The Benefits of Failing at French • Hacker News Board

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#81

Post by bodyfour » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 6:37 PM UTC

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…

Another thing that is hard in French (at least for me) is listening comprehension.

For example, I know many more French words than German ones. Not quite enough to read very much (someday, I hope!) but if I were handed a text in French and German, I'd definitely get more out of the French half.

When it comes to hearing the languages it's reversed. In German, I can spot the words I do know in a spoken sentence and hope to work out the rest of the meaning from them. In French, between the liaisons and the low degree of syllable emphasis I probably couldn't even tell you how many words there were, much less what any of them were! (The exception is in language instruction videos where they carefully enunciate each word one-by-one, but nobody speaks French like that in real life)

I know that with practice picking apart French sentences would become second-nature, but it's a bit of a barrier.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#82

Post by mahyarm » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 6:41 PM UTC

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…

How does that happen, entering a relationship with someone you can barely speak to? I'm very curious!

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#83

Post by eitally » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 6:54 PM UTC

mahyarm wrote: post #82

vdance wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How does that happen, entering a relationship with someone you can barely speak to? I'm very curious!

They both spoke the language of love. :x

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#84

Post by dreamweapon » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 6:57 PM UTC

VeejayRampay wrote: post #50

DanielStraight wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

Because we're dying as a world power. It's the cycle of history. We're slowing riding the wave of our past glory toward oblivion. Most of the countries in Africa who used to speak French are now switching to other languages like Swahili, Lingala or Wolof, the Belgian, the Swiss and the Québécois all speak French and English, it's only a matter of time. You can bring up figures and number of speakers, it won't change…

Arguably, it was only after France's inevitable and necessary[1] retreat from the global power sphere that it's "real" source of power -- it's way of living, and vernacular culture -- began to really flourish, and be genuinely appreciated on the global stage.

You "lost" Indochina and Algeria, pretty much all of your "possessions" everywhere else. But in return you got Houellebecq, Goddard, the Gainsbourgs, Hardy, Dutronc, Pussycat, etc (and the world finally discovered Brassens). And now we all eat brie and goat cheese. What's not to like?

[1] In the sense that the retreats of all colonial powers, including the current crop, are inevitable and necessary.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#85

Post by pault » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 7:04 PM UTC

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…

My Brazilian friend called this "taking the dictionary to bed".

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#86

Post by b6 » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 7:10 PM UTC

loudmax wrote: post #69

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 wish Chinese were the same way. Chinese grammar is very simple and there's little or no conjugation. A lot of Chinese words sound very similar and if you say a word in the wrong tone, you're likely to have said a different word. Oftentimes, native Chinese speakers are bewildered when they hear learners attempting to speak Chinese. Not because they're being rude or condescending, but because if you're just slightly…

I've struggled a lot with Mandarin pronunciation. I think the difficulty is mostly due to Chinese speakers being sensitive to differences between some sounds that English speakers lump together.

For example, most English speakers would initially not be aware of any significant difference between the sounds of pinyin "x" and "sh". They're both basically English "sh".

And there are a few other similar cases in Mandarin. Imagine how confused you'd be if someone was speaking English, but randomly swapping the sounds of "p" and "j", and the sounds of "r" and "b", etc.

One thing that makes me love Chinese people even more is that they're so forgiving of my mistakes and accent. The provinces have their own mutually unintelligible dialects, so they're very used to hearing heavy accents. As long as I paint a good enough caricature for them to catch on, it's good enough, and they never make me feel bad about sounding strange. I'm very touched and grateful to them.

Here's something I wrote a while back on this subject: http://nopandas.posthaven.com/understanding-by-listening

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#87

Post by vdance » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 7:12 PM UTC

mahyarm wrote: post #82

vdance wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How does that happen, entering a relationship with someone you can barely speak to? I'm very curious!

For me - a dating website. Having lived in two foreign countries, I can see that my story might be impossible otherwise. It's just that, from my experience, when you meet someone on a dating website and you tell them you're a foreigner and you're pretty bad at their language, it creates a sort of "expectation" or "context" that can be nice for the first meeting (which was a drink for us). It switches the date from an awkward, "try-to-impress-her" meeting to "hey, this is kind of fun and weird" date, and can work with the right person. I brought a translation dictionary to dates before I knew French really well. With this particular girl, I remember it taking an extraordinarily large amount of time for us to even go through details like family, etc. But, she was patient and intrigued I suppose, because we only communicated in my garbled French. On subsequent dates, I remember taking walks around the city. I can't remember too many exact details because it was 7 years ago -- just that she was very patient and quirky and I truly felt like a little kid absorbing up the French.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#88

Post by silencio » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 7:18 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #62

This is timely. I'm about 4 weeks into a "let's learn Korean" self-study program. The last time I seriously tried to learn a foreign language was Spanish in high school and it was quite a debacle. But after many years married to a Korean woman, I finally decided I was embarrassed enough not knowing more than a few utility words in Korean to take the plunge. I remember looking into learning Korean about 6 or 7 years a…

Out of curiosity, what are the texts/resources you're getting vocab from? Where do you get shows to watch? Did you pick up on the basics like the alphabet and pronunciation first and study that together?

My husband's just like you and beyond knowing words for his favorite foods and some of the lyrics to Gangnam Style, he doesn't know much more. I would like to change that. Plus it'd be nice to practice my rusting Korean with him - there's few Koreans in SF and most assume I'm Chinese despite my Standard Korean dialect. I really want him to learn for raising our future kids fluent in multiple languages but no real stress there - between me (fluent in 2, conversational in 1, formerly conversational in 2-3 I could pick up again), my bilingual mother, and my polyglot father (former military interpreter, near fluent to fluent in 4 and currently learning 3-4 others or however many he maxed out on with his best friends Duolingo and iTunes U...) I think they will be covered.

I dug up some of my old books, AppleTV has KORTV and Crunchyroll and Netflix/Amazon have an okay movie selection (can't figure out how to get it to show/hide subtitles in multiple languages and sometimes english is just burned into the video itself -_- )...I also talked to some Duolingo people at I/O about contributing to "Korean for English speakers", but eh. I grew up with the language and my limited formal study was with a super nerdy polyglot linguistics researcher at Yonsei (Korean Ivy-level-esque university) so I have no idea where to start for new mostly monolingual learners for a less popular language.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#89

Post by cylinder » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 7:32 PM UTC

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…

Sorry but could you clarify? How is the child of an Australian and Chinese couple German?

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#90

Post by frandroid » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 7:38 PM UTC

hrktb wrote: post #74

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…

A lot of the grammar is extraneous indeed, and not actually used in spoken language. After taking a linguistics course, I started paying more attention to the difference between my spoken and written Québec French (my mother tongue) and realized that we almost never use the formal future tense in our speech; we use an auxiliary instead, English-style. So instead of saying "J'irai au dépanneur", I say "Je vais aller au dépanneur" (I will go to the convenience store). We often do the same with the past tense (passé composé), although that form is more kosher in written form.