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The Benefits of Failing at French

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Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#121

Post by vacri »

seanc wrote: post #63
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…

There's another advantage the toddler has, not mentioned in the article. People expect the toddler to speak poorly, and don't make fun of him or treat him badly for doing so. I found being laughed at was a huge barrier to learning French when I lived in Montreal. For example, many English speakers (and Quebecers!) I know have stories like this to tell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaFf2kWL45U (45s clip from The Mo…

It's also worth mentioning a similar advantage the toddler has: it's going to have more than a decade before it's expected to have adult fluency. Mind you, depending on the age of the toddler you want to emulate, you might just be able to get away with simply learning the word for 'no'...

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#122

Post by vacri »

Jacqued wrote: post #42
jiggy2011 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples of French speaking countries would be Rwanda, Congo, Niger and Madagascar. You could be waiting a very long time for these to become significant economies.

There are many more than that though. Basically you can draw a line from Congo to Algeria, and every country west of that line speaks French. There are 4 exceptions : Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone. That still leaves a huge pool of speakers. Probably not enough to make it the 'most spoken language in the world by 2050'[0] because it is mostly spoken by educated and urban people, and far less in the countrys…

Well, it's more that French is an official language of those countries, rather than those countries speak French. WP has a list where most of those countries have only around 10%[1] of the population that can speak French. Given that French isn't particularly popular in the world of business (English and Chinese rule there) and that English seems to have become the default in science and engineering, it seems an assumption that a growing African economy would retain its French as it's primary 'international' language.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_French_...

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#123

Post by bane »

silencio wrote: post #110
bane wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned Hangul years ago from some website. It's impressively easy to learn and makes figuring out pronunciation way easier than writing Korean in a Latin alphabet. There's actually a great list of resources here. http://www.reddit.com/r/korean and more specifically here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/rq3th/the_ultimate_b... Right now I'm using Ankidroid and Anki for Windows and OS X (all free and they sy…

Thank you so much for your response! I don't know how I didn't come across r/Korean while I've been lurking in r/Korea for the last couple weeks (trying to find out more about dual citizenship)... I'll definitely have to check that out. I've been in the middle of creating an Anki deck while studying for the MCAT and I've used it in the past for learning Mandarin and I absolutely love it, just wondered if there were a…

Sure thing! Glad you've been using Anki also. /r/korean is definitely growing and becoming more active. It used to be pretty dead about a year ago but it's really coming to life as an awesome resource recently.

The main deck I've been working with is the 1000 most common. I figure that will get me up to speed enough to start digging into basic grammar without getting too hung up on common vocabulary. It's a pretty good deck, a few of the definitions I've been changing a bit because they're either not clear or not quite right (after running them past my wife). It's a little lacking in nouns, it's much more focused on common verbs, connecting terms (like 그런데) and support words like 뿐. So I'm already planning on following up with some more dedicated noun study.

At the moment, kdramas and movies are pretty impenetrable for me. It'll take me about an hour to get through a 5-10 minute youtube video with lots of subtitles, and I only get about 5-30% depending. 영국남자 is pretty good. For example I got about 40-50% of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFRUoygkaeI&list=UUg-p3lQIqm... which is not bad after a month of study.

Korean is one of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn. The Foreign Service Institute ranks languages based on the average number of study hours it takes an English speaker to achieve proficiency in Speaking and Reading. To achieve what they call "general proficiency" which is basic fluency (or a 3/3 in reading and speaking), it takes about 600 hours to learn a Category I language like French, Spanish or Norwegian. A category V language takes about 2200 hours of study and the languages in that group are Arabic (for various linguistic reasons), Chinese (speaking is considered relatively easy, like a Cat I but reading is incredibly hard), Japanese (speaking is hard, plus all the downsides of written Chinese) and Korean (speaking is hard and particularly listening is difficult, especially with the double consonants and very specific vowel distinction we don't make in spoken English).

The Defense Language Institute (DLI) ranks it a Category IV (the highest) as well - at 64 weeks of intense, 8 hour a day instruction. I think this number has shrunk as well as I know a few DLI trained Korean speakers who swear they spend almost 2 years there. While French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish are over in 26 weeks. DLI's language education goal is actually lower than FSI's and the goal is only 2/2.

To compare, a language like Finnish, Russian or Vietnamese, one category down, is expected to be done after only 1,100 class hours, or half the time.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#124

Post by pault »

scrollaway wrote: post #120
bravura wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, as the french say: "La meilleure façon d'apprendre une langue étrangère est sur l'oreiller." (The best way to learn a language is on a pillow.)

I wouldn't trust anything the French say about learning foreign languages. (Note: Joke -- I'm a french polyglot. Seriously though nobody speaks English here)

Perhaps, but is there a more authoritative source on the art of pillow talk?

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#125

Post by vacri »

gnuvince wrote: post #16
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…

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 ove…

To be fair, the reason why only 90% of English speakers would get every word in that poem right is because there's a lot of very uncommon words in there. 'Sward' or 'phlegmatic' are not things I've ever heard used in casual conversation. I'm pretty well read, but I have never heard of Terpsichore before today. Similarly, Arkansas is an American peculiarism - I wouldn't expect a non-American to get that one right, same with Islington being a UK peculiarism. Probably should have left names out of the poem, because names have a ridiculously wide allowance for pronunciation.

