Have been trying to teach myself French. While on a 36 mile ride yesterday I started to compose a poem and with the help of Google Translate got it into French.
(copyright privileges retained.)

Je suis une machine.
mouvement rythmique désensibilise
toutes mes pensées.
Il n'y a pas de politique
Aucune religion
Pas de culpabilité ni la douleur
Les pistons de mes jambes
Travailler sans douleur dans
la répétition mécanique
Parfaitement en phase avec
le sifflement de pneus sur la chaussée
Comme une locomotive sur les rails
Ma tâche ne se déplace sur.

Translated:

I am a machine.
rhythmic motion desensitizes
my every thought.
There is no politics
No religion
No guilt nor grief
The pistons of my legs
work without pain in
mechanical repetition
perfectly in tune with
the hiss of tires on pavement
Like a locomotive on rails
my only task is moving on.

Even though my daughter majored in French at Smith and my son is a missionary in French Quebec and is fluent, I don't speak a word of French. Going to start a Rosetta stone course shortly so I can converse with them. Nice in the translation though, Sculptor. I'd want a fluent speaker to review it since I would misuse something and stick my 12 EEEE foot in my mouth, and it does not taste good at all!

Bill

Nice

You are a machine.

I am a dishrag. Can you compose a poem about a dishrag?

Sorry. Does not inspire me to creative effort.

Only way to learn French is go there and not understand a thing they are saying and then find out they have just offered Free beer for the night. You quickly learn then.

Studied French at school- passed all my exams- spent a couple of months there and then forgot all about it. Then in 75 started racing out there and wanted to start my own business. Quickly learnt how to communicate and it is a fallacy to say that every other person speaks English.

But as to composing Poems- Forget it. I may have been able to speak the Language- read and possibly write it- but to get that embroiled in the language would not have left enough for the better parts of French Life--Like being educated in the finery's of their food and wine. and after a few sessions of the wine lessons- the nearest I ever got to poetry was singing the dirty ditties about the "La Grande Mere".

I refuse to learn any language that so arbitrarily assigns masculinity or femininity to EVERY D...ARN THING, and requires the sentence to support that arbitrary mascufemilinity!

That part gets to me too. Even English goes too far. I think there should be a gender neutral word for he or she instead of he/she. There are so many times when the gender of a person doesn't matter in a sentence, but you have to use one or the other, or do the slash thing.

One can always use "one" or construct the sentence in such a way that you use the plural and thus would use they or them(which is gender neutral).

Really? I find linguistics to be the interesting part of languages.

That is true, but learning about a language, and learning to speak it are two different breeds of cow. French is the language I took in High-School, but about all that's left of it is Un Deux Trois and Merci Beaucoup.

Japanese has a much more sensible linguistic structure, but the different byzantine politeness levels more than make up for the difficulty in French. Maybe I should learn a less Germanified Romance language, like Spanish, Portugese, or Italian...

C'est manifique mais ce n'est pas la querre:c'est de la folie.

Me too. Linguistics 101. I learned a smattering of Romanian, which is a romance language. It's weird how a change in locale messes with the pronunciation.

To wit: Fr for bread is pain, pronounce pah(n), kind of swallowing the last 'n'.
Ro for bread is paine, pronounced buuweenay. Romanians mix their 'p' and 'b' and they put a diddly-do over the 'a' which changes the sound to an 'uh' or something like it.

I thought it was interesting.

Did you mean: C'est manifique mais ce n'est pas la guerre:c'est de la folie.