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How good is your French accent?

frenchmeter.com

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Re: How good is your French accent?

#91

Post by niccaluim »

teekert wrote: post #31
joeblau wrote: post #27

Funny Story: I was traveling from Portugal back to the U.S. through Charles de Gaulle Airport and my Dad gave me 4 Euros. I went to this little bakery and the man behind the counter asked me what I wanted in French. I mustered up as much throat as I possibly could and said croissant which was apparently good enough for him to go off on this long answer to what I ordered. I looked at him blankly and said "Sorry man, t…

The French are very proud and protective of their language. I have a similar experience, I was asking Je cherche le croissants (or something: I'm looking for croissants), I got a blank stare until my friend made a very theatrical overly french "Croissants!" hand waving and all, then the supermarket guy understood. I know of no other language that invented new words when computers came to the market (ordinateur) or wh…

In Icelandic the word for computer is tölva, a compound of tala + völva (number + seeress).

Re: How good is your French accent?

#92

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

teekert wrote: post #31
joeblau wrote: post #27

Funny Story: I was traveling from Portugal back to the U.S. through Charles de Gaulle Airport and my Dad gave me 4 Euros. I went to this little bakery and the man behind the counter asked me what I wanted in French. I mustered up as much throat as I possibly could and said croissant which was apparently good enough for him to go off on this long answer to what I ordered. I looked at him blankly and said "Sorry man, t…

The French are very proud and protective of their language. I have a similar experience, I was asking Je cherche le croissants (or something: I'm looking for croissants), I got a blank stare until my friend made a very theatrical overly french "Croissants!" hand waving and all, then the supermarket guy understood. I know of no other language that invented new words when computers came to the market (ordinateur) or wh…

>> I know of no other language that invented new words when computers came to the market (ordinateur)

Greek also: υπολογιστής ('ypologistis', literally "computer").

Greek universities teach computer science courses in Greek so a lot of the terminology is translated over. When I speak to fellow Greeks who have studied CS in Greek, there's always a bit of mental gear shifting needed before we can be sure we're on the same page.

A few examples: μεταγλωττιστής (compiler; lit. someone doing voice-overs of foreign language speech)

λειτουργικό (σύστημα) (operating system; lit. functional system)

πολυπλέκτης (multiplexer; lit. multi-knitter. Note that "plex" is possibly from the Greek for 'knitting', 'pleximo')

σφάλμα κατάτμησης (lit. segmentation fault)

περιηγητής (web browser; lit. explorer or sightseer)

μητρική (motherboard; lit. maternal (card))

And my personal favourite:

αντικειμενοστραφής προγραμματισμός (object oriented programming, literally, in the sense of "oriented" used to denote physically orienting one's body towards a given direction; in other words "programming that is facing objects")

Re: How good is your French accent?

#93

Post by [deleted] »

GuiA wrote: post #59
grondilu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm French as well. When I saw the title of this post, I thought it was about how French you sound when you speak English, not how well you can speak French. The thing is, there are a lot of very educated French people who, when they speak English, have an extremely accentuated French accent. Typically scientists and politicians. It's like they don't make any effort whatsoever or think that the French accent is some…

I'm French, and speak American English natively (i.e., when people meet me they think I'm American and when I tell them I'm French it takes them a bit of time to believe me - "you mean, you have french parents but were born here?" etc.). Most people don't realize that a language's accent is a physical thing. Your throat, nose, tongue behave differently when speaking different languages. If you're French, you can't sp…

[deleted]

Re: How good is your French accent?

#94

Post by tonfa »

rconti wrote: post #24
grondilu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm French as well. When I saw the title of this post, I thought it was about how French you sound when you speak English, not how well you can speak French. The thing is, there are a lot of very educated French people who, when they speak English, have an extremely accentuated French accent. Typically scientists and politicians. It's like they don't make any effort whatsoever or think that the French accent is some…

It's very strange how some people can add or drop accents at will, and others can move away from their home country at a young age and simply NEVER lose their accent. I work for a company that moved from Paris to California, so we have a large number of native French speakers who still work with us; it's an interesting dynamic.