It's also interesting that the poem writer has a particular accent: Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Where I live, grieve and sieve rhyme, and neither rhyme with any verson of 'live' (though they do rhyme with 'leave'...). To me, sieve is 'seev', to the author, it's 'siv'.

The poem is very, very well put-together, but I think that the uncommon words and names should have been left out - the rest of the words (most of them) are pretty common, and most native English speakers that occasionally pick up a book should be able to get them.

The problem is that lack of diacritics - I was travelling through Vietnam and found it funny that they used so many diacritics where English needed none... then I realised English definitely needs them - for example, how do you pronounce 'wind'? It depends on context. If you're talking about air movement, it's pronounced differently to rolling something up on a spool...

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#126

Post by Tyr42 »

bane wrote: post #92
silencio wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Kor…

I learned Hangul years ago from some website. It's impressively easy to learn and makes figuring out pronunciation way easier than writing Korean in a Latin alphabet. There's actually a great list of resources here. http://www.reddit.com/r/korean and more specifically here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/rq3th/the_ultimate_b... Right now I'm using Ankidroid and Anki for Windows and OS X (all free and they sy…

Oh, I'm using Anki to learn Chinese, and it's actually not very hard at all to modify a deck to include English->Chinese as well.

Anki has a set of `fields` which you can embed in html templates to make each card's front and back.

Start studying from a deck, press "e" (or click the edit button), then click "cards" from the top. From that menu, you can adjust the card to make reverse direction cards, or even sound only cards. It's quite flexible.

I had to pull out all the English->Chinese cards and put them in a new deck to try and study them at the same time, but that it maybe fixable if there's a sort order.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#127

Post by phea »

seanc wrote: post #63
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…

There's another advantage the toddler has, not mentioned in the article. People expect the toddler to speak poorly, and don't make fun of him or treat him badly for doing so. I found being laughed at was a huge barrier to learning French when I lived in Montreal. For example, many English speakers (and Quebecers!) I know have stories like this to tell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaFf2kWL45U (45s clip from The Mo…

You just have to suck it up and don't let it bother you as the majority of people are not really laughing at you. You may say something embarrassing like 'je suis chaud', which actually means you're horny and not feeling hot. That will get a chuckle out of people but the next time you will know to use avoir instead.

Another favourite of teachers is 'je suis fini'.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#128

Post by colanderman »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #107

The L-R confusion with asian languages' speakers is very strange to me btw. For example, English has t and th and f, most other languages don't have th and some don't even have f. However it's very rare to see non-native English speakers to swap or merge those sounds. Virtually unseen in writing. Asian languages' speakers do swap r and l and vice versa in writing too.

Asian languages have neither the English R (tongue curled backward in mouth, sides curled upward relative to mouth; "retroflex approximant") nor L (tongue straight, sides curled downward; "lateral alveolar approximant"). Rather, they have an R which is a combination of these (tongue straight, sides curled upward; "alveolar approximant"). Without a native sound to map these two distinct sounds to, it's easy to confuse them.

I've definitely seen foreigners confuse TH and T in writing. TH is very often pronounced (and therefore sometimes likely misremembered) as T. TH and T a more distinct than R and L however; TH is fricative (has duration), T is plosive (instantaneous).

What's more common is for foreigners to confuse our sundry vowels. I count at least 14 distinct sounds. Many foreign languages have only 5. But since we have only 5 written vowels, we notice less when a foreigner uses the wrong vowel (and brush it off more as an accent).

English speakers confuse u and ü in German; ㄱ (k), ㅋ (kh), and ㄲ (kk) in Korean (heck I know phonetics and I can't get these right); e and é, and gender in French (quick, where do the accents go in "resume"?). Chinese speakers confuse second-person pronouns in English. Japanese confuse green and blue. There are a ton more examples of such confusion; they're all due to our minds mapping information based on our native tongues.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#129

Post by jodrellblank »

arafalov wrote: post #116

A couple of points: 1) The guy lists his activities with heavy focus on Rosetta Stone. To me that pretty much invalidates his claims on the spot. RS is not really well respected in language learning circles (at least a couple of years ago, it was not). Pimsleur is better due to its exponential backoff repetition model and it's "how do you say" prompts. 2) I did not see any mention of activities that actually built vo…

To pull a bit out of the Esperanto / Springboard2Languages idea, particularly watch this linked TEDx talk about teaching Esperanto to young school children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gSAkUOElsg

How it serves as a good simplified language because it's so regular, there's very little learning before you can start saying your own sentences instead of reciting pre-made ones.

Re: The Benefits of Failing at French

#130

Post by scrollaway »

pault wrote: post #124
scrollaway wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't trust anything the French say about learning foreign languages. (Note: Joke -- I'm a french polyglot. Seriously though nobody speaks English here)

Perhaps, but is there a more authoritative source on the art of pillow talk?

Touché. :)
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