The utterance, to blurt, to catch

When I used one of the FSI courses in the past they made reference to utterances, which struck me as obfuscated 1950s linguistic jargon. But the word struck a chord with me as the fundamental piece of the language acquisition puzzle that almost every course ignores. Now, utterance is defined in Oxford as "An uninterrupted chain of spoken or written language" in the linguistic sense. That's not quite the meaning that I associate with it. To me it purveys more the idea of a nugget of strung-together words that we need to be able blurt out or comprehend in our target language. It could be an idium (he's beside himself (with anger)), common phrase (gotta get the phone), or one important word surrounded by lesser ones (do you have your car with you?) The last one happened to me in Montreal when I checked into my hotel. I was following the conversation fine until the concierge blurted that one out. It's intersting because all I needed to understand was voiture to know how to answer (bien sûr que non, elles sont pour les cons!) Obviously I know the word voiture and a few thousand other French words but when I get in a conversation it's so easy to miss whole sentences because I missed the key word.

What does one do to practice saying and understanding thousands of utterances? Movies and music methinks. Getting target-language subtitles and lyrics are imperative for getting anything out of audible media. I listen to the same albums for years in my target language without understanding them, and I've watched hundreds of French movies and still don't have a clue without reading English subtitles. Imagine if I sat down with the French and wrote down the most important utterances on a flash card with the recorded audio. I could learn to use the utterance, learn to recognize it, and finally start understanding my tired out old tunes. I'm going to give this a try now with a song in French by Louise Attaque and my trusty iPhone Flash My Brain application:

Here's the first bit of Qu'est-ce qui nous tente? by Louise Attaque. I followed up to this line where I found a useful utterance:

Qu'est-ce qui nous tente ?
Qu'est-ce qui nous donne ces envies?
Qu'est-ce qui nous enchante,
qu'est-ce qui nous réveille la nuit?
Souvent souvent c'est les certitudes,
de temps en temps c'est la solitude
Très peu pour moi les habitudes
sinon J'vais passer pour un con.

"otherwise I'm going to pass for an idiot (or something more offensive)"

Seems like a good line to me. I've certainly never used this in colloquial conversation, nor would anyone but a fluent or very immersed speaker. But I should be able to summon up this line and use it when appriopriate. Obviously I don't need to imitate it completely, J'vais passer pour could be used with all kinds of things I imagine (according to google: un con, une grosse putte!, un abruti, une folle, etc., which are all pretty negative and variably offensive.)

But how do I learn to use this with a flash card? It's already evident to me what it means, so I don't need a translation. What I need is a speaking excercise where I'm somehow encouraged to use it. I think the FSI variation drills are a good model. It seems I need to record my own FSI course:

Sinon je vais passer pour un con
une grosse putte! ...............................Sinon je vais passer pour une grosse putte!
un abruti.............................................Sinon je vais passer pour un abruti.
une folle..............................................Sinon je vais passer pour une folle.
un analphabète...................................Sinon je vais passer pour un analphabète.

Awesome! I learn the utterance and reinfornce a bunch of other good vocabulary that I may or may not have known, but are obviously common since they show up at the top of the google search. So en resumé, no rather than a standard flashcard translation I need a mini FSI lesson for each phrase. I just put the phrase on the front of the card and recorded everything above (with a pause where the dots are so that I can put the phrase together when I practice.) On the back of the card I listed the left hand phrases (in case I don't understand one when I do the drill.)

Now obviously this is a lot of work, but think about all that I'm learning for my 5 minutes of effort. 1) I learned what a line of a song meant, so that I can catch it when I listen in the future. 2) I've learned the utterance and several popular variations of it. 3) I've learned the vocabulary of the variations.

Really learning a language well is not easy, but it can be a lot more fun and effective with simple techniques like that above. Now we'll see how willing I am to make more of these flash cards!