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I'm french so I had to try it out! Although I got 90-100% on all words, I was able to get 50+% on most words doing what I think is a strong (but totally underst

by cpa 11y ago

I'm french so I had to try it out! Although I got 90-100% on all words, I was able to get 50+% on most words doing what I think is a strong (but totally understandable) american accent in french. That was fun!

grondilu 11y ago
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 kind of honorific mark they should cultivate. Me, I've always thought the French accent is the worst ever and I try my best to hide it because it makes me feel retarded.
- rconti 11y ago
  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.
  - stuxnet79 11y ago
    Accent is fluid and can change when you are young but by the time you are 15/16 it becomes difficult to "lose" your native accent regardless of the amount of exposure you have to a different language. This has been scientifically validated (can't find any relevant papers at the moment to link you to though).
    - TulliusCicero 11y ago
      He's not talking about losing it completely though. Some people are able to mostly lose their accent and sound relatively close to a native, others retain a very strong accent despite having lived in a new country for many years.
  - tonfa 11y ago
    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.
  - switch007 11y ago
    I find it strange too. My grandmother moved to England from Italy over 60 years ago but she sounds like she arrived a couple of weeks ago. I think it's a combination of wanting to maintain her Italian identity and talking daily/weekly to other people in Italian. It must take effort, even if subconsciously (e.g. wanting to fit in, thinking it affects the way people perceive you, not being understood etc), because it clearly doesn't happen automatically.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > or think that the French accent is some kind of honorific mark they should cultivate It impresses Americans, who unconciously assume anything European is more sophisticated. Go to a high-end restaurant in the U.S. and I'll bet your maitre d' has a European accent. Or just look at the top luxury brands; why is a Mercedes somehow more sophisticated than a Lexus? French wine more sophisticated than Californian?
- GuiA 11y ago
  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 speak English while keeping the same physical arrangement of your mouth and throat than when you speak French. So if you want to speak a language with a native accent, you have to experiment with all those parameters, and find what your voice sounds like in that language. For instance, my voice is a bit deeper in English than it is in French; this is particularly noticeable with my female friends who are speak both English and French natively - their voices tend to be very noticeably higher in French. I've been learning Japanese, and it seems that I get best pronunciation results when my throat is in an even lower, more relaxed position than English. I intend to pick up mandarin at some point and am very much looking forward to experimenting with that, as I have no experience with strongly tonal languages. Kids get this intuitively, but adults have a much harder time with it- it has to be taught consciously. Which is why most French people, even after living in an English speaking country for many years, retain a horrible French accent. We really ought to be teaching kids from the maternelle, much like many of our European neighbors do. That being said, one thing I just have never been able to do are regional accents in languages I already speak. I cannot for the life of me speak with a northern French accent (my family's from the south, although I grew up in Lyon so have a mostly neutral accent), or a British accent.
  - TillE 11y ago
    > Most people don't realize that a language's accent is a physical thing. Right! This is why I hate saying English words in the middle of German sentences. It's actually easier to just say them with the German accent, rather than take the effort to rearrange both my mouth and my brain.
    - titzer 11y ago
      Agree! But vice versa: I've been learning German for a few years and it's hard to dynamically reconfigure for the odd German place name or person while in the middle of English, but my German accent is actually pretty decent and don't want to let it get Americanized by laziness. The other way, speaking German and inserting English words with a German accent, is actually pretty comfortable, I find.
- wibr 11y ago
  I think an accent is perfectly fine (everybody has some kind of accent), as long as it doesn't significantly increase the effort for others to understand you. From my experience listening to some French people speaking English, you actually have to remind yourself that they are speaking English and not French. They might use English words and grammar, but it sounds like French, flowing from sentence to sentence with the typical melody.
  - jpgauthier 11y ago
    You are completely right. Speaking French is actually more than a different set of words, a different grammar and an accent (it probably applies to a lot of other languages). It's also a different mindset. We tend to use a lot of words and expressions to say something that can be summed up in one word in English. Moreover, French people like to speak with images instead of words. So, a word-for-word translation from French to English, which is what most of us do, results in confusing sentences that are hard to follow. Even if I'm a native French speaker, I always have a hard time trying to understand my fellow Frenchies speaking English, but I might be biased...
  - defen 11y ago
    > it sounds like French, flowing from sentence to sentence with the typical melody. I've heard this described as stress-timed (English) vs syllable-timed (French) languages. Stress-timed meaning the time between stressed syllables is roughly equal, whereas syllable-timed means each syllable is roughly equal length.
- TulliusCicero 11y ago
  > It's like they don't make any effort whatsoever or think that the French accent is some kind of honorific mark they should cultivate. To native English-speaking ears it does sound kind of fancy. Kind of snobby too, though.
- alouanchi 11y ago
  It's funny when you read the comments, I got the same issue when I move to UK, trying to hide my accent or let's say trying not to have an accent. What I learned is they don't mind your accent while you are trying to speak their English. The experience made me change the way I see others speaking/learning languages. Nowadays it's all down to the communication and it's why I learn languages at the first place, being able to communicate and having fun learning from each other. Unfortunately is not always the case in France, where we expect people to speak French as it should be, hopefully with more people travelling and having experiences abroad we will be more open when foreigners try to speak French.

