Reading in Sallanches

Wow! What an amazing weekend. A time to for us to brush up on our French (well, more like a crash course for me), do a little reading, eat AMAZING food, ski in the Alps, do some sight-seeing, and to just relax.

As I mentioned we did some reading, and I had a crash course in French. I first learned how to count to 10 (which if you look at the spelling, sounds NOTHING like it looks), and then since French is a Romance language and so is Spanish (which I had three years on back in high school), I thought it would be kind of fun to do some reading to learn some more French. I was pointed upstairs to a collection of TinTin books. Patrick recommended Objectif Lune (Objective Moon) which he had read in English as a child. So I figured why not. Sounds like a good choice.

The book was great. And I actually understood most of it. Although I will I admit I used the pictures A LOT. However, I had forgotten what it was like to spend a long time reading a 'small' book.

Let me explain. I'm a fast reader. Years of reading for pleasure has helped, and it is not uncommon for me to go through 50 - 150 books during the summer depending on how much time I have on my hands. (My library card gets a lot of workout during the summer, if you couldn't guess.) I upgraded to large (adult) books at a young age, so it was a trip down memory lane to spend more than one hour reading a 60 page book. I had flashbacks to memories of reading under the covers late at night just to finish the story. I finished the story after 2.5 days of reading.

Another thing I learned with French; pronouncing the words are easier for me if I've had something to drink. As I mentioned I took Spanish in high school where every letter is pronounced. In French, you seem to drop half the letters when you are pronouncing the word, and there are no 'hard' sounds (or at least what I would classify as a hard sound). So it was easier to forget the ingrained habit of pronouncing every letter when I'd had something to drink.