Computer is still out of order. A fix (I hope) is in the works.
This is a short post intended to be good advice for anyone learning French. This is the advice I’ve received that really has turned out to be solid and valid. The first one may surprise you.
Ignore “the basics.” You learned your first language without knowing that syntax, grammar, verbs, nouns, etcetera, existed. Remember that as you go along.
Figure out a routine and stick with it. Every day I take a lesson or three from Duolingo. You don’t need to use Duolingo, but it is free.
Practice, practice, practice! Seriously!
The most important skill to develop is listening to French! How?
French TV and movies! (Tele et films.) Watch in French and use subtitles, in English at first, but as you learn switch to French subtitles! Do this a lot! Netflix has a lot of programming in French, and you can choose subtitles to suit.
If there is a local chapter of l’alliance français, see if they have events held in French. Prior to Covid19 I regularly attended a breakfast meeting at a French restaurant. It helped a great deal!
If possible, visit a country or province that speaks French. Like France, or Quebec, or, no kidding, New Orleans.
There you go. Doing those things worked for me. I speak French, and bit by bit I’m beginning to understand other people. Both useful skills where I live.
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!
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!
