Dr. Carlos do Amaral Freire has supposedly learnt 115 languages. I find that difficult to comprehend.
http://thelinguistblogger.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/the-wisdo...
The Benefits of Failing at French
11–20 of 158 posts
Re: The Benefits of Failing at French
#12I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn. Ridiculous amounts of exceptions to every single rule, dozens of tenses (which no one ever uses), lack of general structure, arbitrary genders, it's got it all. My personal piece of advice to anyone: don't waste your time learning French, it's a dying language. Go for Spanish if you need a latin language, it's at least used in Spain, the United…
Would you say French is more or less complicated than English (from how much you can evaluate the two fairly, though it seems like your English is excellent)? I'm frequently catching myself on how hard English must be to learn...having it pushed on to me in school is only second in born-privilege to being a U.S. citizen by birth. My Vietnamese parents have been in the states nearly 40 years, speaking English in their…
I'd say English is simpler than French because it doesn't have as many arbitrary exceptions. To begin, English doesn't give genders to every idea. English has much fewer irregular verbs. Conjugation in French is a party of special cases. Participes passés?
I'm no authority on the subject, but here's what I gathered: during la Renaissance, some aristocrats made a game of overly complexifying the language such that the plebe couldn't understand what they were saying. Or just grabbing ideas that look good (participe passé) from other languages (Italian), then sticking to them (while Italian apparently got rid of this silly construction). Also, the basis for French evolution is how authors use the language. The Académie Française looks at what famous authors have written and then use that to define what's proper French, what's not. While this is not stuff I've researched (only what I've heard from French profs justifying our usage of insane constructs); those are what I believe make for French a worst language to learn than English.
My wife studied both French and English as second language and found English to be much easier to learn than French. My personal opinion is biased since I'm a native French speaker, but still nowaday I find French to be much more cumbersome than English.
Re: The Benefits of Failing at French
#13Short of cauterizing your own genitals, nothing seems like it would change who you are like speaking in an-other's language. Blech, I'd rather wear someone else's underwear, no thanks, I'll take the 12 credits but no way am I retaining anything. "Well, science says you lose the ability to learn languages as you get older." Oh, did NPR just interview TED? Dummies in other countries and dummies in the CIA learn as adults, are they all using different science? An American describes another American who is fluent in French as "oh my God, he's so smart, he speaks French and everything" but this statement is easily unmasked as a defense by getting him to describe a Frenchman who speaks English: "well, they all speak English over there." The bilingualism is robbed of the "intelligence" signification because it's seen as customary.... who they are. America is a branded-identity nation, which means hearing yourself speak in not-your accent, with not-your vocabulary sounds very not-you, which is why when an American tries to speak French he feels self-conscious, but the Frenchman hearing it feels you aren't even trying. He'd be wrong, you are trying: trying not to become French.
"Ugh, I hate psychobabble, why can't you be more like Malcolm Gladwell and give me practical neuroscience based tips like 'get up before dawn' or 'play basketball annoyingly'?" Fine, here's your concrete advice that you won't take for shaving 6 months off your second language acquisition: master the accent first. Before even one word of vocabulary. The accent will teach you the rhythm of the words and the grammar-- it will make it okay for you to learn the vocabulary. And you will think differently. American exceptiono-isolationism isn't arrogance, it's a cognitive bias impressed on us from kindergarten when we learn that there are only two languages in the world, English and Everything Else. Which teaches us that a German is more similar to an Italian than a Texan to a New Yorker, and I can predict with 100% accuracy that if that made you pause you only speak English. Can't wait to hear your foreign policy ideas over drinks. You should work for NPR.
Once you have the accent down, pick a foreign language actor or actress you admire, and learn the language as if you were them. Talk like them. This trick works because you are thinking like someone else, acting like someone else, yet simultaneously distancing yourself from this change-- I'm doing this, but it's not me, I'm just pretending. The self-consciousness is removed because it's not "you" who is doing it. Yet it is; and after a time, you'll become it-- and the positive benefit for society is you'll hate the guy you used to be. C'est la vie.
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/05/thank_god_the_heart_a...
Re: The Benefits of Failing at French
#14I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn. Ridiculous amounts of exceptions to every single rule, dozens of tenses (which no one ever uses), lack of general structure, arbitrary genders, it's got it all. My personal piece of advice to anyone: don't waste your time learning French, it's a dying language. Go for Spanish if you need a latin language, it's at least used in Spain, the United…
French is an official language in 29 countries and spoken by more than 200 million people. It's probably the most widely learned foreign language after English. It's also one of the top 10 languages on the internet. I'm genuinely curious why you would call it a dying language.
That figure includes partial speakers , so people who learned a little French in school but probably have a much better knowledge of say English.
With the exception of France most countries that legitimately speak French as the main language are either tiny or third world.
Re: The Benefits of Failing at French
#15I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn. Ridiculous amounts of exceptions to every single rule, dozens of tenses (which no one ever uses), lack of general structure, arbitrary genders, it's got it all. My personal piece of advice to anyone: don't waste your time learning French, it's a dying language. Go for Spanish if you need a latin language, it's at least used in Spain, the United…
Would you say French is more or less complicated than English (from how much you can evaluate the two fairly, though it seems like your English is excellent)? I'm frequently catching myself on how hard English must be to learn...having it pushed on to me in school is only second in born-privilege to being a U.S. citizen by birth. My Vietnamese parents have been in the states nearly 40 years, speaking English in their…
I am a native English speaker (born and raised in the US). In school -- over a decade ago -- I took six semesters of French courses, and I've done some immersive trips to Quebec (which admittedly is a different dialect, but at least helps a bit).
Last week I was in Paris. Even with a refresh on grammar and vocabulary, I struggled a lot to communicate in French.