by cpa 11y ago

grondilu 11y ago

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 kind of honorific mark they should cultivate. Me, I've always thought the French accent is the worst ever and I try my best to hide it because it makes me feel retarded.

rconti 11y ago
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.
- stuxnet79 11y ago
  Accent is fluid and can change when you are young but by the time you are 15/16 it becomes difficult to "lose" your native accent regardless of the amount of exposure you have to a different language. This has been scientifically validated (can't find any relevant papers at the moment to link you to though).
  - TulliusCicero 11y ago
    He's not talking about losing it completely though. Some people are able to mostly lose their accent and sound relatively close to a native, others retain a very strong accent despite having lived in a new country for many years.
- tonfa 11y ago
  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.
- switch007 11y ago
  I find it strange too. My grandmother moved to England from Italy over 60 years ago but she sounds like she arrived a couple of weeks ago. I think it's a combination of wanting to maintain her Italian identity and talking daily/weekly to other people in Italian. It must take effort, even if subconsciously (e.g. wanting to fit in, thinking it affects the way people perceive you, not being understood etc), because it clearly doesn't happen automatically.
hackuser 11y ago
> or think that the French accent is some kind of honorific mark they should cultivate It impresses Americans, who unconciously assume anything European is more sophisticated. Go to a high-end restaurant in the U.S. and I'll bet your maitre d' has a European accent. Or just look at the top luxury brands; why is a Mercedes somehow more sophisticated than a Lexus? French wine more sophisticated than Californian?
GuiA 11y ago
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 speak English while keeping the same physical arrangement of your mouth and throat than when you speak French. So if you want to speak a language with a native accent, you have to experiment with all those parameters, and find what your voice sounds like in that language. For instance, my voice is a bit deeper in English than it is in French; this is particularly noticeable with my female friends who are speak both English and French natively - their voices tend to be very noticeably higher in French. I've been learning Japanese, and it seems that I get best pronunciation results when my throat is in an even lower, more relaxed position than English. I intend to pick up mandarin at some point and am very much looking forward to experimenting with that, as I have no experience with strongly tonal languages. Kids get this intuitively, but adults have a much harder time with it- it has to be taught consciously. Which is why most French people, even after living in an English speaking country for many years, retain a horrible French accent. We really ought to be teaching kids from the maternelle, much like many of our European neighbors do. That being said, one thing I just have never been able to do are regional accents in languages I already speak. I cannot for the life of me speak with a northern French accent (my family's from the south, although I grew up in Lyon so have a mostly neutral accent), or a British accent.
- TillE 11y ago
  > Most people don't realize that a language's accent is a physical thing. Right! This is why I hate saying English words in the middle of German sentences. It's actually easier to just say them with the German accent, rather than take the effort to rearrange both my mouth and my brain.
  - titzer 11y ago
    Agree! But vice versa: I've been learning German for a few years and it's hard to dynamically reconfigure for the odd German place name or person while in the middle of English, but my German accent is actually pretty decent and don't want to let it get Americanized by laziness. The other way, speaking German and inserting English words with a German accent, is actually pretty comfortable, I find.
wibr 11y ago
I think an accent is perfectly fine (everybody has some kind of accent), as long as it doesn't significantly increase the effort for others to understand you. From my experience listening to some French people speaking English, you actually have to remind yourself that they are speaking English and not French. They might use English words and grammar, but it sounds like French, flowing from sentence to sentence with the typical melody.
- jpgauthier 11y ago
  You are completely right. Speaking French is actually more than a different set of words, a different grammar and an accent (it probably applies to a lot of other languages). It's also a different mindset. We tend to use a lot of words and expressions to say something that can be summed up in one word in English. Moreover, French people like to speak with images instead of words. So, a word-for-word translation from French to English, which is what most of us do, results in confusing sentences that are hard to follow. Even if I'm a native French speaker, I always have a hard time trying to understand my fellow Frenchies speaking English, but I might be biased...
- defen 11y ago
  > it sounds like French, flowing from sentence to sentence with the typical melody. I've heard this described as stress-timed (English) vs syllable-timed (French) languages. Stress-timed meaning the time between stressed syllables is roughly equal, whereas syllable-timed means each syllable is roughly equal length.
TulliusCicero 11y ago
> It's like they don't make any effort whatsoever or think that the French accent is some kind of honorific mark they should cultivate. To native English-speaking ears it does sound kind of fancy. Kind of snobby too, though.
alouanchi 11y ago
It's funny when you read the comments, I got the same issue when I move to UK, trying to hide my accent or let's say trying not to have an accent. What I learned is they don't mind your accent while you are trying to speak their English. The experience made me change the way I see others speaking/learning languages. Nowadays it's all down to the communication and it's why I learn languages at the first place, being able to communicate and having fun learning from each other. Unfortunately is not always the case in France, where we expect people to speak French as it should be, hopefully with more people travelling and having experiences abroad we will be more open when foreigners try to speak French.