Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 502 posts

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#401

Post by [deleted] »

qwytw wrote: post #110
manmal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Europe and have never been stolen from, and I‘ve been on plenty vacations abroad. And in many places you do get free tap water (eg London or Vienna) with food. IDK why you would care about the price of tap water though since that’s probably 0,1% of your traveling budget for a city trip. Taxes are country specific, you‘ll find some EU countries with lower taxation than your average US state, eg Bulgaria. Bei…

> why you would care about the price of tap water Because I have to ask and unless I'm explicit they'll bring a 330 mL glass bottle which is extremely annoying. That forces me to drink beer all the time just to avoid that which is not exactly ideal. > eg Bulgaria The VAT there is 20% which is much higher than any place in the US.

[deleted]

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#402

Post by frenchie123 »

achenet wrote: post #344
eloisant wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Parisians are dicks to other French people too - including Parisians. It's not about Parisians ignoring foreigners because they don't speak the language, it's about Parisians ignoring people.

ex-Parisian here (or perhaps Parisian in exile, I'll always be Parisian in my heart, but I refuse to live in the city while it's under the tyrannical mismanagement of Anne Hidalgo) We're nice to each other. The local social codes are perhaps not as obvious to visitors, but if you put some effort into befriending the city, Paris can be very kind. Agree with the whole "Parisians ignoring people" thing though. If you're…

[flagged]

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#403

Post by [deleted] »

watwut wrote: post #362
n0n0n4t0r wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, reading from all the comments here, this seems like a fact! I'll have my own introspection in order to try to detect/avoid such a behavior if I do have it!

For whatever it is worth, I had actually good experiences in France including in Paris. Or, basically normal one, not really different from trying to get around Germany. I suspect that French are unfriendly meme has taken life on its own. People complain when the French switches to English for them, they complain when the French speaks more slowly and simplifies the language, they complain when the French does not si…

[deleted]

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#404

Post by dnh44 »

esperent wrote: post #213
kashunstva wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, I don't think so. In my experience of traveling around and trying to speak various languages in a broken fashion, the biggest difficulty is the native's receptivity to trying to understand you. The second biggest difficulty is ease of basic pronunciations, and this does vary a lot between languages. For example, currently I'm in Vietnam, and local people do not try to understand foreigners who speak Vietnamese at…

>Spain, Italy, Greece are similar to France in that they are condescending towards non-native speakers.

I've spent quite a lot of time in Spain and I've never felt that but it's possible that I just didn't notice. The same in Italy although I've only spent 3 or 4 weeks there in total. However it has never occurred to me to think of Paris as unfriendly either which seems to contradict the experience of most other people, so maybe I'm just oblivious to that sort of thing.

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#405

Post by pyeri »

n0n0n4t0r wrote: post #318

Hello, I'm a french (non Parisian) reader, and was very surprised by the comments I read. More precisely, the near 100% percent agreement on "french are despising non native speakers, especially the Parisians". I really don't feel it this way and am so surprised. I don't have more to add since I really never thought about this. Speaking of English: I work in an international company since one year and am I the proces…

Indian English has to be one of the easiest accent/dialect to understand. The way we speak isn't much different than how a Spanish, French or Italian would speak English, a bit slowly and trying to emphasize each consonant as we want to get it right.

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#406

Post by GlobalFrog »

n0n0n4t0r wrote: post #361
nicbou wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised. I'm from Quebec. I am more comfortable speaking English with anyone than I am speaking French around French people. They just can't get over the accent, like I'm some sort of curiosity at the zoo. There are so many YouTube videos of French people mocking us. It's not curiosity but a distinctly French superiority complex. My friends who learned French had similar struggles in France versus elsewhere…

Now that you say it: some decades ago there was a racist tendency in France where people where having fun of others accent. They where having fun of the southern marseillais accent, but also of the northern ch'ti accent, they also had extra fun of African or Quebec's accent indeed. I, as a child, did imitated those accent for fun. I now regret it, bit it's still in the roots of a lot of people. I sometimes fear that…

