Yikes.

I sat down and listened to the Ottawa Citizen interview with Dion and I must tell you, there were a couple of problems.

• There were many annoying blips in the audio, making it difficult to hear at times.
  
• The microphone being used was terrible, so the voices were all echo-ey and tinny.
  
• Sometimes Dion was speaking either in tongues or so quickly or both, that whatever was being said was completely unintelligible.
  

That being said, like other people I found myself trying hard to stay awake listening to it.

I offer these nuggets of wisdom from the man who would be Prime Minister. Some of them I got myself, some I got from Kate's site, and some from Olaf.

"No, I must say I have always been a lover for nature...um, love with a nature and, as a Quebec city kid it's not difficult to be in the wood -- twenty minutes and you are, it's a beautiful lake in the woods, and I love that, and I'm always reading and very concern about protection of nature and involved and so on..."

After, Olaf goes into some good analysis about what this all amounts to. Some of his observations:

"* Conjunctions and articles: he says he's "a lover for nature"; "not since the last weeks"; and "I will be in competition with the Budweiser".

* Verb choice: he says, for example, that scientists are saying that 400 chemicals "request action right away", as opposed to "require".

* Plural nouns: he said "there are beautiful lake in the wood" around Quebec city; and refers to "these fourteen years old kid"."

If you want to see more, and I suggest it as good reading, go to his blog post about it. Onto mine.

"Now I was on the driving seat for the environment..." (Must have been painful.)

"When I decided to come in this race after the defeat..." (Wow, what a dirty race.)

"This is what I have done since a month..." (common mistake, because in French when you have been doing something for a month, you say "depuis un mois" but nonetheless it's something that should be taught to new speakers of English.)

"I've always been a lover for nature."

"I came, as you know, in politics, because my country was in danger to fall apart." (2 big errors, and both errors that should be evident.)

"Today there is a report saying that the provinces don't share information between themself." (Singular, and a word that does not exist. And "between" refers to only 2; any more than that and it should be "among" or "amongst".)

"They have difficulty to compare themself, because they are in competition, they don't like to be seen as less good than the other one."

I understand that, for doing this (in fact for having this blog at all), Jarrett (whom I respect a bunch) will say I'm being a douchebag, and maybe so, but politics is fought in the gutter. I speak french better than Jarrett says he does (but my intuition tells me that he speaks better than he lets on), and in return I know what mistakes are common with what level of francophones when speaking English. Some of the mistakes, like Olaf mentioned, are common ones--but they, unfortunately, stem from thinking in French and translating to English--they're idiomatically idiotic. Similarly, there are idioms in English that just don't go into French--ça ne se dit pas--and in doing so you expose yourself, rightly so, to criticism.

And besides, as Kate points out, it's not like it hasn't been done before. In the end, I'm okay with being a douchebag. Why? Because it's fun.