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It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

nytimes.com

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Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#111

Post by asark »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #90
hluska wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a sample of one, but my experience with French people has been much different. As long as I’ve been open about being a beginner (from Western Canada) who badly wants to practice, I’ve actually been quite pleasantly surprised by how hard French speakers work to make me feel comfortable. For example, just last week, I asked a French speaking couple I know to help me pronounce “de rien”. When I say it, I sound like…

> help me pronounce “derrien” Do you mean "de rien"? (As in "no problem", literally "it was nothing") I agree r's are definitely the hardest thing to pronounce in french (as an english speaker at least). I think "rire" is the hardest word in the french language

Singing along to French songs in the car finally fixed my R problem, in a matter of days. Found I could do the rolled Spanish R and even the lazy, liquid Latin R with very little practice after getting that one down, too, and I couldn't at all before.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#112

Post by eequah9L »

hluska wrote: post #95

This is anecdotal and I am a sample of one, so do with this as you will. I have learned to speak French at two particular times. When I was very young, my Grandma Yvette often spoke French to me and I spent three years in French immersion. Now, I am an adult who barely speaks the language, but I have a daughter who I badly want to bless with the French language. So, I’m learning again... I have noticed two things. Th…

> I’ll ask a stranger for money in English, but I’ll be damned if I ask a stranger to pass the cream in French.

I had this with English. Then with Russian. Now I have it with German. It goes away with practice.

Languages are hard. Keep it up, it will get better.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#113

Post by intertextuality »

salawat wrote: post #76
SomeHacker44 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In college Mandarin courses we were required to learn 30 words a day. That was a nearly impossible task for 20 year old me and required three hours of study a day on top of the 1:20 or 1:50 long daily class. To think a person more than twice that age can learn 30 words a day is, to my aged brain, ludicrous. Maybe it’s just me, but my learning ability is now vastly below what it was in my teens or even college.

So, it isn't actually. I did a short foray into learning Morse Code, and I ran into what I found to be the biggest barrier to learning new languages. The bloody lookup table phenomena. What happens is your mental representation maps the Morse sequence->your primary language character->whatever the message then actually means. This is a very high overhead mental process, and one specifically advised against by fluent…

I studied German in college, and I have been studying Korean for almost 2 years and I would say you're spot on.

The hardest thing about learning a new language is learning to think in that language, not 1. think in native language 2. transcode to target language. Not only is this quite slow, it leads to very unnatural language. English and Korean have different idioms and ways of structuring sentences.

Since I've been studying Korean for a while now I have certain thoughts I can innately express in Korean and actually have difficulty directly mapping to English.

---

However, one has to start somewhere. I can't really learn a concept in Korean without it being explained in English.. until I'm advanced enough to understand Korean grammar and word explanations in Korean.* One just has to remember that things don't map neatly although textbooks pretend like they do. Over time and exposure, you get a sense for how and when things are really used.

So the real answer is you need to just use the target language as much as you can. The only way to innately grasp a concept is by seeing it and using it.

* It's a bit like bootstrapping a compiler, isn't it?

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#114

Post by Aromasin »

bpyne wrote: post #93
Aromasin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in part it's due to very few native English speakers being multi-lingual. Rudely correcting someone on their second-language is a faux-pas for most people in the UK. From my experience, people will try to be helpful and constructive with their criticism - because lets be honest, how many native English speakers could say much more than Hello, Please and Thank You in anything but English? Conversely, I can see…

You make a fair point. I can understand fear about a loss of cultural identity. But, speaking from a strategic standpoint, if you want to preserve the language, you need to get more people speaking it. Corrections can come later. It's like a child learning a musical instrument. Rare is the child who can tolerate being stopped every few seconds with corrections. But, teach a child to play a song in a rudimentary way o…

But how are you meant to fight off bandits with your sword arm if you're travelling on the right hand side of the road?! Utterly irresponsible. /s

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#115

Post by Naga »

taejo wrote: post #89
bpyne wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An anecdote from a trip to Paris, I walked into a store to look for a gift for someone back home. After making the greeting in French, I started to explain what I was looking for. The woman stopped me. With a dramatic eye roll she said, "Speak English, pleeeease." An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon…

> An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English." I was under the impression (having never been to Quebec) that she was in fact breaking the law by doing this.

