Category: language

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France language

Je Parle Le Français

Et, plus important, je comprends le français

Okay, you don’t read French. I get it. But I’m posting this because, and no one is more surprised than I am, I do! And so, in case you’re thinking of learning some French, I’m sharing how I pulled it off.

After my final new lesson in Duolingo, I can report that I studied French on Duolingo for 1524 days. That’s a bit over four years, but that isn’t where I started, and it doesn’t even show the days I didn’t study, not that there were a lot, but some days I just couldn’t hack it. My first exposure was a month-long visit mostly to France in 1976. I learned “Tourist French” along with how to be polite (I’ve posted about being polite in France if you’d like to know.) I knew Spanish (more or less) so it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. Spanish and French are both based upon Latin, and they do have a lot of words in common. The difference in pronunciation can be extreme. Take bien, which means “fine” in both languages. In Spanish it sounds, reasonably enough, like “bee-ayn”, emphasis on the “ayn.” In French it sounds like “byahn” sort of, emphasis on the “ahn” and spoken as one syllable. Same word exactly. French, as it turns out, isn’t crazy about pronouncing all the letters in a given word. Here’s an excellent example of that for you French students. You know what Je ne sais pas means, right. (It means “I don’t know”.) If you say that in France, you’ll be understood, and you’ll stand out like a sore thumb. What do we (ahem) say in France? It’s sort of Zhay pah or for a more formal setting J’sais pas. Nobody ever says ne out loud. In writing, well, you’d better spell it right or the ghost of Cardinal Richlieu will haunt you. Or something.

My first lessons in French after we decided to move here were in a series of audiobooks, formerly CDs, from Paul Noble, titled (you’d never guess) Learn French with Paul Noble. Mr. Noble loves language, and he makes it easy to pick up the rudiments of a new one. He teaches a bunch of languages, and in that teaching explains what nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech really are. Want a quick example? Take nouns. If you can say “that is my (his, hers, theirs) _______________. It’s a noun. Those types of nouns your English teacher was so keen on just don’t matter, because in a sentence a noun is a noun. Verbs. If you can say I, you, he, she, it, they are _____________________ (some act or other) it’s a verb. Transitive, intransitive, who cares? A verb is a verb. He even explains pronouns, right down to why they are called “pro”. I found his teaching to be a great background in the basics of French, so that when I switched to Duolingo (where I once completed the Spanish course) it was a lot easier to get along.

Some people don’t care for Duolingo, but for me it worked wonderfully. It is free with ads, but after about a year I signed up for the pay version because I wanted to help keep it free for those who can’t afford it. Using “Super Duolingo” does give you some advantages in the games included with the app, although with enough determination you could dominate with the free version, too. Duolingo has cartoonish characters that weave in and out of the learning, and of course a green owl. I do recommend trying the app in the free version (free, for real) and if you like it, maybe buy up to unlimited hearts. (Once you see it you’ll get that.)

And of course I visited France several times since 1976. I’ve been up the Eifel tower twice, eaten the blandest Mexican food imaginable, toured the Louvre several times (Mona Lisa isn’t worth it, but the rest of the place is fantastic,) watched the world from Montmartre, been through other museums, and Notre Dame (we walked across the plaza two days before it burned.) I’ve also seen Cannes, Nice, Saint Tropez, Bordeaux, Rennes, Poitiers, some lovely castles, a bunch of cathedrals including the one in Orleans, and lots of French countryside and small towns and villages. We liked it well enough to move here, and I’m glad we did.

So if you plan to move to France, or study in France, or just to study French because you like distorting your mouth a lot 🙂 this is the story of how I came to be basically literate in French. 1524 days with a green owl? Totally worth it!

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Culture France language

The French Languages

A Real Book. A Long History. Written in French. Sigh.

You may think I’m going to talk about dialects of French, and there certainly are a lot of them to consider. French is spoken as a native language in the Carribean, in Canada, in Africa, and in Polynesia plus some other places. But, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that, whatever dialect you speak, you probably will need to learn two French languages. Spoken French (not too awful) and Written French (too awful.)

To begin with, let me show you a few letter combinations you can write to represent the sound we call a “long A”.

