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The Benefits of Failing at French

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Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#71

Post by dreamweapon »

contingencies wrote: post #46
dreamweapon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's dead to you, obviously. My counter-advice to the above is that on an extremely deep, life experience level it doesn't matter how popular a language is, in numerical terms. Or what will come of that language 500 years from now. What matters is what experiences open up to you, as individual, when you go visit (and live) in those countries, in this life, right. It's the people you meet -- and become friends wi…

Poetic! I'm an Australian whose wife is Chinese, we just had our first child, who is German, in Thailand and are thinking to move - after 8+ years in China - to France. Neither of us speak French, but we sometimes translate classical Chinese together. You only get out of languages what you put in to them. Speaking of which, there's a great Arabic calligraphy torrent around at the moment... PS. Pashto's pretty close t…

I meant "marginal" in an facetious sense. None of these languages are "marginal" to those who grow up speaking them (or who end up meeting a soul mate, of one kind or another, from which they learn them). That's the main point I was trying to make.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#72

Post by bodyfour »

refurb wrote: post #54
Tiktaalik wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Montreal. It's the 8th largest city in North America. It has a rich history of bilingualism, but it's essentially French speaking.

My understanding is that 80% of people in Montreal use English as their primary language.

Maybe that was true in 1965, but it's nowhere near the case today.

Historically the downtown business core of Montréal was Anglophone while the poorer, rural areas were completely Francophone. However, rural people could still vote: the result was the 1976 provincial victory for the Parti Québécois who immediately introduced far-reaching legislation requiring the use of French in public places, in the workplace, etc. The effect of this was to make Toronto Canada's primary business center.

There are still some English areas, I think mostly around McGill. Most of the city is completely French though.

As an English-speaker with only a rudimentary knowledge of French, I found Paris a lot easier than Montréal to get around in. In Paris, as long as you can remember to start with a nice "Bonjour"/"Bon soir" everyone I spoke with was happy to help in English as best they could. In Montréal, language is so politicized that doesn't work. To be fair, once people found out I wasn't from Canada they would be friendly and helpful -- their first assumption, though, would be that I was probably just someone from Ontario, must have had some French in school, and now am just refusing to try.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#73

Post by epsylon »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #2

I'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…

That's a pretty poor advice. (I'm French myself.)

French is pretty widely used (as a native language, and as a learned language as well) and very relevant in today's economy.

But moreover, learn French if you want to! If you find it fun, just do it. If you already speak English, you can already communicate with a huge chunk of the world's population. Any language you learn besides that is bonus!

(I am currently learning Norwegian on my own, just for the fun of it. There is little interest for me in doing that besides curiosity and the sheer pleasure of expanding my language skills.)

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#74

Post by hrktb »

DonPellegrino wrote: post #37

The author hits an important point. I'm a native French speaker and speak to anglophones trying to improve their french everyday and the overwhelming majority gets distracted if they don't get the noun genders right, pick the right verb tenses and all sorts of things like that. They hesitate mid-sentence trying to remember the rules and get it perfectly instead of just saying "Tommy hitted me" like in the article. As…

I feel this is especially true for french. There is so much grammar involved everywhere that trying to have everything perfect can be a huge burden. At the same time, the object of the sentence often comes last, forcing the listener to wait and "buffer" the words before starting to interpret the meaning.

When a speaker slows or halts a sentence because he/she is struggling on grammar, it makes it exponentially harder for the listener to keep listening and interpret what is said. On the contrary, grammar is so redundant that getting it wrong on half of the words would still leave enough information to understand even the nuances.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#75

Post by jsbgir »

I can't recommend the Pimsleur language courses enough. They teach languages in a way that's similar to how a toddler learns to speak - by going from sounds to words, and by gradually expanding your lexicon while jogging your memory on previously learned words and phrases. In my experience, 45-50 daily 30-minute lessons were enough to comfortably navigate a new country. Most courses include ninety 30-minute lessons.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#76

Post by hrktb »

vdance wrote: post #65
DonPellegrino wrote: post #37

The author hits an important point. I'm a native French speaker and speak to anglophones trying to improve their french everyday and the overwhelming majority gets distracted if they don't get the noun genders right, pick the right verb tenses and all sorts of things like that. They hesitate mid-sentence trying to remember the rules and get it perfectly instead of just saying "Tommy hitted me" like in the article. As…

I learned French in my mid-20s -- in France. I spent a year learning French at a school and literally couldn't even understand fluent, spoken French by the time my ex-girlfriend moved back to the US. I stayed in France and began dating a French girl who didn't speak English at all -- so we had these weird intellectual/juvenile sounding conversations in the beginning - with me basically speaking confusing, garbled Fre…

I think the point is really to have a strong interest in the language. Not just an accademical curiousity, but something that is stromg enough to force the brain to go painful places, cram unordinary amount of new concepts and throw ourselves completely outside our comfort zones.

For most people it's a signifiant other, or just living in a foreign country where not understanding is more painful than doing the effort to learn. As an anecdote, a few people around me got to learn japanese by sheer passion for the culture, as they were breathing it day in day out anyway. We could say their games, anime, manga, novels and tv drama were kind of their S/O, if only by the amount of time it took in their daily lives.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#77

Post by m-r-r »

ubernostrum wrote: post #15
danso wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 struct…

> 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.

If you have difficulty learning French, I suggest learning another language with a similar "structure", such as Esperanto.

I'm a French native speaker, and I'm currently learning Esperanto. I find the two languages very similar in their way of constructing sentences, but the later one if a lot easier to learn: conjugation and agreement, in particular, are much simpler, and the absence of suppletion (a verb and its derivative always share the same root) helps greatly for memorizing the vocabulary.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#78

Post by SG- »

g8oz wrote: post #31
11001 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to, say, Russian or Ukrainian French is really not that complicated. It also has way less "exceptions to every single rule" than English. You should choose a language based on your goals, not "how many countries use it" (and even by that metric French would still be really high up). For example, if you ever want to work in Canada knowing French would help you a lot more than knowing Spanish.

>>if you ever want to work in Canada knowing French would help you a lot more than knowing Spanish. Only if you want to work for the federal government or in the decidedly non dynamic province of Quebec.

Pretending Quebec is a small province, it also helps a lot to work in Ontario near Ottawa.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#79

Post by grecy »

DonPellegrino wrote: post #37

The author hits an important point. I'm a native French speaker and speak to anglophones trying to improve their french everyday and the overwhelming majority gets distracted if they don't get the noun genders right, pick the right verb tenses and all sorts of things like that. They hesitate mid-sentence trying to remember the rules and get it perfectly instead of just saying "Tommy hitted me" like in the article. As…

That's why I loved learning Spanish so much through Central and South America for two years.

I learned on the road, and every person I met was extremely encouraging and helpful, even when I knew I was getting the genders and tenses wrong. No matter what kind of nasty sentence I would create, they would smile and welcome me wholeheartedly.

After two years, I was having political conversations in Argentina (their favorite topic...)

I've immensely looking forward to tackling French in the same manner.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#80

Post by Steko »

Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic has talked in depth over the past few years about his attempts to learn French as an adult and I believe he's incommunicado at the moment due to an immersion program.

Nice video here showing his level at the time, great moment near the end when's he's asked by his conversation partner to explain his recent article for the magazine (the widely discussed 'case for reparations' article).

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/a-l...

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