my bf is making me learn french

[fabulouslyghetto]

One thing you will find is that the attempt at speaking French is more important than the pronunciation. Most people have trouble with the guttural and nasal sounds which don't exist in English, but then we have sounds in English which the French don't have, such as 'th'.

After all these years of not speaking it, I'm barely conversational anymore, but I understand far more than I can speak. Same with sign language. I've lost a lot of that as well. As the saying goes, "Use it or lose it."

I've lost a lot of my spanish from lack of use, I can still hold a conversation but I can read it and write better than I can speak it, and I struggle to understand native speakers because most of the emphasis is on vowel sounds so it all sounds like a blur if they speak really fast. Sometimes if I don't know how to say something I can express it in a way that's sort of literal, maybe even goofy-sounding to native speakers.

 

[bankside]

Quebecois french is not a good substitute for real french.

Thank goodness that I was able to drag out enough ecole secondaire francais in Morocco to get by quite easily.

This is a silly old prejudice about the French spoken in Canada. I would have thought you should know better, but at least one of us does.

Canadian French draws on a wider linguistic palette that hails back to colonial days where settlers came from different regions of France that had yet to be subject to the steamroller of Napoleon's imperial standardisations. Still today it has a richer more varied vocabulary than post-Napoleonic French.

Also, Canadian French has only recently in its history been given the chance to serve as the language of command, the language of governance, the language of refined society. French Canadians until the Quiet Revolution were expected to be good little workers with no ambitions but to pay their tithes to the parasitic church. As a result of that local tyranny, and of its best speakers being kept out of the limelight by the sort of fussy anglo prejudices you now display, the common register of French in Canada skews toward the lower-working-class speech typical in any unequal country, with the same very broad range between the basilect and acrolect that you'd notice between cockney and RP, a span less prominent in countries with less of a legacy of class stratification. But that cycle was broken more or less definitively in the 1960's, and the capacity of Canadian French to be spoken beautifully is finally unrestrained.

Anyway the point is many educated speakers of the most prestigious and literary strains of French, spoken within earshot of l'Académie française, are suitably impressed and delighted to hear well-spoken québécois French, at least that was the case with my French professors in university, who were happy to teach me a cross-section of the language from franco-manitobain to Swiss French to français de France to the colonial French of the Congo belge (from speakers with both European and African roots), français d'Indochine, to Breton-inflected French, to québecois. This idea that québécois is nothing more than some kind of second-rate ersatz French is beyond silly.

 

[fabulouslyghetto]

This is a silly old prejudice about the French spoken in Canada. I would have thought you should know better, but at least one of us does.

Canadian French draws on a wider linguistic palette that hails back to colonial days where settlers came from different regions of France that had yet to be subject to the steamroller of Napoleon's imperial standardisations. Still today it has a richer more varied vocabulary than post-Napoleonic French.

Also, Canadian French has only recently in its history been given the chance to serve as the language of command, the language of governance, the language of refined society. French Canadians until the Quiet Revolution were expected to be good little workers with no ambitions but to pay their tithes to the parasitic church. As a result of that local tyranny, and of its best speakers being kept out of the limelight by the sort of fussy anglo prejudices you now display, the common register of French in Canada skews toward the lower-working-class speech typical in any unequal country, with the same very broad range between the basilect and acrolect that you'd notice between cockney and RP, a span less prominent in countries with less of a legacy of class stratification. But that cycle was broken more or less definitively in the 1960's, and the capacity of Canadian French to be spoken beautifully is finally unrestrained.

Anyway the point is many educated speakers of the most prestigious and literary strains of French, spoken within earshot of l'Académie française, are suitably impressed and delighted to hear well-spoken québécois French, at least that was the case with my French professors in university, who were happy to teach me a cross-section of the language from franco-manitobain to Swiss French to français de France to the colonial French of the Congo belge (from speakers with both European and African roots), français d'Indochine, to Breton-inflected French, to québecois. This idea that québécois is nothing more than some kind of second-rate ersatz French is beyond silly.

woah chill ladies, we're losing sight of what's important here, how am I going to get my boxes of wine past TSA?

 

[oakpope]

Tu pourrais suivre des cours avec moi si tu étais à Flagstaff.

Perfect French.

 

[oakpope]

As long as you remember to take along some "French letters"...........

And obviously in France it was called "capote anglaise"

 

[fabulouslyghetto]

As long as you remember to take along some "French letters"...........

I don't get it

 

[medic1]

^Condoms............

 

[guyfromNY]

This probably isn't even on your radar now, but it's an interesting read and a great benefit of learning another language.

https://www.livescience.com/12917-learning-language-bilingual-protects-alzheimers.html

 

[LilBit]

Perfect French.

My more mathematically-inclined students often enjoy learning about if-clauses, because the construction is so simple and formulaic.

 

[fabulouslyghetto]

^Condoms............

I still don't get it, condoms = French letters, is that from a movie or something?

 

[fabulouslyghetto]

My more mathematically-inclined students often enjoy learning about if-clauses, because the construction is so simple and formulaic.

I'm looking forward to that, cuz english "if" is a mess and even spanish verb conjugation can be pretty complicated with "if" phrases.

 

[fabulouslyghetto]

This probably isn't even on your radar now, but it's an interesting read and a great benefit of learning another language.

I'm thirty two, in gays years that's like fifty four so that's very much on my radar

 

[medic1]

I still don't get it, condoms = French letters, is that from a movie or something?

Don't think so, it was what we called condoms when i was at secondary school....

 

[Draven]

My more mathematically-inclined students often enjoy learning about if-clauses, because the construction is so simple and formulaic.

Oh you mean these students? I found a video of you during one your lectures.

 

[frankfrank]

Girl I've said it before, you don't need to be spending that kind of money on no Rosetta stone program just to go to the McDonald's and order up some French Fries. They speak English...mostly.

I didn't know that French fries could talk.

 

[LilBit]

I'm looking forward to that, cuz english "if" is a mess and even spanish verb conjugation can be pretty complicated with "if" phrases.

If + imperfect, then conditional
If + present or future, then future
If + pluperfect, then past conditional

That's pretty much it. And it's almost identical to English.

Oh you mean these students? I found a video of you during one your lectures.

I smash the students, not their intrusive electronic devices.

 

[Draven]

I smash the students, not their intrusive electronic devices.

Ah I see you favor the rod.

 

[LilBit]

Ah I see you favor the rod.

Not your wart-covered rod.

 

[Draven]

Not your wart-covered rod.

Better than your centipede-infested gash.

 

[LilBit]

Better than your centipede-infested gash.

The cuntipedes belong to Ram, not me. I'm just keeping them warm.