help

lateasever

ok heres what i need. how the hell do you write a short story in french.
its supposed to be around 300 words. i cant put a sentence together. what the hell can i do?
i cant even find general essay type phrases on the net that i could throw in.
help.

Red Alert

Il a dix ans...

kittenkiller

Plagerise?(sp is awful, sorry)

lateasever

no you see they start you off with some crap intro, and then you have to continue. for example: youve have to mind your neighbours cat, but one day you lose it and(in french)......... i just have no french vocab and cant write anything above a damn basic french sentence. i doubt i could learn off some random french story and just throw it in like..

and then the cat died, and i went to aiga napa on the rip and then... continue with my learnt off story,
(although where would i get a good french story that teachers wouldnt recognise)

i mean i couldnt do that, could i? ...

kittenkiller

Try one of those aimed at children sites/books.

They're really basis & if you look up one or two 'grown-up'words, you might just pull it off!

arbeitsscheuer

Babelfish

This is a nifty little tool that will allow you to input your story in English and with a mere click of a button will translate it into any of a number of languages, including French.

It ain't perfect - sometimes the grammar and word order is completely FUBAR, but if you're as screwed as you say you are, this will definitely help.

Cecilia

Gimme some sentences in english if u're really stuck and Ill translate then for you. Im more or less fluent. I've translated ur last story into french (and made a few changes).
Mon dieu! J'ai perdu le chat ! Je ne peux pas trouver mon chat. Elle a disparu. Je téléphone mon ami et demande son aide en trouvant le chat. Nous passons trois heures recherchant le chat, mais hélas nous ne pourrions pas la trouver. Ainsi nous sommes allés à Ayia Napa des vacances, et avons bu un bon nombre d'alcool.

Kevin_rc_ie

Je téléphone mon ami et demande son aide en trouvant le chat.

I would have written J'ai téléphoné mon ami et demandé...

lateasever

no, you see the problem is this (sorry i didnt specify) its for an exam, and they could start the story with anything......... i mean anything. so i guess the most i could do is throw in some random phrases but theyll probably mark me bad cos the context will be all wrong

but thanks cecilia that was incredible. i love it when you talk french to me

Mr.Nice Guy

Just learn a bunch of phrases. For example:

A mon avis - In my opinion
On ne peut pas nier que - One cannot deny that
Sans doute - without a doubt

And so forth...

Cecilia

Here's a few more...
Il est vrai pour dire (It is true to say...)
Dans mon expérience (In my experience)
Je suis d'accord complètement avec l'expression.. (I completely agree with the phrase)

P.s Kevin_rc_ie you were right in your correction of my sentence. I haven't used french since my leaving cert (3 years ago), so my grammar and spelling has gone down the drain.

Vainglory

Ahhh, brings back the memories of first year French.

You're on about the Rédaction as far as I can tell...

Might as well stop worrying now because it's piss easy, as long as you have that big beast Oxford-Hachette dictionary that they make you buy at the start of the year, the REALLY big one. If you don't have it, you can get it in Modern Languages (I think that's what its called) in town, which is up the road that has Knobs and Knockers on the corner, off Nassau Street.

You're allowed to take this dictionary into the exam, which totally saved my life. I didn't do a single rédaction all year, the first one I even attempted was in the exam. You don't know what the story of the little story is going to be, but it doesn't really matter. Whatever it is, just grab the trusty oul brick of a dictionary, and start looking up words like "a" and "the" and "me", just really common words. Along with the definition and translation, they have handy little short, idiomatic, grammatically correct, creative-writing esque sentences that you can use in your mini-essay thing. Just grab as many as you want out of the dictionary, and start thinking how you can link them into what you have to write about.

It'll take you the whole time of the exam but its worth it. Just combine that with the French you know yourself (minimal, in my case anyway) and work the plotline of your story around the sentences that you're taking out of the dictionary. That's what I did. I reckon 75% of my essay was directly stolen from the dictionary, and 25% was my own ****. Because so much of it was straight from the dictionary, it was all grammatically correct and spelt right and made lovely use of awkward subjunctive tenses etc.

And the best thing about all that? It's 100% legal

I got 52 in French in first year, not by any means brilliant but I missed the aural exam so was down 11% before I even sat the exam. No bother to ya at all!

(I also hadnt read any of the plays or novels and somehow passed that paper, so if you're screwed here as well, don't despair!)

Right...back to cramming for these damned 2nd year exams

RagShagBill

On ne peut pas nier que - One cannot deny that

That phrase doesn't actually take the "pas" - I don't know why, but when pouvoir is followed by nier, you leave out "pas".

Mr.Nice Guy

RagShagBill wrote:

That phrase doesn't actually take the "pas" - I don't know why, but when pouvoir is followed by nier, you leave out "pas".

Are you sure? I remeber reading that word for word in the first few pages of the French Leaving Cert papers and they had loads of phrases such as the one I mentioned.

Cecilia

I don't think it does drop the pas either. On ne peut nier que sounds strange. I def think its on ne peut pas nier que. Also if you take out the pas, you'd have to take out the ne too, so it would just be on peut nier que, which is definetly not right.

lateasever

think ill just be leaving that phrase, cool?

vainglory appreciate the advice, im gonna be filling that dictionary with vocab.

they better not check the thing

Kevin_rc_ie

lateserver u'r actually in college?

Vainglory

Don't write anything in the dictionary yourself! They flick through them randomly.

Just use the stuff that's already in there. Loads of little sentences and phrases.

rainbow kirby

Lateasever - aren't you the guy who called people suckers earlier in the year for doing work during the year?
Karma...

RagShagBill

I don't think it does drop the pas either. On ne peut nier que sounds strange. I def think its on ne peut pas nier que. Also if you take out the pas, you'd have to take out the ne too, so it would just be on peut nier que, which is definetly not right.

Meh, my grinds guy told me so. He lived in France for 10 years. But it could well be a colloqial thing. Yeah, put the pas in just in case.

lateasever

meh meh meh meh meh,
is there a fu*king pot of gold at the end of your rainbow kirby,
meh meh meh


sorry