Bonjour!

Hello everyone!
So here we go, the first step on my road to fluency! Well, sort of.

For this week's blog, I'm capitalizing on the fact that this is a new series, so I thought I'd write a little introduction for myself, then go through and explain what it all means. Talking about yourself is also a staple of language exams, of course, so it's all useful stuff!

Bonjour! Je m'appelle Mark. 
J'ai trente-cinq ans, et j'habite à Bicester. Je suis né à Witney, et j'habitais là jusqu'à l'année dernière. 
Je suis marié, et ma femme s'appelle Jemma. Nous avons une fille, qui s'appelle Phoebe, qui a presque sept mois. Elle n'est pas de tout repos, mais tout de même nous l'adorons. 
Je suis fonctionnaire. Je travaille à Oxford. Je travaille là depuis dix-sept ans. Il paie bien, mais je ne l'aime plus - il m'ennuie aujourd'hui.

So here we go!

For my first entry on a learning French blog, this is fairly complicated stuff. We've got three tenses, with a variety of uses of pronouns, adjective agreements, pronominal verbs, negation and idioms. Having been over it a couple of times, I think it's all correct, but if you know better, please feel free to leave a comment and let me know!

J'ai trente-cinq ans, et j'habite à Bicester. Je suis né à Witney, et j'habitais là jusqu'à l'année dernière.
This opening is probably the most complicated, as we've got three tenses on show - the present tense, the past-perfect tense (passé composé) and the imperfect tense. To start with, "J'ai" (I have) is the correct way to give your age - you're saying "I have x years" rather than "I am x years old". In my case, I have 35 years under my belt! "J'habite à" is how you say where you live - you use the preposition à when talking about being in a town, as is the case here.

"Je suis né" is our first taste of the past tense - the passé composé. Grammatically speaking, a "perfect" action is a completed one, and so the passé composé is the perfect past, because it describes an action that happened once, at a definite moment in time, and is now complete. I should probably think about a separate post about this, but anyway! For now, "je suis né" translates to "I was born", though don't dwell on the fact that there is a "was" in there!

"J'habitais" is our second past tense, the imperfect. If a perfect action has happened and is over with, an imperfect action is one that took place over a period of time in the past (but has now finished). It is therefore used with habitual or continuous past actions, and often equates to the English "was" (which is why I said not to dwell on the earlier translation!) "J'habitais là" means "I lived there", the implication being the action (living) was habitual.

Je suis marié, et ma femme s'appelle Jemma. Nous avons une fille, qui s'appelle Phoebe, qui a presque sept mois. Elle n'est pas de tout repos, mais tout de même nous l'adorons. 
So here, I talk a little bit about the family! I am married with a baby daughter, who is almost seven months old (at the time of writing!) I do like to throw in these odd words, like "presque" (almost) and "jusqu'à" (until) in the previous section!

We have an idiom next, "elle n'est pas de tout repos". It means, I am reliably informed, "she's a handful", though literally translated it comes out as "she is not all restful"! I love learning French idioms, as it makes me feel like I'm producing more authentic French. Another great idiom, which is fairly widely used from what I understand, is "tout de même", which means "all the same".

Finally, in this section, let's talk about pronouns! These little words stand in for nouns to avoid repetition in a sentence. Words like "it" in English have a whole plethora of variations in French, depending on the situation at hand. "Nous l'adorons" means "we adore her" - rather than saying "we adore our daughter" or similar, the "her" replaces the "our daughter". Pronouns are another topic that really need their own blog post, as there are all manner of different rules to be observed with their use, but here, I've replaced "notre fille" (our daughter) with "la" (her), which is a direct object pronoun, which then elides with the "adorons" because that word starts with a vowel. This blog is already getting fairly complicated, so I don't want to go too much into this now! This is definitely one of those areas where it becomes painfully apparent that, in order to learn a foreign language, you need first to understand your own on a much more visceral level!

Je suis fonctionnaire. Je travaille à Oxford. Je travaille là depuis dix-sept ans. Il paie bien, mais je ne l'aime plus - il m'ennuie aujourd'hui.
Here, I'm talking about my work ("travaille"). In French, a job title doesn't need an indefinite article before it, so when I say "I'm a civil servant", that is simply "je suis fonctionnaire" and not "une fonctionnaire". As an interesting aside, all French nouns are either masculine or feminine, and aside from a few obvious ones (such as "father" and "brother" being masculine, referring as they do to men), there is really very little rhyme or reason behind why they are masculine or feminine. The word for civil servant is "une fonctionnaire", and it doesn't matter whether the person is a man or a woman - it's the noun that matters. So while I am a man, my job title is a feminine noun!

Here's an interesting word: "depuis". It means "since" or "for", and that's how I've used it here - I have worked in Oxford for seventeen years. However, while in English we use the past tense, I have worked", in French, when you use "depuis", you need the present tense - in this case, "je travaille". It's another part of learning a language that is both fascinating and infuriating, as we often have such different ways of expressing ourselves!

Finally, I'm expressing my thoughts on the job - "it pays well, but I no longer like it - it bores me nowadays". We've got a bit of negation going on here - "je ne l'aime plus" ("I no longer like it"). To make a verb negative, you surround it with, generally, "ne ... pas", though there are a whole host of adverbs that you can use in the place of "pas" to give more information. Here, I've used "ne ... plus", which often means "no more", though can also mean "no longer".
For extra bonus points, I've also had another pronoun in there - rather than saying "I don't like the job any more", I have gone for "I don't like it", so using the pronoun "le" that then elides with "aime" as we saw earlier.

So there we are! My first entry on my journey to learning French. Like I said in my previous post, I do have some history with the language, so my first example of written French is fairly complex in grammatical terms, but I hope I've been able to explain things in as clear and concise a way as possible! If any of it has confused you, do let me now in the comments, and I'll seek to enlighten you! I'm not an expert - I'm still learning, too! - but I'm always keen to talk about this stuff!

I think I'm going to try to get a couple more blogs written soon, about some of the grammatical points that have already been thrown up in this post. Stay tuned for more!