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It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

nytimes.com

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Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#321

Post by pygy_ »

glandium wrote: post #50
pygy_ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being harsh for pouls / poux being singular/plural, provided it was the first time the author had encountered those words. That kind of knowledge comes with experience with the words, which the author didn't have. Bouloche has been corrected.

I don't know what foreign learners of french learn, but native speakers very early learn the complete list of words ending with ou whose plural is with an x instead of an s, which poux is one of (there are only 7 of them)

Keep in mind that her encounter with "pouls" was spoken, not written. The "poux" warning probably came with a written note.

Regardless, @bambax said she should have known that, in a spoken context [lə pu] is the pulse and [lɛ pu] is lice. I argue that it isn't surpising that the author didn't have that knowledge. Lice exceedingly rare in adult life (if common for school kids). Pulse is specialized vocabulary.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#322

Post by intertextuality »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #296
foldr wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Perhaps you should, how else would they learn? Telling someone who speaks a language at an intermediate level that they don't always speak idiomatically is pointless - they already know that.

Telling someone who speaks a language at an intermediate level that they don't always speak idiomatically is pointless - they already know that. Sure, but do they know when they're saying something awkward? Recently I struggled in both England and Barcelona to get carbonated water. In San Francisco I'd be saying "soda water". In New York, "seltzer water". In England, apparently, sparkling water is the trick. I'm a na…

That's not what I was talking about. If I say something that's awkward like that, it gets pointed out and that's fine.

My friend, randomly, said that I speak non-idiomatically / kinda awkwardly in general.

Great. What am I supposed to do with this information? I already know that. It's just frustrating, especially since at the time I was in a rut about my progress.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#323

Post by taejo »

gooseserbus wrote: post #129
taejo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English." I was under the impression (having never been to Quebec) that she was in fact breaking the law by doing this.

It's a little shocking that you're under this impression. The Charter of the French Language in Quebec ensures the right of consumers to be informed and served in French. It does not prevent people from serving you in English or any other language for that matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_French_Language

That's exactly why I thought it was illegal for people requesting service in French to be told, "no, this will be in English"

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#324

Post by taejo »

mewfree wrote: post #110
taejo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English." I was under the impression (having never been to Quebec) that she was in fact breaking the law by doing this.

To my knowledge that wouldn't be breaking the law. The law is that service has to be AVAILABLE in French. From the Charter of the French language: "Consumers of goods and services have a right to be informed and served in French." http://www.legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/showdoc/cs/C-11#se:5

Yes, and these consumers who requested service in French were told, "no, this will be in English"

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#325

Post by shmat »

mi100hael wrote: post #147
salawat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it isn't actually. I did a short foray into learning Morse Code, and I ran into what I found to be the biggest barrier to learning new languages. The bloody lookup table phenomena. What happens is your mental representation maps the Morse sequence->your primary language character->whatever the message then actually means. This is a very high overhead mental process, and one specifically advised against by fluent…

The Koch method of learning morse code addresses that by never introducing an intermediate visual representation of the dits and dahs. Instead, you listen to audio sequences and transcribe them directly to the characters of your language. So instead of learning the language visually, you learn to understand the sounds which is far more natural. There's a great free site that teaches morse code in this fashion if you…

Learning morse code directly from audio is absolutely essential. Once you have learned all the characters by sound, I found it helpful to listen to code at a faster level than you can handle. You will miss characters, but I found it speeds up your ability to copy well. For example, back when I was taking morse code tests for licenses, I would listen to code at 20 wpm to prepare for the 13 wpm test and 30 wpm to prepare for the 20 wpm test. The tests seemed easy. BTW, I cannot read morse code without making the sounds in my head from the visual representation.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#326

Post by bambax »

learc83 wrote: post #226
bambax wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harder, I don't know. Hard, yes.

Difficulty in understanding non native speakers is largely subjective. It depends heavily on the perception of the listener. Basically if the listener believes that it is difficult, it will be. Additionally, the harder the listener tries to engage with and understand the non-native speaker, the easier it becomes. French could be unique among languages, but my strong suspicion is that if what you describe is true for…

> There is a professor at Georgia State University who's primary research focus is on this topic if you're interested in reading more. http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslsal/cv.htm

Interesting and intriguing! Thanks!

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#327

Post by anticensor »

wrycoder wrote: post #263
bitwize wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegraph and radio operators used to write down the messages, character by character, as soon as they heard each character in Morse, and only once the entire message had been received attempt to read or interpret it. There are artifacts of this even in modern voice radio usage; e.g., "do you copy?" meant originally, did you successfully copy down my message?

You can’t do that above 25 wpm (unless you are a fast typist). You have to transition to hearing entire words.

Telegraph never exceeds 300bpm, which corresponds to 40wpm on average.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#328

Post by ekianjo »

exergy wrote: post #198
ekianjo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could have been checked easily in like 5 seconds of review? Yes.

God forbid you ever make a mistake. Editing standards at NYT are MUCH better than virtually any newspaper that you would care to point to.

I disagree. I find most of what the NYT publishes nowadays of a very low level, biased along with a lack of research. I think it used to be a much better newspaper, but that was a long, long time ago now.

Note that this is not unique to the NYT, the (former) printed press has fallen enormously since the advent of online news (once you can measure what attracts viewers, your articles will tend to be more and more clickbaity and sensationalist by nature).

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#329

Post by usrusr »

danieltillett wrote: post #314
usrusr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking back at my years of failure at French in school I get the impression that French does not lend itself particularly well to scraping by. Any form of rudimentary word-uuuhm-by-hrmmm-word rendering of French is so far removed from actual French (and noticeably so even to the uninitiated, which might be the key difference), that it's hard to find your "scrapping by voice". Objectively harder than in many other la…

Yes one of the thing us native english speakers forget is how easy it is to speak English badly and get by - with many other languages unless you have a good grasp of the language nobody has any idea what you are trying to say.

Maybe there is more to the dominance of the English language than just British and American pop music, movies and empires. Relatively high functionality at low skill levels should be the main quality metric for a common secondary language. English ranks terribly in consistency between spelling and pronunciation, but maybe selecting the wrong mapping rule for a word isn't quite as damaging to communication as over might expect. But I'm biased myself, as a native speaker of German I am clearly on the winning side of English dominance: just add the French half of the vocabulary, the rest is almost a dialect.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#330

Post by gooseserbus »

taejo wrote: post #323
gooseserbus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little shocking that you're under this impression. The Charter of the French Language in Quebec ensures the right of consumers to be informed and served in French. It does not prevent people from serving you in English or any other language for that matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_French_Language

That's exactly why I thought it was illegal for people requesting service in French to be told, "no, this will be in English"

If they insisted to be served in French then they would have to be served in French, but what little of the situation has been detailed this does not seem to be the case.
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