è, é, ai, ait, er (on the end of a word), and several more if you can believe it. Now, about the plain old e. It’s a schwa (the linguists term for it) which means it’s just a generic vowel mostly considered unworthy of being pronounced, especially if it is at the end of a word. Chien, is pronounced sort of like shieh. It means Dog, masculine or just generically. Chiene is pronounced sort of like “she-en” and means Dog, feminine. Many times, a vowel with an e on the end of it is the feminine form of an otherwise masculine word. If you see an unaccented e on the end of a word, never pronounce it. If you do, the members of Richlieu’s Academy will probably come threaten you with their swords, and maybe send you to their secret jail somewhere. (Kidding)

French, like English, changes verb forms depending on who’s doing it. I run, you run, he runs, that sort of thing. They run, easy enough. In French that phrase looks like ils courent. The word “to run” is courer. Keep up, now. To run sounds like “Cou-ray”. I run sounds like “Cour” (there is an s on the end of the word.) courent sonds just like cours. Yep, ent means absolutely nothing to how one pronounces the word in French, but it absolutely must be put there if you’re writing it out. L’academie français, founded by that famous Cardinal Richlieu, keeps a tight grip on written French. But, being a free country, French people say whatever they want to.

For example, if you take French, they’ll tell you that “I don’t know” is Je ne sais pas. Sounds sort of like Zhe nay say pah. But, forget that. Write it, but in speaking it, I kid you not, what comes out sounds a lot like Zhay Pah. In French, even under current rules, you could write that out as J’ai pas, but don’t ever do that, or the ghost of every retired French grammar teacher will haunt you to your grave. (J’ai pas, by the way, could be translated as “I have nothing.” That would even work, wouldn’t it?)

This, then, is a warning. study your academic French well. You’ll need that, if only to fill out government paperwork (or to read government paperwork) but remember to speak the way French people do, in what is, pretty much, an entirely different language.

Categories
France language

Parlay Voo?

If you think he can’t talk, you never met a beagle

The proper spelling is parlez-vous, in case you wondered. I do mean speak French, of course. Do you? I’ve been able to speak French for a while, now. What is relatively recent for me is the ability to understand French when it is spoken to me. There were scattered bits of comprehension for a year or more, then last October I made a call and got somebody’s voice mail, in French. I was amazed to hear, in French, The person you are trying to reach is unavailable. Please leave a message after the beep. Yep, beep. Bip, I suppose. It went on to say how I could leave a number if I wanted to. If that message sounds familiar, that means that you’ve heard people’s voicemail before. Voicemail is messagerie vocale, by the way. Since that day, I have had moments of temporary lucidity in my comprehension, and generally, I am finding it easier as time passes. I wonder if this is because I’m getting used to the Poitou accent, or just have practiced enough that it is starting to sink in. Whatever, I like it. I was able to translate something for Tami a couple of days ago. No one was more surprised than I was.

So, if you plan on spending more than a week or two in France, here’s my advice. Learn more French than you need to just be a tourist. You may need to ask for a jump start when leave the lights on in your rental car. You may want to look for brown sugar in a supermarket. You may need to know where the bank is. All sorts of things can come up, and you’ll need to know how to ask for help with them. Several years ago I had to ask a French gentleman to use his credit card for us at a gas station and I’d reimburse him in cash. My French was pretty weak, but he was great, and we were saved, so to speak. Weak, but not entirely lacking in the useful words needed to ask for that sort of help. I highly recommend that you get to at least that level of French if you’re going to be here longer than a casual tourist. (In Europe, that would probably be known as level A2. A1 being tourist French.) And, I can’t stress this enough, practice listening to French being spoken. It is a musical language, where rhythm and cadence are important. Quite a few syllables are not important, so it can be confusing. So listen, listen, listen.

There are French language movies available on Netflix and Amazon Prime that can be configured to display French subtitles. Why French? Why not English? Simple. I learned recently that when you know two languages, both are active all the time. The trick is to suppress the one you are not using, which can’t be done in this case if you’re reading English words. In fact, reading the English words tends to suppress your French. French subtitles (les soutitres français) reinforce your French, allowing you to keep your English down to, well, maybe a mild roar? Whatever, it helps a lot, and I write from experience.

Well, that’s this week’s French lesson, the first of 2024. Hope you enjoyed it, and remember, practice, practice, pratique!

Au revoir!

