Learn French: Goal One - SparkCharts

Well, I created this blog as a sort of correlary to 43things. But in order to post to your blog from 43things, you need to give them your username and password, and there's just no way I trust them enough to do that (silly me) yet. I may give it a try later.

Anyway, I've now got "5 things" going on at 43things. One of them is "learn French". I've made a couple of entries at 43things about this goal, one talking about the learning materials I have accumulated and the other talking about the obstacles that I've encountered in the five years that I've been working on this.

I've decided that if I can cram all of the information contained in my two SparkCharts into my head, then I will probably have made a good step along the path to learning French. So this is my first Goal: to become extremely familiar with all the information in these charts.

Here I go through the French Grammar SparkChart.

Interesting, the English "gender" is French "le genre".... not to be confused with the English "genre".

French is hard because French nouns have gender, but English ones do not. In some cases, word endings help to identify the gender. I'm going to collect three words that exemplify the endings listed in SparkCharts.

Words ending with -age

• le courage = courage
  
• le dommage = shame (as in "quel dommage", "what a shame!"). It occurs to me that tant pis! means "what a pity!" and I wonder if these two phrases are used in different contexts.
  
• l'hommage = homage or tribute ("en hommage à, "to pay tribute to"). Is the liaison correct here, I wonder? (l'hommage iso le hommage)