I thought I posted this more than a week ago but it is showing up as a "draft" in my post list, so I'm just adding it now. Additional reading for tonight!
I wrote most of this blog post a few days ago but forgot about it and never posted it. Now I need to change some of what it said because some of it is no longer relevant...
I've been proud of myself this week because I've gotten back into running, and I've actually been running longer distances than I've done in a long time. It's really nice to go running along the river, and I've been running with Eve, so that keeps me motivated. My goal is to keep it up until it's time to go home so I'm in shape to keep running this summer. Except today it got super cold again, so I definitely skipped the run.
Until today, one of my tutoring students was a girl named Léa. She's about my age she wants to join the French Navy. Léa called me today to let me know she'd been accepted into the next round of interviews for the post she is applying to. She wants to stop our classes since she doesn't have a whole lot of time before the interviews and needs to focus completely on what she wants to talk about (in English) during them; she'll just be studying constantly on her own now. We'd gone through all the major things she needs to talk about in her lessons, so I really hope it all helps her get the position she wants! I'll miss seeing her twice a week though!
Léa was also been super helpful in teaching me slang and other useful things about French. Last week she actually taught me some slang native to Bordeaux. For those of you who actually know a bit of French, I'll write it below. If you don't know French...I'm sorry! I'll translate - but some of this slang is only used in Bordeaux, so I'd have to translate it for French people as well.
Excuse the vulgarity here, it's purely for learning purposes:
This all started because Léa said, "Je suis parêt" which meant nothing to me. When I asked, she told me it essentially means "Je suis prête" which is "I'm ready" but parêt is a word native to this area.
Furthermore, in French, a popular curse word is putain, which can mean just about any English curse word you want it to - goddamn, shit, fuck, you name it. You can also make is particularly vulgar by saying putain de merde (basically double the vulgarity; the closest equivalent in vulgarity is probably motherfucker). In the Bordeaux region, they often substitute putain with punaise. Punaise works well because it sounds fairly similar to putain - but in reality it means "stink bug."
You can also use the word anki (or anqui) which also stands in - and is apparently used only in this region of France.
There's also the word gavé which can be used in place of super, so instead of saying something is "super bon!" (really good) you can say it's "gavé bon!" Gavé can also double as a verb, gaver, which can replace énerver, or "to annoy." No idea why gavé can be used in such different circumstances.
But to bring that all together, in Bordeaux you could say, "Anki, ça me gave!" (Putain, ça m'énerve! for my French-speakers) and only people from Bordeaux would unerstand you. Léa told me that she once said that in the north of France and no one had any idea what she was talking about.
So there's your lesson about slang from the southeast of France.
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