Saturday, October 20, 2007

Sarah's Mini-Challenge Read A Book...

Sarah's mini-challenge is to take an hour (including the time it takes to find it) to read a book in a foreign language. My native language is English. So the book I'll be trying to work through a little bit at a time is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland translated into French, Adventures d'Alice au pays des merveilles. I've had two years of high school french (way back in 94-95 and 95-96...and several semesters of college french way back in 96-97. So I'm hopeful that I'll be able to recognize a few of the basic verbs and most of the pronouns.

I found the translation--it took a good twenty or so minutes--doing a google book search. At first I was trying to find it just using the normal English search engines and terms. Then I gave up and tried the link so kindly provided by Sarah. I searched for Lewis Carroll and after sorting through five or six links that didn't get me what I wanted, I finally arrived at my destination. (Funny, how they thought it would be helpful to have like twelve random pages throughout this book. Like reading page 36, then page 67 then page 92 would help someone figure the story out.)

"La belle avance," pensait Alice, "qu'un livre sans images, sans causeries!" (1)

Il n'y avait rien la de bien etonnant, et Alice ne trouva meme pas tres-extraordinair d'entendre parler le Lapin qui se disait: "Ah! j'arriverai trop tard!" (2)

Un instant apres, Alice etait a la poursuite du Lapin dans le terrier, sans songer comment elle en sortirait. (3)

To sum up, I tried to read about the first eight or ten pages of the book. But my French is too rusty. It was like reading and it being blah blah blah blah with blah blah blah she blah blah blah eyes blah blah blah but.

2 comments:

Dewey said...

Ha ha blah! Blah blah blah cute. Blah blah and blah blah funny!

Sarah Dillon said...

well done Becky!! It may have been all blah, but hey, you tried :) have fun with the rest of the read-a-thon, hope that's all the blah out of the way for you :)