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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

#281

Post by panglott »

blacksqr wrote: post #266
irq11 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use.” It isn’t necessary. The tools are fine, and/or improving them won’t solve the fundamental problem. People are just procrastinating. ”Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.” Short of makin…

If that is true, then not only digital tools, but all books, classes, tests and every other technique aside from what you recommend for language learning are fraudulent wastes of time.

Language learning courses and tools are just ways to kickstart normal language acquisition, so you don't have to go through the years of gurgling like a baby has to. Learning to communicate in a new language isn't exactly like learning some other kind of skill--it's much, much huger.

When you're speaking your native language, you're decoding and processing complex social signals in real time at multiple levels of structure (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic). Even the best AIs can only get a couple of these levels of structure, with significant error rates, and only in a handful of well-studied languages (there are hundreds or thousands of natural languages). How much time does it take for you to learn 1000 vocabulary words? A natural language will have tens of thousands. A comprehensive grammar of the English language would be dozens of heady volumes and have less information about English grammar than any competent native speaker.

Learning a language is just an astonishingly huge task. No course or system can cover it all. Mostly they're just trying to make things easier for you.

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

#282

Post by deanalevitt »

I moved, in my 30's, to a non-English-speaking country. I tried Babble and DuoLingo. Babble was crap, and DuoLingo was alright at slowly expanding my vocab, but the sentences were idiotic. One example was "The horse is touching me" which I found particularly useless. I also tried private lessons, but the cost was high and required more effort than I had time for.

Rosetta Stone has, so far, been the best, precisely because it relies on immersion.

The downside is that I think the situations are traveler centric, and overly simplistic.

To my mind, the best way I've improved is by memorizing "scripts" of common interactions. For example, ordering coffee, or memorizing answers to the common questions people ask me about myself.

I've never said "The boy jumps over the water," in any language, but I have said, "I'd like a double espresso with hot water on the side, no milk or sugar" or "I'll be at home at 2 pm" many times. As I add scripts, my vocab improves.

Most fluent immigrants I've spoken to say that watching a ton of TV in the language was a massive help.

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

#283

Post by philippoi »

deanalevitt wrote: post #282

I moved, in my 30's, to a non-English-speaking country. I tried Babble and DuoLingo. Babble was crap, and DuoLingo was alright at slowly expanding my vocab, but the sentences were idiotic. One example was "The horse is touching me" which I found particularly useless. I also tried private lessons, but the cost was high and required more effort than I had time for. Rosetta Stone has, so far, been the best, precisely be…

I've been consumed with this idea since going back to France for a few days after living there for five months almost 10 years earlier. I had the experience of trying to learn Danish mostly by immersion and a little by terrible classes (no one seems to have an idea how to make Danish phonetics decently teachable, and that's the number 1 challenge in Danish). I theorized that foreign language learning has evolved to develop a pyramidal approach towards literary translation. That's definitely an important skill, but my guess is 99% of people interested in in a foreign language don't care about that level of language mastery, even in their native tongue, and would much prefer to learn enough grammar to start to acquire more and more conversational fluidity. People shouldn't read poetry in foreign language learning, but magazines. People should watch TV, partly because there's so much TV/video available in every language now via the web, and it's a great venue to hear diversified fluent speakers speak, rather than just actors or newscasters who are trained in speaking as clearly as possible.

My plan for Danish was to try and establish a transcript feed for viewing DR programs online, so you could watch the most audibly diverse shows on your device and quickly refer to the complete transcript (not the CC for hearing impaired because it scrubs the verbal grammar a bit and omits the vocal punctuation that are extremely important for holding your own in a foreign language), and change the playback, jump back and forth a few seconds, etc., the way one reads and rereads a passage in a text that catches their attention or evades comprehension at first.

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

#284

Post by robocat »

cm2187 wrote: post #157
bambax wrote: post #11

> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche > When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious…

And homonyms are not a french monopoly. Beach/bitch, sheet/shit, swan/swine are minefields for a non native speaker.

I think you mean homophones (phonics sound same) not homonyms (one written word with 2 or more distinct meanings see https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-homonyms.htm... ).

Although your three examples are definitely not homophones in New Zealand English, but the vowel sound distinctions could be difficult for some non-native speakers.

What accent are you presuming?

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

#285

Post by deanalevitt »

philippoi wrote: post #283
deanalevitt wrote: post #282

I moved, in my 30's, to a non-English-speaking country. I tried Babble and DuoLingo. Babble was crap, and DuoLingo was alright at slowly expanding my vocab, but the sentences were idiotic. One example was "The horse is touching me" which I found particularly useless. I also tried private lessons, but the cost was high and required more effort than I had time for. Rosetta Stone has, so far, been the best, precisely be…

I've been consumed with this idea since going back to France for a few days after living there for five months almost 10 years earlier. I had the experience of trying to learn Danish mostly by immersion and a little by terrible classes (no one seems to have an idea how to make Danish phonetics decently teachable, and that's the number 1 challenge in Danish). I theorized that foreign language learning has evolved to d…

That sounds really cool, actually. I rely on YouTube/Daily Motion for shows in foreign languages but I struggle without a transcript due to dialect and speed.