Categories
France language

Psst! Wanna Learn Some French?

I wrote this review a while back. I don’t say anything about my French these days, for the record. I just try to use it so long as it’s working. Anyway, here’s a review of a good place to get a foundation in the language.

Learn French with Paul Noble Reviewed

This review is of the entire series, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Here’s a story. Recently, our rental car was very low on fuel when we pulled into Angouleme. We found a station, but as we had lost our credit card on the first day of vacation, we had no way to pay. (The pumps didn’t take debit cards.) There was a kiosk where one could in theory deposit money and retrieve a ticket with which to buy fuel, but it was not working. It was raining hard to boot. I looked around and saw only French people. So, I asked a man at the next pump, “Comprendez-vous anglais?” To which he replied “non.” Then, I dug deep, deep within myself to find all of Paul’s French lessons and advice, and, much to my amazement, I was able to explain our situation, and ask him if he could use his card for us, and I’d reimburse him in cash. He said “Oui,” and even didn’t stop the pump short of the fifty Euros I’d given him, which I told him to do. He actually put in Euros 50.01. I called him every nice thing I could think of in French and shook his hand. Amazingly, that amount exactly filled our tank.

I have two take-aways from the experience. One is that the French reputation for being nasty is pretty stupid and wrong (I do say “bonjour” to everyone, hint hint.) The second is that Paul French’s audiobooks (on CD or Audible, I believe) are extremely effective in teaching French. He loves language. Not any particular language, but language itself, as do I. My French is still pretty crude, although as I say, “tour le jour, un peu meilleur.” I like the rhyme. It’s French! Ahem. Anyway, if this story doesn’t convince you, try the first book in the series and see how useful it is. You’ll be glad you did!

Categories
Culture France language

Parlay Voose Francis?

Taken in Spring of 2019. You must know what this is, right? (La Tour Eifel)
In case you missed it, all photos are by the author unless noted otherwise.)

French people speak French. That may be their worst quality, but there it is. Many don’t know more English than what they maybe gather from watching a few American movies. Which is less than you might think, buckaroo! So I’ve been studying French for a spell, and I know most of the common words, but there are specialty words that I’ve never seen. Like, for instance, where do I get Drywall Mud?

Drywall mud, properly called in the US Drywall Joint Compound, and in Canada simply Joint Compound, is called mud by professionals mainly because that’s what it closely resembles. Other than being plaster white, it could be clay scooped out of a mudpuddle. I’ve used lots of it in Nevada, especially. I even successfully replaced a kitchen wall in a small place we once owned in Arizona. Seriously, you could not tell it was a new wall, with no seams showing and all. (That may give you an idea of how much practice circumstance has forced me to take.) So, when we had the living room door moved over a few feet, I wasn’t worried. In fact, when we had the old radiators and associated pipes removed, I wasn’t worried. I simply looked up “Drywall Joint Compound” in a couple of translation apps (I always like confirmation, and they don’t always agree) I found the word remboulage. Well, remboulage is what you use to patch cracks and holes in walls. So, I headed for the Bricolage, meaning DIY, store, went to the paint department, and found some stuff called, ahem, remboulage It was soft, sort of grey, but it filled holes and so on pretty well so I filled quite a few holes in several walls with it. (The radiator project left some rather large holes.)

That stuff turns into concrete! Have you ever tried sanding concrete? There has to be something better, right? I mean, French houses do use gypsum drywall, and lots of it. Well, the man who moved the door (sounds easy, doesn’t it?) had some white stuff that stirred up just like mud. I asked him and he gave me the brand name. Cool. Back to the same brico for some of that! What they had in that brand name, in the drywall department, was plaster of Paris (Plâtre fin de Paris, to be exact.) Nothing else. Now, Plaster of Paris works as joint compound, except that it sets up in ten minutes. I ended up mixing many batches, which meant climbing up and down a ladder a lot. Good exercise, but . . . And then I ran out of plaster of Paris! So, today I went to the biggest brico in the area, looked in the paint department first, and eh, voila! there was the brand again, but this time with a box of stuff that promised to mix just like plaster of paris, give one half an hour to apply it, and be sandable after 24 hours. If you’ve ever used Mud, that looks familiar. I found MUD! As a bonus, they had some seuil, or threshold, that the other bricos didn’t seem to carry.