Actually, all French speakers for a very long time have mocked other accents, especially from France, therefore they have a kind of specialty of mocking themselves. Parisian have always mocked regional accents, every region was mocking other regional accents, and even accents from two cities 50 km apart are mocked from both sides. Other accents are just mocked the same as french people make fun of other french people regional accents. I would say that the accent mocking in France is less about racism than about the structure of french society, which is extremely centralized historically, and regions have always been very defensive about their specificities, like the local dialects, languages and the accent is part of that. Some regional languages were even forbidden in some places not so long ago. Racism in France being looked by the accent prism is a foreign worlview with a very low relevance level. It avoids the real and problematic issues of racism that exists. But indeed there is a link: racism flourishes when you do not see or hear people different from yourself. This can happen everywhere and mocking other accents is just using one parameter to insulate your own social group from the rest of the world and diminish/blame/mock the others. If you live in a country where regional accents are not a thing, you will find another parameter and anyone can say through the prism of this local parameter that racism is worse in this country compared to another. My point here is that racism can be everywhere, and has first to be fought on its causes, because symptoms can be very different from places to places and fighting them might help, but not solve.

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#407

Post by notahacker »

hnbad wrote: post #312
marcus_holmes wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany they were happy to see me trying, but almost universally couldn't understand any of my garbled sentences. I put it down to German being one of those languages where the order of words matters less and conjugation matters more for inferring context (and context is key to making any sense). Because I mis-conjugated a lot, it came across as garbled nonsense. I've travelled a bit, and learning to speak Global…

The fun thing about those experiences in professional settings is that the non-native speakers struggling with $5 words will liberally use $10 words ($50 words? I don't know how this is deals with inflation) that are part of the specific domain.

And trying to communicate clearly English to someone considerably more fluent in a Latin-derived language can even be an exercise in picking $10 and $50 words over the standard $5 ones because so much of our fancy vocabulary has common Latin roots

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#408

Post by clausecker »

pyeri wrote: post #405
n0n0n4t0r wrote: post #318

Hello, I'm a french (non Parisian) reader, and was very surprised by the comments I read. More precisely, the near 100% percent agreement on "french are despising non native speakers, especially the Parisians". I really don't feel it this way and am so surprised. I don't have more to add since I really never thought about this. Speaking of English: I work in an international company since one year and am I the proces…

Indian English has to be one of the easiest accent/dialect to understand. The way we speak isn't much different than how a Spanish, French or Italian would speak English, a bit slowly and trying to emphasize each consonant as we want to get it right.

What makes Indian English stand out is the use of a syllable-timed pronunciation for a language that is usually stress-timed.

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#409

Post by febusravenga »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #95
dataflow wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French The main criticism I've heard is kind of the opposite - that they dislike foreigners not trying to speak French, and just starting communication in English. If both of these are true then I guess that puts foreigners in a tough place where they're damned if they try and damned if they don't?

locals are not obligated to please illiterate tourists however the trick is simply to learn enough that you can politely ask if it's alright to use english with them

Jeez, aren't you seeing what everyone writes here?

Learning is not being "illiterate". It means trying to become literate and shows intention. Being impolite in response to use of such non-perfect use of language is rude at least and that's what everyone says here.

... and my anectodital experience:

My wife was learning French for 4+ years, probably in not hightest quality high school in Poland - no good practice unfortunately, but good intentions.

Exhibit 1.

Husband of my sister in law when She tried to be polite and start friendly chat "her-broken-French". Response: don't talk to me, better switch to English ...

(this guy is authistic anyway, so let's drop this sample)

Exhibit 2 Month in France travelling by train. It was much more easier for me to find someone speaking English (my English wasn't good back then too), than for her to find someone to speak with her French. I mean typical dialogs: train station, tickets, tourist info or grocery.

She gave up after week and we switched to me managing dialogs with French people in English.

Yes, her French was probably not too good or even bad, but how for Christs sake was she supposed to improve it? I guess practice is agreed to be best way to do it?

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#410

Post by TeMPOraL »

pyeri wrote: post #405
n0n0n4t0r wrote: post #318

Hello, I'm a french (non Parisian) reader, and was very surprised by the comments I read. More precisely, the near 100% percent agreement on "french are despising non native speakers, especially the Parisians". I really don't feel it this way and am so surprised. I don't have more to add since I really never thought about this. Speaking of English: I work in an international company since one year and am I the proces…

Indian English has to be one of the easiest accent/dialect to understand. The way we speak isn't much different than how a Spanish, French or Italian would speak English, a bit slowly and trying to emphasize each consonant as we want to get it right.

There is the Indian English you speak about, which I'm not sure I've experienced, and there's the Indian Helpdesk English that I know of, which is nigh-incomprehensible.
Post reply on HN