When there are subtitles, it helps immensely, so I imagine your idea would be a benefit on top of this already helpful technique.

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

#286

Post by ydnaclementine »

intertextuality wrote: post #222
adventured wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had not previously heard of Anki. In briefly looking at the site it sounds very interesting. Can you describe what your daily routine is like in using it?

Let me first describe my initial routine, and how it spiraled into me quitting anki entirely. Then my current routine which actually works. When I started learning Korean, I grabbed anki + Evita's 5k words deck. It's a pretty good deck, but lacks sentence samples. I use the mac osx app at home and the ios app on the go. The ios app is $20 but you can use ankiweb.net to do reviews. The android app is free. For about s…

Also a Korean learner who uses Evita's 5k word deck. She has a sentence deck with 2k sentences (most with recordings). I started it after doing 2k words in the vocab deck.

I honestly think that's the missing piece for people learning, learn vocab, but then start reading sentences. I love children's books for this.

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

#287

Post by xena »

jperras wrote: post #134
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." Native Québecois here. That's most definitely very odd. The typical scenario is someone not fluent in French attempts to speak it, and the other person switches…

It's gonna be interesting for me. I'm about to move to Montreal (flight is in 2 days). I want to learn French very well to idle-mine immigration points. I'm gonna make mistakes. That's just how it is. The surest path to success is failure.

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

#288

Post by cydonian_monk »

gerbilly wrote: post #272
cydonian_monk wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also doesn't help that French and Quebecois French are different dialects to the point of almost being different languages. We "offended" our entire office in Montreal when we rolled their telephony system into our headquarter's PBX and added localization for IVRs, Voicemail and whatnot using prompts recorded by a Parisian. I could understand the French French, the Quebecois was..., well, honestly about as differe…

> It also doesn't help that French and Quebecois French are different dialects to the point of almost being different languages. No, just no, they aren't and I can speak both. I don't know if you are a native speaker, but It's tiring to have your own language (or 'dialect') explained to you. For what it's worth, France has dozens of regional dialects as well.

Not a native French speaker, no. Apologies if that one-sentence broad generalization was tiring to you - I meant neither to explain nor be exhaustive. ;)

Obviously they're not different languages - I was a bit exaggeratory in that regard. And I do understand both, in as much as I understand either. French is my third or fourth most proficient language after English, Spanish and maybe German, but I never get to use it (or German for that matter).

The two are however different enough in some pronunciation and idioms that we ultimately had to do a second localization to support both. And the differences reported to us ran the spectrum from simple things, such as how to correctly pronounce the (cardinal) number 1 (a cleaner "un" compared to what sounds to my ear like "arn"), to the longer phrases one might expect to hear in a voicemail prompt. Ultimately our translation department got things ironed out, but it was a (somewhat amusing/bemusing) learning experience for us.

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

#289

Post by gerbilly »

cydonian_monk wrote: post #288
gerbilly wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also doesn't help that French and Quebecois French are different dialects to the point of almost being different languages. No, just no, they aren't and I can speak both. I don't know if you are a native speaker, but It's tiring to have your own language (or 'dialect') explained to you. For what it's worth, France has dozens of regional dialects as well.

Not a native French speaker, no. Apologies if that one-sentence broad generalization was tiring to you - I meant neither to explain nor be exhaustive. ;) Obviously they're not different languages - I was a bit exaggeratory in that regard. And I do understand both, in as much as I understand either. French is my third or fourth most proficient language after English, Spanish and maybe German, but I never get to use it…

It's ok.

I have another response in this thread about the origins of the Parisian accent (because it really is a new invention) compared to the Québec accent.

Also in Martinique, they speak with a less sing-songy accent than they do on the mainland.

I personally enjoy all the variations of my language, and especially appreciate the language that is 'of the people'.

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

#290

Post by boudewijnrempt »

onli wrote: post #177
arkh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is not my native language. I've been reading English books mostly for pleasure for years: when books main language is English that's what I get (thanks Amazon). At first it was hard, it is still hard when trying a book in a domain I've not encountered a lot. And I'm still reading faster in my language but there are not a lot of modern English books I'd consider impossible to read. And I'm far from fluent.

That's kind of my point. Your advice to read books to learn more words is right, in languages like English and German. It does not work well for French because the written French is too complicated and different.

Absolutely true -- but read BD's instead. That will give you spoken language, context and fun in one package. Forget about Maupassant, La Peste, Tartarin de Tarascon, Seigneur de Brantome, Victor Hugo, Balzac or any of the other ancient French classics. Ancient language, weird sentences and -- not much good as a read either.
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