As someone who lives in Quebec, I assure you that the government does not legislate what languages people can speak. They're picky about signs and menus and whatever, but you can't tell people what language to speak. There was a motion in the legislature to urge people not use "Bonjour-Hi" as a greeting, but that's not binding, and cannot be.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#116

Post by levosmetalo »

zorked wrote: post #72
atemerev wrote: post #49

The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes. If I speak bad English (I am Russian), everybody is still happy, the worst thing can happen is I’ll get corrected, and in 99.9% of cases it’s not even that. If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjour/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)

This is very correct. English's status as an international language does wonders - you can speak in any terrible accent, get all the vowels wrong, invert word orders, ignore plurals and be wrong about every preposition and people will make an effort to understand you. Now for German, you can speak any of the awful dialects natively and it's fine. But never, never dare Hochdeutsch with with a _foreign_ accent as peopl…

> Now for German, you can speak any of the awful dialects natively and it's fine. But never, never dare Hochdeutsch with with a _foreign_ accent as people will make a point of not understanding you! Because dropping a umlaut suddenly makes an entire sentence impossible to parse!

Well, for Germany it's not about the language, it's about the fact that making any mistake that gives away that German is not your native language suddenly makes you a stupid immigrant of lower education in the eyes of the most of the natives.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#117

Post by man2525 »

Well, anecdotally, liaisons. Prior to a trip to the French part of Switzerland last year, I practiced my French pronunciations instead of learning word banks. I was able to hear much more than during my four semesters of college level French a decade ago. But, those sentences where you leave the consonant sound off the end of a word? Got me every time. I imagined that the word was different, not the pronunciation. My friend I was visiting, on the other hand, took the train to another city to participate in a French language course with other foreigners learning French as a prerequisite to employment. Immersion: Given that, his family speaking French fluently, living in a country where French is spoken slowly, and seeing Italians and Germans make mistakes in French, he could suss out the words much faster. I didn't feel outclassed, just outpracticed.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#118

Post by intertextuality »

mr_overalls wrote: post #97
SomeHacker44 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In college Mandarin courses we were required to learn 30 words a day. That was a nearly impossible task for 20 year old me and required three hours of study a day on top of the 1:20 or 1:50 long daily class. To think a person more than twice that age can learn 30 words a day is, to my aged brain, ludicrous. Maybe it’s just me, but my learning ability is now vastly below what it was in my teens or even college.

Have you ever tried the method of spaced repetition? It's astounding how efficient it can be as a tool for memorization. https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Anki may very well be one of the best applications ever made.

I have been using it for about a year and a half for Korean, and now I'm memorizing kanji characters with it. My goal is to memorize 2,136 kanji within 4-5 months and I fully believe it's possible with Anki if I don't miss a day of reviews.

However, anki is the most useless app ever if you miss reviews. 1-2 days is fine, but you're hurting yourself otherwise.

My suggestion is to change the default deck setting to order review cards first. The default is to mix new cards + review cards, but sometimes I don't have the energy to learn new the cards, leading me to skip doing the reviews.

Also the decks are very customizable, since you can add custom properties, change what shows on each front/back, and style them with css.

I plan on doing a full writeup of anki at some point.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#119

Post by linuskendall »

bpyne wrote: post #78
atemerev wrote: post #49

The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes. If I speak bad English (I am Russian), everybody is still happy, the worst thing can happen is I’ll get corrected, and in 99.9% of cases it’s not even that. If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjour/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)

An anecdote from a trip to Paris, I walked into a store to look for a gift for someone back home. After making the greeting in French, I started to explain what I was looking for. The woman stopped me. With a dramatic eye roll she said, "Speak English, pleeeease." An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon…

In this way Belgium is much better in my experience. Especially in Brussels people are really tolerant of poor French (presumably due to the two language situation).

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#120

Post by amanaplanacanal »

cced wrote: post #100
hluska wrote: post #95

This is anecdotal and I am a sample of one, so do with this as you will. I have learned to speak French at two particular times. When I was very young, my Grandma Yvette often spoke French to me and I spent three years in French immersion. Now, I am an adult who barely speaks the language, but I have a daughter who I badly want to bless with the French language. So, I’m learning again... I have noticed two things. Th…

Not to be nitpicky, but to be precise, “de rien” translates to “from nothing”. Similar expressions in english are “no worries”, “no problem”, or “you’re welcome” . As for speaking a foreign language, you need to take the jump. Know that, you are likely to be judged. However, there are people who find joy in seeing others speak their language and do so in a nurturing environment. You just need to find those people and…

Your translation is word-for-word correct, but I've never heard somebody say "from nothing" in English in a situation where you might say "no worries", "no problem", or "you're welcome". I have heard "It's nothing" though, so I think his translation is fine. Perhaps people don't use it that way in the dialects of English you know?
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