But, this is a post about language. The title, spelled correctly, is Parlez-vous français? You see what being unfamiliar with the language and common terms and uses for things gets you? Unnaturally rough looking spots on your wall (still a lot better than radiators and pipes) and quite a bit of bother. Of course, now, I know where to get what I need and what to call it. But I do wonder what else I’m going to have to mess up before I’m familiar enough to stop making stupid mistakes like that. Anybody? Hello?

Categories
France language

MANNERS

This is Tyrion “Beagle Butt” le chien being mannerly

I’m putting this post near the top of the blog because it is important. There are people who say that French people are terribly impolite, which is categorically untrue. No one is as polite and helpful as a French person, unless, that is, you fail to be mannerly. In the middle of the 20th century I imagine that not many visitors to France had the same impression. American visitors, anyway. That is because we in America were also expected to be mannerly. To always say “hello,” “please,” “thank-you,” and “goodbye” even to store clerks and others we might consider to be “menials.” After all, our forebears went to some trouble to ditch nobility, which makes everybody deserving of respect, doesn’t it? Well, it does in France to this day.

More than once in Paris I have seen a clerk in an information booth repeat and repeat the word “bonjour!” The person, an American, takes that at a sign to start in with their questions. So, the person in the booth says, “bonjour!” again, and so on until somebody gives up.

The thing is, France is a different country, and has different expectations for behavior. I think it goes back to their revolution (in the same decade in which ours ended, of course, so an American should understand all this, if you think about it.) Having dispatched of a lot of nobility in a most nasty manner, the French were left with a dilemma. How to address one another? After the revolutionaries wore themselves out trying various schemes, it was decided by consensus to address all citizens as if they were nobles! So, you don’t just walk up to the local lord and say, “Hey, Dukey, how’s it hangin’?” No, you say something like “good day, my lord.” And the title for a man in French is “monsieur,” which used to mean “my lord.” The title for a woman is “madame,” which used to mean “my lady.” There is how you address, well, anyone. If the president of France wants to talk to a beggar on the street, he’ll first say, “bonjour” and wait for the greeting to be returned before proceeding. Seriously. Then it’s “S’il vous plait” for please (it means ‘if you please’) and Merci for “thank you.” Goodbye, formally, is “au revoir,” which literally means, “until we see each other again,” and you use it even on a pimple-faced kid selling hot dogs at a carnival, because that’s what you owe everybody: basic respect.

If you do those things outlined in the previous paragraph, I guarantee you that French people will prove to be most friendly and helpful. If you don’t, then you’ll get treated the way you’re treating others, which is always true, but more obvious in this case.

After the “bonjours” by the way, you can ask if they speak English. In tourist areas, it’s likely that a lot of people do. Failing that, I’d suggest a translation program on a smartphone. Heck, even Google Translate can be useful in a pinch. And, as I said in my previous post, try a little French, especially the polite words. People always appreciate your effort!

Categories
France language

Speaking Frankly

See what I did there? Frankly?? I kill me!!! Image is public domain.

I want this blog to be an ongoing discussion/revelation about France, the United States, customs, facts versus rumors, and other things, of course including language. The Frankish language started out as a German dialect, you know, but French is what’s left of it. French is mostly a Latin dialect now (whether Latin died is another discussion entirely) but it is still ten percent Frankish. Words like “Gros” meaning large are just like German! Boy, howdy, huh? I hope to write about French as a language in the future, but for this post, I’m just talking about whether or not they speak French in France. After all, you hear a lot of people say that “they almost all speak English!” Yeah? Here’s a heads up:

THEY SPEAK FRENCH IN FRANCE!

And not everybody here speaks English. And when they do, I find that a lot of times my French, lousy as I know it to be, is better than their English. (I may write about English also, because I pity anyone trying to learn it.) What I’m about to write applies primarily to British, nay, English people. First, let me say that the English people I know are perfectly lovely, and they speak French probably better than I do! That said, there are English people who have lived in France for twenty years (they got special residency status after Brexit so they can stay as long as they wish) and still do not speak any French! And tourists who expect that because they’re spending money in France, French people should speak English! Quoi? Folks, my attitude now is Si j’habite en france, je parle français. This blog is in American English, so here: If I live in France, I speak French. It’s basic courtesy to my hosts. The French actually use a lot of English words, badly from an anglophone point of view. Camping is a place, for example, and so is parking. le camping et le parking. But to ask them to know English just because you spend some money here? Seriously? Plenty of Latino folks spend money in the United States. Do we owe them our speaking Spanish? Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander, right?