To be fair, I personally enjoy working in a diverse environment with so many accents, and at least for the european ones I don't have any trouble (international english is the working language, native english speakers are not a majority in my office and there are over 50 different countries represented). Personally unless I feel like people have trouble understanding me, I don't make too much effort to cover my (french) accent.

Re: How good is your French accent?

#95

Post by montbonnot »

callumlocke wrote: post #84

Misleading app. If you say "bon appétit" in a good French accent, it fails, then if you say it in a very bad accent but imitating the distinct pitch and rhythm of the guy in the recording, it scores 100%.

The accuracy is better if you maintain the same distance from the mic when you try several times in a row. If the distance is significantly different between 2 tries then you might get odd results. The recorded voice has to be used as a reference only. The pitch doesn't matter, I'd say don't speak too fast or too slow either and you'll be fine.

Re: How good is your French accent?

#96

Post by pygy_ »

sevensor wrote: post #51
notalaser wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ordinateur was not invented when computers came to the market. It was coined in its modern sense of computing machine , not by Proud French People Who Liked Their Language but by IBM France, because they felt that "calculateur" (French for -- whaddya know! -- "something that computes", a literal equivalent for "computer") was too restrictive. In the 1950s, when that happened, "ordinateur" had been in use for a very l…

A better example might be >, which I learned means "VCR" when I studied French in the '90s. Edit: accent

A natural counterpart to the magnétophone that plays audio tape (which itself probably derives from gramophone).

Forced frenchified words that come to mind would be couriel for email, and mot-dièse (literally "sharp word") for "hash tag", when both English terms already are in common use.

Re: How good is your French accent?

#97

Post by seszett »

gerbilly wrote: post #38
zdkl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"standard"

>standard Uh huh, whatever that is. Even Paris has more than one accent. (St Denis for example) It's interesting how pronunciation in France shifted after the revolution.[1] Before that, everyone from the terroir to the king spoke mostly the same way. It was called the "Bel usage." When the king said: "La loi c'est moi" it probably came out more like: "La loi c'est moé." There was a more formal, accent reserved for p…

> I find it funny how Parisians almost twist themselves in knots to over-pronounce every written letter of every word. It's almost as if it references the _written_ word more than the spoken one.

While in my opinion it's generally true that in France (and not especially in Paris) the written language constitutes the reference more than it does Québec, I think you might be slightly biased here:

Nobody in France would pronounce the final "t" in "tout" or the "i" in "envoie" for example :)

Re: How good is your French accent?

#99

Post by melvinmt »

tonfa wrote: post #90
melvinmt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I meet a French person my go-to sentence to show off my French is: "à quelle heure le garage est fermé?", only to be met with the same blank stare. I then ask if I pronounced it wrong and they say (in English): "no I understand, but which garage do you mean?".

s/la/le/

Thanks :)

Re: How good is your French accent?

#100

Post by maxxxxx »

matthiasb wrote: post #54
teekert wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The French are very proud and protective of their language. I have a similar experience, I was asking Je cherche le croissants (or something: I'm looking for croissants), I got a blank stare until my friend made a very theatrical overly french "Croissants!" hand waving and all, then the supermarket guy understood. I know of no other language that invented new words when computers came to the market (ordinateur) or wh…

Frenchie here. I think it is a very common misunderstanding. My bet is that if you got a blank stare, the person just had no idea what you were saying. It has nothing to do with your proud or protection our language. I got a lot of blank stares when I moved to the US 10 years ago ;-)

In most countries I have been to people tried to help me when I spoke their language badly. In France (especially in Paris) I just get a blank stare or they are amused when I mispronounce something but still won't help. Maybe they are not used to people with an accent?
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