Comment Dites-On...

One reason I'm so reticent about speaking French, even when a less intimidating opportunity arises, is that I know that you  usually can't just produce a word-by-word rendition of how you'd say it in English.  When I watch French movies or TV programs, or read a French novel, I'm always struck dumb (pardon the pun) by how different certain thoughts and concepts are expressed in French.  First, there's always the preposition problem (Do I use à or de, or some other word?).  Then there are constructions that are completely unlike any in English.  The perfect is example is the verb manquer--roughly meaning 'to miss' or 'to lack something,' but often employed in a completely different way in French.  Fortunately, in some cases the verb behaves in the same way as its English counterpart, e.g., J'ai manqué l'autobus.  (I missed the bus.)  So you're moving right along, plenty satisfied, if not smug, with the way things are going parfaitement and all of a sudden you run into something like this: Véronique me manque. (I miss Veronica).  My first interpretation of this sentence would that Veronica is missing me.  Nice to know someone is :).  But this is not the case.  I am missing Veronica.  Veronica, where are you?!  For me, the only way to get a handle on this is to make it a sort of passive structure:  Veronica is being missed by me.   

I have several native-speaking French pen-pals and all of them say: Your French is pretty good, but that's just not quite the way we'd say that.   These correspondents are also seeking my help with their English, so luckily, for a little while I'm not the one who feels incompetent.  The most frequent mistakes they make when writing me in English are very subtle ones that involve things like word order or prepositions--the very same thing that plagues us learners of French.  Time after time they've written something that it alright grammatically, but would just sound peculiar to a native English speaker.  And boy are these things hard to explain, since I've grown up using these constructions and they just come naturally.  

I guess the lesson to be learned from this is that it takes years (decades, lifetimes?) of daily practice to become truly fluent.  It's impossible to learn every oddity from a textbook or tutor, so you end up just learning a lot of these things by regularly hearing French spoken conversationally and correctly.  Though I've had years of formal training and quite a bit of self-study, when I watch La quatrième dimension on YouTube, I realize how far I have to go.  Which brings me to another road-block:  Why is it that so many English and American movies and TV shows' titles completely change when dubbed or subtitled into French?  Again, that's just not quite the way they'd say it.  

À la prochaine.