Thursday, November 15, 2007

Mo sno!


Snow in park
Originally uploaded by hellomizk
It has been snowing on and off here for three or four days and I just cannot get over how beautiful it is. Seeing this out the window every morning makes it difficult to have a bad day - despite NaNoWriMo trying to get me all discouraged...

I have reached the halfway point in my wordcount - over 25k words done. Whew! I'm still not feeling my novel but at least I now have less left to write than I have written to date...I guess. I'm doing a stiryfry for dinner tonight and then hopefully knocking out another one thousand words, though that may not happen as Mr K just called me and reminded me today is late shopping day - hurrah! For those of you outside of Fribourg, on Thursday all our stores are open until 9:30 or so rather than until 7 so we get to go shopping and it has become kind of a weekly ritual for us. In Virginia, we used to hit Target for late night shopping all the time and we have notice since we moved that we spend a lot less money when the stores close early. Tonight, though, we shop!

On a completely unrelated note, I have a question for any of you French speakers: So, as you know, language books leave out all sorts of unwritten contextual meanings of phrases. I want to be able to apologize for not speaking French when I have to tell people I don't speak French. I have seen "Je suis desole" and "Je regrette" (I know I'm missing some accent marks...) used interchangeably in my books, but I have a feeling there are slight differences. Which one is a less serious apology, as in "I'm sorry I don't speak your language" and which is a more serious sorry, as in "I'm sorry I just stepped on your dog/child/expensive fur coat"? Thanks in advance for helping me look moderately less silly!

3 comments:

Kasia said...

More Snow! YAY! I'm home today wanna come for a tea and chat? Evening sale is always a good thing about Fribourg, especially when one has to work all day long. They have the same in Bern, where many more shops are open. Anyhow, to your French, as you know my French isn't much better but I learned this one tiny sentence which makes their faces bright up: (no idea if spelling is correct, but to hell with that!) Pardon, mon France ca tres petit. which means more or less I'm sorry but I speak a tiny French. For more useful phrases grab my hubsand and force him to teach you :D
Oh, congrats on 25k+ That's soooo great!

parks said...

ok, talked to my native french speaker at work, and he says...

I would say "Je suis desole, mais je ne parle pas francais" .... or just, "Desole, je ne parle pas francais".

"Je regrette" is more formal.

Hope that helps!

Jen said...

What a relief! I've been saying something to the effect of what Parks advised for a few months now - good to know I haven't been messing that one up too badly! Of course, what could be more convincing to someone of your inability to speak the language than not even being able to say THAT correctly?? :-)