…and sans pictures this time, the connection at my park is super flaky right now. Life these days is full of work and frisbee and not much else. European club championships are in two weeks in London, and since the beginning of September it’s been double practice both weekends, practice Monday and Wednesday nights, and team meeting last Tuesday night. This, together with my new rule that we can’t speak English in my office (Jan is maybe not so happy about this), and going out to dinner with French friends from the lab, means I’ve been listening to and speaking more French than ever before. It’s really good. I can understand a lot more, though speaking is always the last to come.
For two hours in the morning, I work at my apartment on grammar, vocabulary, written expression, and oral comprehension, out of books I bought after my course was finished. The grammar and oral expression books are pretty much the same, but the vocabulary and written expression books are both for French speakers I think – pretty advanced vocabulary. My dad gave me a huge French-English dictionary for my birthday and it’s coming in handy. This is one area that I think books are so much better than the internet. There’s something really nice about flipping through a dictionary, seeing words that catch your fancy, cross-referencing them, looking at the special boxes with unique linguistic notes.
I finished my John Grisham in French (which really wasn’t that good a novel, even in French) and am about 1/3 of the way through “Les Trois Mousquetaires” (which those with good memories will remember from my online profile for The Stranger). I’ve also finished the second volume of Proust and am on to “The Guermantes Way”. I must note that Proust in English is much harder than Dumas in French. Alyosha also gave me a book by Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker writer, about his ex-pat years in Paris, called “Paris to the Moon”, and it’s wonderful, I wish I could write like that. He describes things perfectly, like how the ambulances sound plaintive here – expect an excerpt soon.
I leave you with a great article by Krugman that nonetheless does not answer the question posed in the title: How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? In another life, I’d be an economist. Seems like there’s a lot left to be discovered in that field. The very messiness might frustrate me, though.