So, my advice, should you decide to travel to a French speaking country (there are lots of them, some very close to the USA), is to learn enough French to at least be polite. I’ll write a post all about being polite, for now, trust me, you need to be. That is, how to say hello, good-bye, please, and thank-you. Even for people who do speak English, it warms their hearts to hear somebody giving their language a try. You don’t have to be good at it. And, for the love of anything at all, ignore the spelling, but give it a try. It’s amazing how much easier life as a tourist in France becomes for those who speak at least the bare minimum of the local language.

Come to think of it, that applies to any non-English speaking place you visit. A few words of courtesy are not difficult to learn. Do learn them, and you’ll be glad you did!

Okay, end of rant/lecture. I hope this finds you well, and that you find this at least a bit useful. I’ll be back with more observations, in more detail I hope, almost before you know it!

Au revoir!

Categories
language

Really, French? Really?

Is that a French word?

Vraiment, even! At the bottom of this post is a link to a YouTube video defending English as an easy language to learn. I think it is right. As pointed out by Rudolf Flesch in the 1950s, only a few hundred English words are not phonetic. Sure, you need to do some memorization because these tend to be commonly used words, but only a few hundred of them! The rest of English vocabulary is phonetic, and easy to pronounce. Of course, there are a lot of words in English, more than most languages for sure. I once took a survey that told me that I seem to know 33,500 words of Englilsh. French doesn’t even have 33,500 words in the entire French vocabulary! But almost all 33,500 (there are more than that many, that’s just the ones I supposedly know) are phonetic. That’s a lot of words, so what is it that makes English easy? Besides being mostly phonetic, I mean.

Well, see the video for details, but I’m going to use French as my examples, because I have spent the last 830-some days studying French daily, and I’ve been living in France since April 12th. I’ve had a lot of exposure to French, more than any language except English. So, naturally, I am a stone-cold expert on all things French related, right?

<Leave a comment if you’re interested in a bridge I have for sale.>

Take noun gender. Please. And put it far, far away. Don’t know what I’m talking about? That’s because English has no gendered nouns! Yes, words like woman, girl, she, her and others that refer to female persons or animals might be said to be gendered, but they really aren’t. Gender in nouns doesn’t refer to sex, but just to a class of noun. French has two: masculine and feminine. Some languages have more, but I’ll give French some tiny bit of credit for keeping it down to two. Any noun ending in tion is feminine in French. Constitution is feminine, restitution is feminine. So, the definite article, plain old a in English, is la. La Constitution, la restitution, la institution, etc. Why? Who the heck knows? None of those things are gendered at all in their usage, so why bother? More French words are masculine than feminine. Take eau, for example. It’s water. the definite article is le, as in l’eau. Notice that when writing French you always drop the vowel of the article if the word starts with a vowel. Why, I don’t know. Just another quirk of a quirky language.

Thing is, if you use an adjective with your noun, the adjective has to have the same gender as the noun. So, adjectives change with whatever they’re modifying. Why? A blue chair is un bleu chaise. An old institution is une vielle institution. A blue car is une voiture bleu. An old man is un vieux homme. Why? Why not, say the French, in gendered riposte. That indefinite article also changes with gender. Why? Notice our adjectives work with no change whatsoever with any object you can name. Old is old. Blue is blue. What the hey, French, why be so stubborn?

I happen to know. Cardinal Richlieu (the guy the Three Musketeers were always in trouble with, except he was real) was worried about peasants corrupting the fine French language, so he started The French Academy to oversee any changes that might occur in French. To this day this group of 100 people, all carrying swords (really) meet to decide the fate of any new words in French. It’s la covid 19, in case you were wondering. Why is covid feminine? Who the heck knows? They are the reason that French is spelled so horribly, and the reason French insists on keeping old-fashioned, Latinate things like gendered nouns. Curse you, Richlieu! Well, anyway, for more of this, and with some light-hearted banter thrown in, click the link below and watch the video. You’ll be glad you did!

Go on, click it. It won’t bite!