Today, I thought it was time for something of a juggernaut of a piece, one that I've been trying to get my head around for a couple of months now. When learning a language, a lot of people will tell you to use things that are familiar to you, or that you're interested in, to develop your skills - so naturally, I've been using this idea to write about one of my favourite hobbies, which I'll talk to you about today!
Mon passe-temps préféré est Warhammer 40,000, un jeu de plateau fait par Games Workshop. J'ai fait ce passe-temps depuis 2014, mais ça m'a toujours intéressé.
C'est un jeu pour deux personnes, qui chacun ont une armée composé des figurines - le plupart du hobby est de construire et de peindre ces petites figurines. C'est un investissement pécunier et temporel immense! Il y a aussi des romans qui disent l'histoire de ces armées, une histoire riche et vibrante. Le cadre de l'histoire est très sombre, très gothique et très exagéré, avec un pressentiment sinistre. J'aime lire ces romans en plus de jouer le jeu.
Il y a beaucoup de choix parmi les armées - je pense qu'il y a une trentaine au total. J'ai seulement deux armées qui sont assez complètes - mais pourtant je leur ajoute avec des nouvelles figurines tout le temps. En surcroît, j'ai sept petites armées qui sont en-cours. Mes grandes armées sont des Necrons et des Drukhari - les Necrons sont les premières figurines qui j'ai acheté d'alors.
Maintenant, je peins des Grey Knights, mon projet du jour. Ils sont une armée de l'Imperium de l'Humanité, un empire totalitaire et fanatique. Cependant, les dernières figurines qui j'ai peint sont des Blood Angels Space Marines.
La dernière fois que je l'ai joué était en janvier, avec un ami chez lui. Je jouais avec mes Drukhari, contre une armée de Chaos. Je l'ai perdu, mais c'était chouette. Warhammer 40,000 est un jeu compliqué, et il nécessite beaucoup de temps pour jouer. Il est difficile de trouver le temps de jouer, bien qu'il soit rentable de le faire.
Récemment, ils ont annoncé une nouvelle édition du jeu, qui sortira cet été. Espérons que cette édition soit géant - la dernière est assez monstre! Il y aura des nouvelles figurines pour les Necrons aussi, pour lesquelles je suis tout emballé!
Okay, here we go!
Mon passe-temps préféré est Warhammer 40,000
I'm really quite heavily into the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000 - I'm quite the nerd, it must be said! This is a British game from the 1980s, for those who don't know, played with painted plastic miniatures. Let's crack on!
C'est un jeu pour deux personnes
So, throughout this piece there are some problematic pieces of grammar, which I'm a bit worried about because I've basically been translating from English, which of course doesn't always work! But I have been using the site linguee.com to help, which is useful because it has examples within context, so that you can see how the sentence is formed when using words and expressions. Very useful!
je pense qu'il y a une trentaine au total
I've recently gone back to basics, to some degree, and have started looking at different lessons to do with numbers - moving beyond basic counting, to stuff like approximate numbers, as shown here. 'Une trentaine' is "around thirty" - interestingly, you can make any number approximate by adding the suffix -aine, which is a somehow neater way than the English "about/around" system.
J'ai seulement deux armées qui sont assez complètes
Given the choice of roughly thirty armies, the fact that I have two seems quite low really, although I am what is often called a "hobby butterfly", and move between different projects quite a lot! The next part of this sentence is quite interesting, where I talk about adding to these armies often - je leur ajoute avec des nouvelles figurines - this uses the indirect object pronoun leur because the action is adding the models (the direct objects) to the armies (the indirect objects).
La dernière fois que je l'ai joué était en janvier
This sentence does trouble me a little. "The last time I played was in January" - it troubles me because of the juxtaposition of passé composé and imparfait is something that I'm not sure would happen in actuality, but I've not been able to think of another way of saying this, so translated it literally. I mean, whereas there may well be idiomatic expressions that should be used, sometimes things do actually work, word for word...
Il est difficile de trouver le temps de jouer, bien qu'il soit rentable de le faire
This is a great sentence here, for all that the paragraph started out problematic. Warhammer 40,000 as a game is very long, and can often take an entire evening or longer to play. There are so many rules, but the immersion is always worth it. The final sentence here gives us another example here of a subjunctive trigger - 'bien que' means "although" and is one of these expressions that always requires the subjunctive to follow it.
Using the French subjunctive can be quite tricky for native English speakers, because the English subjunctive is so rarely used. Of course, it's a whole blog post of its own, but it's something that I think is worth bearing in mind when using French, that certain expressions like these require the subjunctive where the usual rules for the verb mood don't apply.
Récemment, ils ont annoncé une nouvelle édition du jeu
The final paragraph continues to throw around tenses like there's no tomorrow - a new edition of the game was announced a few weeks ago (past tense), which will come out this summer (future tense). Espérons que cette édition soit géant - the subjunctive, again! This is an idiomatic expression that I picked up from facebook, of all places! "Let's hope this edition will be great", is the translation, and given the nature of hoping here, the subjunctive is used as an expression of unreality. I'm in danger of branching off into a full-blown discourse on the subjunctive, so let's cut it short here. I'm sure, though, I'll be writing more on this soon!
Il y aura des nouvelles figurines pour les Necrons aussi, pour lesquelles je suis tout emballé!
The final sentence here is me making use of the idiomatic expression 'je suis emballé', which I mentioned in my last blog of course! Although, it's also a perfect example of how French so often differs from English, and causes problems when trying to translate. I translate this sentence as "There will also be new models for the Necrons, and I'm really excited about them!" - but that doesn't really work in French, because it's a language that's a bit more... well, fancy... than English. The sentence in French reads "There will be some new models for the Necrons as well, for which I am very excited!" I find that, when translating from English to French, you need to take a step back from conversational English, and try to be a bit more fancy. It's something that I touched upon in a previous post, where I talked about how French is a language with elegance and style - it often translates into something far more beautiful than the language into which it is being translated (not "the language it is translated into" - don't go dangling your prepositions in French, now!)
So there we have it! I'm honestly not sure about quite a lot of this blog, grammatically speaking, because of the fact that I was translating almost verbatim so much. Please do let me know in the comments if any of this ought to be corrected!
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