It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by adrianN » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

rjsw wrote: post #131

imtringued wrote: post #16

It's just a matter on how much time you spend learning the language. Even if you only consider the time you spent in school merely learning your own native language those school lessons will add up to thousands of hours. How many adults, who have already "learned" a foreign language, dedicate 6 hours per week purely on further improving their skills in that language for 12 years? If you are worried about not knowing…

If you listen to the evening news on TV each night you will easily get up to 6 hours per week. Look up any new words in the dictionary.

10000 hours to proficiency divided by 6 is just 1666 weeks or 32 years. That's ignoring that just listening to the news is not the deliberate practice that is supposed to be accumulated for the proverbial 10000 hours.

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

#142

Post by sa-mao » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

I have been learning French from the very beginning of my life, because my parents and everyone else considered that success in our country can only be achieved if you are fluent in it. Now I can hold a descent French conversion and I even did my engineering education in that language, but I never managed to be fully fluent in it. French is an interesting language, and I really enjoyed the countless Fantasy and sci-fi books I read, But I think I should have invested my time in learning English instead.

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

#143

Post by davidy123 » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

19690401 wrote: post #133

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…

> Consider the word “de rien”. It is so simple. Three syllables. Not that it changes your point, but "de rien" is two syllables!

It's pronounced in three syllables (de re-an) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/de_rien

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

#144

Post by oblio » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

ebg13 wrote: post #67

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!)

> If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjout/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!) These are two very different things. In my years of experience, the most likely outcome of speaking imperfect French is just that the French person switches to speaking perfect English. Not saying hello+good morning is a social sanitation faux pas viewed…

> In my years of experience, the most likely outcome of speaking imperfect French is just that the French person switches to speaking perfect English

If they're from Canada, maybe [1]. If they're from France, a decent chunk of Wallonie (French-speaking Belgium) or Romandie (French-speaking Switzerland), I doubt it. France has one of the lowest rates of English proficiency among the other developed countries in Western Europe and I know that first hand.

[1] And the average French person wouldn't consider what the Quebecois speak as French :p

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

#145

Post by jgwil2 » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #136

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…

> I may have simply run into rude people. Why did you think those people were rude, instead of, say, trying to be helpful? French is difficult to understand when spoken badly, even for natives (maybe esp. for natives). We don't understand what people are trying to say -- really. We don't try to be condescending: we truly do. not. understand. I get that foreigners / tourists may not believe it, but it is true.

Eye-rolling and interrupting are always rude.

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

#146

Post by intertextuality » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #57

sametmax wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard to them to make this mistake: "le", "la", "les" is all "the" for english natives, while verbs and adjective don't change according to plural or gender. A lot of my mistakes in spanish comes from me trying to call masculine something that is not and vice versa. French is a difficult language to learn: - many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent. - conjugations, plural,…

>French is a difficult language to learn For a native English speaker, it's one of the easiest languages to learn. https://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.g...

Here is a better resource: https://www.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/c78549.htm

Both resources list the languages according to "time to Professional Working Proficiency" level. Not native level.

Learning any language to a native degree is going to be exceedingly difficult. French has more difficult pronunciation and spelling rules, significantly moreso than Spanish or German. Even for native English speakers.

The fact that overall, learning French is easier than say Korean, does not change the fact that French has difficult pronunciation.

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

#147

Post by mi100hael » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

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…

The Koch method of learning morse code addresses that by never introducing an intermediate visual representation of the dits and dahs.

Instead, you listen to audio sequences and transcribe them directly to the characters of your language. So instead of learning the language visually, you learn to understand the sounds which is far more natural.

There's a great free site that teaches morse code in this fashion if you ever decide to give it another go: https://lcwo.net/

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

#148

Post by shay_ker » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

One thing that's really helped me learn languages is watching tv shows or movies with native subtitles. I had this revelation years ago in Spanish class. At the time, I had taken years of Spanish in school and yet I could barely speak or understand Spanish.

One day, our teacher made us watch Pan's Labyrinth with Spanish subtitles. It was such a struggle to watch, but because the movie is so good we paid attention anyway, and context clues help you along the way.

I vividly remember the next morning on the subway to school, where there were two men speaking Spanish and I suddenly realized I could understand everything they were saying. It totally blew my mind that I could finally understand Spanish!

I used this same technique years later when I lived in Italy for a summer. It was a lot of work, but I did the following:

1) Learned enough basic Italian grammar that I could translate a sentence by looking up words & conjugation rules 2) I watched Italian movies, both good and "blockbuster" ones, with English subtitles so I could understand the movie 3) Then, I re-watched the movies with Italian subtitles. If I saw/heard a sentence I couldn't immediately understand, I'd pause and hand translate it

Even though Spanish & Italian are quite similar, this was still surprisingly effective. I also enjoy watching movies, so it was also quite fun =)

There's probably some science as to why this technique works, but I don't know. It's probably because watching tv/movies is most similar to real-life conversations, as opposed to what you get in a classroom or a book. I never knew how to write an essay in Italian, but I also never cared.

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

#149

Post by cm2187 » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

atemerev wrote: post #85

renox wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes. Define sensitive? When my wife (who is Czech) or my colleague (who is Venezuelan) make French errors, I correct them the same way I correct my children: not because it is annoying me (I don't speak Czech and my Spanish is terrible!) but because I want to help them. And yes, if someone speaks bad French, I'll switch to English but that's not…

No, your attitude is fine. I am OK when somebody corrects me. When they switch to English because they think English will be comfortable for both sides, this is also fine. It is rolling one's eyes and immediate passive aggressive remarks that I hate, and they are quite common...

It might be the passive aggressive attitude itself rather than a reaction to the language. A frequent example is Parisian waiters in bistros. It is an old tradition for the waiter to be slightly cavalier with the clients, and for the clients to respond in kind. But it’s a kind of a parisian joke. Though I get how it would put off foreigners. But many other trades have their ritual (like a souk in Marrocco).

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

#150

Post by sowbug » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #136

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…

> I may have simply run into rude people. Why did you think those people were rude, instead of, say, trying to be helpful? French is difficult to understand when spoken badly, even for natives (maybe esp. for natives). We don't understand what people are trying to say -- really. We don't try to be condescending: we truly do. not. understand. I get that foreigners / tourists may not believe it, but it is true.

The reason why Parisians are so rude in this context, as I've heard from several French natives, is that time is money. Most interactions with tourists in Paris are transactional. If a shopkeeper or restaurant server can spend two minutes with one customer in not-perfect French, or 30 seconds in not-perfect English, and there is no recreational value for the Parisian to the slower choice, then the Parisian will renegotiate the discussion's language to the faster choice.

You could call that helpful if you're optimizing for fastest transaction. For tourists who might have spent years in school learning the French language, and many recent weeks on Duolingo refreshing before the trip, and who are optimizing for a richer local experience, it's thoughtless and rude. Both viewpoints are rational.