Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That forces me to drink beer all the time My opinion of American tourists is such that I can't tell if this is a joke, and I'm Canadian , ffs.
Well.. I'm European, it's only half a joke though.
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How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
201–210 of 502 posts
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. A lot of very different words sound similar. A very simple grammatical mistake can completely change the meaning of a sentence. And yeah, it's probably kind of the same in English, but French is not the linga franca English is today (see what…
I interact with french in France for some 13 years, spending most weekends there (Chamonix! but all over the place from east to west to south, not much north yet). First of all, french is not some beautiful language once you grok the grammar, rather pretty weird and old layered 'spaghetti code' with tons of exceptions to tons of obscure rules (nothing, absolutely nothing elegant there). Its needlessly complex especia…
Written French grammar is particularly good at expressing nuances due to the expression of the variety of "times" and tenses.
J'aimais and j'aimai (imparfait and passé simple) are both past but
the first expresses "I loved (duration, action being performed in the past)" and the latter "I loved (instant, action completed)".
Je finissais (imparfait) = I was completing (some stuff), je finis (passé simple) = I completed.
Also
Je marcherais (conditionnel présent) = I would walk, (possible)
Je marcherai (futur) = I will walk (true)
(Maybe the ability to express a nuance discreetly is a sort of elegance)
You could say " this is spaghetti code" but je marche, je marchai, je marchais, je marcherai, je marcherais respects some kind of nearly mathematical rules that allows me to feel situations.
March - e
March - ai
March - ais
Marcher - ai
Marcher - ais
J'ai marché, j'avais marché, j'eus marché, j'aurais marché, j'aurai marché express a lot of different things based on the different forms of "to have".
English has this kind of complexity too : I have walked, I had walked, I did walk, I will walk, I will have walked, I did have walked...
I am not arguing about the possibility of nuances here but rather about the means by which they are expressed, of course.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#203It's always fun to see foreigners coming to paris discovering that the french they learned at school is basically useless. Not only we use africans or arabic words, but we also speak in reverse, with noises, everything is shortened, etc.
In Nice, I learned that nobody ever calls a toilet a "WC", but rather a "toilette", and that "ne" is generally optional in "ne .. pas" negation. But rappers like Dadju taught me Congolese slang like "kitoko." It took years to transform my American high school French into something less alien to people in France. Music was a huge part of that, though.
you can say « les vécés » (or « le vatér » if you're an old Belgian man maybe), but more common are « les toilettes », « les chiottes » (vulgar but very common)
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#204> Members of the French Academy, the 17th-century institution that publishes an official dictionary of the French language, have been working on the same edition for the past 40 years. This is nonsense. The French Academy is adding new words to the dictionary every year. The whole article is weak to say the least. Of course, the French spoken abroad is changed by the local influences. This is the sam case as with any…
> This is nonsense. The French Academy is adding new words to the dictionary every year.
True—though they are, indeed, working on the 9th edition since the 80s. They have currently completed A–S (up to Spermatophytes).
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#205Learning French while exploring West Africa was enormously good fun. For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best. Nobody ever corrected my pronunciation or criticized me for my bad grammar and lack of vocabulary. (Cough, France, Cough). Thanks to all the encouragement and positivity I picked it up pretty quickly, and thoroughly enj…
French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. A lot of very different words sound similar. A very simple grammatical mistake can completely change the meaning of a sentence. And yeah, it's probably kind of the same in English, but French is not the linga franca English is today (see what…
> It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French.
Is there any evidence that French has some unique qualities that render it unusually difficult to understand when not spoken by a someone fluent in the language? I’m reasonably competent in French and if there is such a feature, I don’t see it.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
French has a few Germanic loan words, but is most certainly not a Germanic language.
The Germanic vocabulary in French is surprisingly as high as 40–45%, as Fernand Braudel pointed out. French is kind of a hybrid.
That seems like a rather high amount. According to the statistics from Wikipedia it's more like 40-45% of all loanwords, of which French admittedly has quite a few. Crucially, the vocabulary that makes up its grammatical core is overwhelmingly of Romance origin.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#207Learning French while exploring West Africa was enormously good fun. For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best. Nobody ever corrected my pronunciation or criticized me for my bad grammar and lack of vocabulary. (Cough, France, Cough). Thanks to all the encouragement and positivity I picked it up pretty quickly, and thoroughly enj…
> For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best. I think this is currently pretty typical in any language. In my experience, Non-native speakers are much more resilient to strong accents and broken grammar. Probably because they passed themselves by this step. I worked in a research laboratory with >100 nationalities: It was extremel…
>"Globish English"
Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.
*Ahem*
Basically, the built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal. Literally anyone with a passing understanding and skill in English can use it to communicate effectively. This feature is seldom seen in most other languages let alone lingua francas.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Europe as a whole has always come off as unpleasant to visit as an American, from what I've read online such as this thread. In no American city I've been to do you have to be so vigilant for pickpockets as you apparently do in European cities, and virtually no one in America will complain about your accent or grammar. We have free water at restaurants, and the staff won't treat you like a mooch for asking about it;…
[flagged]
This trope about the risk of being shot by police in the US is kind of dumb. Yes police shoot about 1,000 people here a year, but on average only 50 are unarmed. And among those where data is available the number where the unarmed person wasn’t attacking the officer with their bare hands boils down to basically the cases you’ve seen in the news. I can think of exactly 2 foreign nationals who have been shot while unarmed by US police.
We have some real problems with policing here, but as a foreign tourist you’re more likely to die in a plane crash getting here than to be shot by the police.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#209Learning French while exploring West Africa was enormously good fun. For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best. Nobody ever corrected my pronunciation or criticized me for my bad grammar and lack of vocabulary. (Cough, France, Cough). Thanks to all the encouragement and positivity I picked it up pretty quickly, and thoroughly enj…
French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. A lot of very different words sound similar. A very simple grammatical mistake can completely change the meaning of a sentence. And yeah, it's probably kind of the same in English, but French is not the linga franca English is today (see what…
I have noticed that advanced mono lingual speakers (ie with higher education or some experience analyzing language) are aware of a huge amount of nuance and meaning in their language encoded in small inflections or grammar. They are thus not always good at narrowing down to the simple thing the accented foreigner is trying to say.
It seems to require some 2nd language learning experience to realize “the 2nd language speaker is probably not advanced enough to know rare idiom X, therefore he probably means much more common idiom Y but has the grammar off.”
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. A lot of very different words sound similar. A very simple grammatical mistake can completely change the meaning of a sentence. And yeah, it's probably kind of the same in English, but French is not the linga franca English is today (see what…
I remember being at a bar in the 18th, and asking for "L'Eau". "Quoi?" "L'eau sil vous plait?" ..... long pause ..... I motion to picking up a glass and drinking it ..... "Ahhhh! DE L'eau!" I was like.... Dude... come the fuck on.
Sounds like you're asking to talk to a girl named Lola, diminutive Lo. And the guy is like wondering if he remembers someone at the bar with that name or if he misheard you.
But after he sees your hand gestuals, the meaning of your needs becomes clear. French and Italians are familiar with waiving hands and making facial expressions to accompany their words, so keep doing it, and be patient until your language skills improve. My first trips in Britain as a teenager, no one could understand me asking where the bathroom is (French is my mother tongue). Now that's not a fun one to use gestuals for. In time I got to learn about the John, loo.
But hey, it's the fun about traveling in foreign land!