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11/30/2007 Entry: "Comprehension"

My Early Birthday Present from Julie is a good one: an oral comprehension book with CD. Definitely good, because listening is the opposite of what I do best -- just ask Julie.

And it's pretty exiting, the dialogs in the book. Why last chapter, a girl asked the waiter at the café out on a date. Before that, people were quite surprised at how much younger Robert's wife is than him.

But this chapter I was less than excited to learn that today, the 15th of June, was their 25th anniversary. Numbers are a real challenge in French for beginners, and that was the theme for the chapter.

There must have been a power outage on the day they made up the numbers, because the tens only go up to 60. That is, after soixante-neuf (69), they just keep on with soixante-dix (sixty-ten) for seventy. I should have seen it coming though: in the teens, French has elegant single words for eleven, twelve, through sixteen. Then for some reason, they just threw up their hands and went with ten-seven, ten-eight, etc for 17, 18, 19. So we are at seventy-one, or rather, sixty-eleven and climbing. Then, after you finally get to sixty-ten-nine, logic steps out for a quick smoke break while we find are selves stuck with a Lincoln-esque "four-score". Four-twenty, that is.

Four-twenty-and-one, four-twenty-two, all the way to four-twenty-nine, and thennnnn....

Four-twenty-ten -- of course. So when you get to ninety-nine, you say quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, or four-twenty-ten-nine. What's that plus one?

Cent.