Monday, July 14, 2008

nous bouffonnons



In an effort to overcome my laziness and practice conjugating French
verbs I revisited the verb2verbe website. This website quizzes you on over 4000 French verbs.

After doing a few
of the conjugation quizzes I decided that yes I'd like to do a "random test"and learn 10 new verbs by translating them from French to English. My laziness picked the least number of questions (20) and the present tense and hit "GO". And that's when the verb2verbe test program went buffoon on me.

My first random test gave me this gem: nous bouffonnons.
I had no clue so I just hit enter without actually entering anything. And it means we act the buffoon. I also learned another form: tu bouffonnes.

My second random test gave me an equally amusing gem
: tu suces. This means "you suck". But you should be VERY careful when using this verb. If you mean to say you don't like someone you could use "tu es nul". But if you aren't referring to candy: "sucer un bonbon" then make sure you really like the person you say this to... because it's only used in a sexual way.

The quizzes are great because you can go back and correct your mistakes,
helping you to remember the right conjugation form (instead of making the same mistakes over and over) and increasing recall on vocabulary words.

Unfortunately, the quiz has been programmed to count your translation
a mistake if you enter the meaning in the wrong order.

And since French isn't a "see and say" language (at least in my book, authors of "See it and Say it in French" Margarita Madrigal and Colette Dulac obviously disagree) it would be great
if you could actually hear the conjugations and French translations/questions. If anyone knows of a quiz that does this- please let me know!


If you want to see all the conjugation forms of bouffonner check out the le conjugeur website.


La photo (merci, m_ff) : Boule, St. Paul de Vence. Juin 2008.