The most difficult thing, for me, is the sentence structure. I have enough vocabulary and grammar to choose the words I want, but I have a lot of trouble putting them in the correct order. And this is not a rare thing; it shows up in all sorts of simple sentences.
For example, in English I might ask "Where is (X)" or "Is this street (X)". In French, I need to flip those around to "(X), where is it" or "Here, this is (X)?" The sign to hang on the door of the hotel room would, in English, say "Please do not disturb" -- in French, it says "Thanks of not to disturb".
All of those words are, of course, easily recognizable, but the structure is completely alien to an English speaker (especially the way French uses infinitives in so many situations where English does not, giving rise to stereotypes of French speakers attempting English and always saying "Please to tell me..." and such).
I suspect that it would take me many months or perhaps even years of immersion and full-time speaking and thinking in French to get to the point of being able to construct most sentences in "natural French" structure on the first try.
Re: The Benefits of Failing at French
#16I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn. Ridiculous amounts of exceptions to every single rule, dozens of tenses (which no one ever uses), lack of general structure, arbitrary genders, it's got it all. My personal piece of advice to anyone: don't waste your time learning French, it's a dying language. Go for Spanish if you need a latin language, it's at least used in Spain, the United…
Would you say French is more or less complicated than English (from how much you can evaluate the two fairly, though it seems like your English is excellent)? I'm frequently catching myself on how hard English must be to learn...having it pushed on to me in school is only second in born-privilege to being a U.S. citizen by birth. My Vietnamese parents have been in the states nearly 40 years, speaking English in their…
Native French speaker here, I think going from "I don't know the language" to "I can hold me end in a conversation" is easier in English than in French. French has a richer set of verb tenses, while with English you can go a long way be knowing present, " + ed" and "will + ". You also don't need to understand why a chair feminine and an oven is masculine (hint: there is no reason).
One thing I do think French has over English is ease of pronunciation; although not completely regular, most letters have one pronunciation (unless they have an accent, which gives them a different, but clear pronunciation). If you know the phonemes, French gives you a much easier time. Try reading this [1] out loud for kicks. I probably got 90-95% of that right, but even after 15+ years of speaking English, I still got caught by a few words.
[1] http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-pronunciation...
Re: The Benefits of Failing at French
#17Short of cauterizing your own genitals, nothing seems like it would change who you are like speaking in an-other's language. Blech, I'd rather wear someone else's underwear, no thanks, I'll take the 12 credits but no way am I retaining anything. "Well, science says you lose the ability to learn languages as you get older." Oh, did NPR just interview TED? Dummies in other countries and dummies in the CIA learn as adul…
I love TLP but losing your accent is easier said than done. I started learning English when I was a few years old and I've lived in the US for 22 years speaking English 99% of the time. My German accent is still clearly there. I'm not sure what it would take at this point but it's not something that happens easily. I listen to the way other people pronounce words but hearing your own accent is hard.
Interestingly, my kids claim they can't really hear my accent, they know I speak a little differently but they don't think I sound like Arnold or Angela.
Re: The Benefits of Failing at French
#18Short of cauterizing your own genitals, nothing seems like it would change who you are like speaking in an-other's language. Blech, I'd rather wear someone else's underwear, no thanks, I'll take the 12 credits but no way am I retaining anything. "Well, science says you lose the ability to learn languages as you get older." Oh, did NPR just interview TED? Dummies in other countries and dummies in the CIA learn as adul…
"American exceptiono-isolationism isn't arrogance, it's a cognitive bias impressed on us from kindergarten when we learn that there are only two languages in the world, English and Everything Else."
Actually the French suffer from this as well, thinking that every language has the rhythm of French, and only stressing the last syllables.
Learning the accent first is an insteresting trick.
But what it seems to me is that the biggest disadvantage of learning as an adult is the exposure to the new language.
Adults, by necessity (and lazyness) shy themselves of exposure to new languages, they also don't have the environment around them to support it (watching cartoons on TV, school kids talk a lot more amongst themselves and/or are paying attention to classes, etc)
Re: The Benefits of Failing at French
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
French is an official language in 29 countries and spoken by more than 200 million people. It's probably the most widely learned foreign language after English. It's also one of the top 10 languages on the internet. I'm genuinely curious why you would call it a dying language.
That figure includes partial speakers , so people who learned a little French in school but probably have a much better knowledge of say English. With the exception of France most countries that legitimately speak French as the main language are either tiny or third world.
Being spoken in the least developed countries seems more like a plus for French than a minus. As those countries develop, French will become even more important (assuming they still speak French). A language like German on the other hand will never experience this kind of organic growth because pretty much everywhere that speaks German is already well developed (and has negative or near-zero population growth, which certainly isn't helping the language grow).
Re: The Benefits of Failing at French
#20I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn. Ridiculous amounts of exceptions to every single rule, dozens of tenses (which no one ever uses), lack of general structure, arbitrary genders, it's got it all. My personal piece of advice to anyone: don't waste your time learning French, it's a dying language. Go for Spanish if you need a latin language, it's at least used in Spain, the United…
Would you say French is more or less complicated than English (from how much you can evaluate the two fairly, though it seems like your English is excellent)? I'm frequently catching myself on how hard English must be to learn...having it pushed on to me in school is only second in born-privilege to being a U.S. citizen by birth. My Vietnamese parents have been in the states nearly 40 years, speaking English in their…
Non-native French and English speaker (that is both are second languages to me). I find English much easier.
But, I also learned English first, and most of all, I learned it because all the computer stuff was in English and movies were in English. There were powerful external motivating factors to practice and understand English. French was imposed on me in school but I never saw a benefit in learning it aside from saying "I understand some French".