My French Verbs Book

warning: long personal story

When I was in grade four, we started learning about verbs and how to conjugate them in French class. I immedately found them very easy to learn; a nice logical system. By grade eight, we’d obviously learned much more about verb conjugation, and yet many of my classmates were struggling to understand even the basics that we had learned four years prior. Those years included many instances of me trying to explain them to others, but this can hardly be done in a few seconds or minutes.

So I gave in and decided to write it all down. I believe it took me about two weeks to finish my first version of the guide, simply entitled “French Verbs” (with my copyright, of course), and was something along the lines of eleven (8.5×11) pages. Oh, the days of writing in WordPerfect (can’t quite recall the version). The need was obviously there, because when I showed it to my French teacher (who actually cried, but that’s a longer story), and she asked if anyone wanted copies, something around 100% of the class asked for one.

I think it was extremely well done, and I continued making corrections and additions to it (okay, I went a little crazy including the many-page verb dictionary and then starting an excersize book and solutions manual…). In grade nine, my last year of taking French, I started but never completed a second edition to incorporate what we learned that year.

I didn’t totally abandon French verbs, as in my grade ten computer class (when I learned to program, and in Turing) my final project was a French verb conjugater. And a pretty good one, if you ask me 😉

It occurred to me today that it is still probably a useful resource (admittedly I haven’t seen what else is out there on the web today) and that it would be really neat to bring it back and publish it on the web.

So the question is, do I simply upload the original files (I have some of them at least) or do I convert it to HTML? I really should do the latter, but what then… should I try to reproduce the original formatting with CSS, or do I make it look good as I would design it today. And if I find my incomplete second edition, should I complete it (this would require me relearning a bunch), or leave it as is?

Fortunately, it’s not as if I have several thousand other unfinished projects to occupy my time with..