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Same. Spent a lot of time on Duolingo trying to learn French, couldn't understand anything a French waitress asked me. Surprisingly, I can now understand a lot

Same. Spent a lot of time on Duolingo trying to learn French, couldn't understand anything a French waitress asked me. Surprisingly, I can now understand a lot of written French, but maybe that's normal for English+Spanish speakers? I recently found Anki (https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/), a free cross-platform app for index card-style learning. Their shared decks seem useful, and I like that you can customize exactly how you practice, though of course its effectiveness in "conversational" practice is obviously limited.

toomanybeersies 8y ago
I found the same when I was learning French through Duolingo. I could read French fairly well, I could write a bit too, although it was very formulaic. Sometimes I'd be able to speak a bit of French to someone and they might understand me through my thick New Zealand accent (which is apparently incredibly cute to French people), but I could barely understand a word of French spoken to me. The big problem with Duolingo in my opinion is the computer generated French audio sounds nothing like actual French.
- napban 8y ago
  >The big problem with Duolingo in my opinion is the computer generated French audio sounds nothing like actual French. Written French sounds nothing like French.
macdice 8y ago
One difficulty with French is that their system of stress makes it very hard for a beginner to know when one word ends and another begins. I lived in France for a few years, and I was initially surprised that after a few months of working hard at it, I could still sometimes understand Spanish and Italian a little more easily than French (even though I don't speak them at all), just because they have per-word stress like English, but French is unusual (for Europe at least) in having per-phrase stress (not sure of the technical term for that, but I'm sure it's a thing). That was extremely frustrating. But it passed... I'd say it took about 3-4 months of immersion to learn enough stock phrases (waiters say "Vous désirez ?" and other stock protocol phrases you just get used to) and common slang, and train my ear to understand the way words melt into each other (liaisons in real life, omitted words, strange sound transformations that no one ever tells you about... I like the aspiration that appears at the end of some words in the Paris accent, I do it myself, but I can't tell you the rule for it). You just can't learn that stuff from a book or whatever. I think I was relatively good at it (at least, much better than the other English speakers in our circle, but not as good as a couple of others whose foreignness I couldn't hear at all, so they knew tricks I didn't), and I put that down to vast amounts of immersive discussion in real life and also on IRC, where I could see people transcribing what they actually say.
- dnautics 8y ago
  It also doesn't help that pronunciation rules for French border on the bizarre (only English is worse) due to language evolution and the spelling being conservative to it's Latin roots, and there are some sounds that are flat out strange to English speakers (like the growling r). I joke that probably English speakers would have an easier time understanding African french due to the very careful pronunciation of consonants and the regularized rhythm

toomanybeersies 8y ago

I found the same when I was learning French through Duolingo. I could read French fairly well, I could write a bit too, although it was very formulaic. Sometimes I'd be able to speak a bit of French to someone and they might understand me through my thick New Zealand accent (which is apparently incredibly cute to French people), but I could barely understand a word of French spoken to me. The big problem with Duolingo in my opinion is the computer generated French audio sounds nothing like actual French.

napban 8y ago
>The big problem with Duolingo in my opinion is the computer generated French audio sounds nothing like actual French. Written French sounds nothing like French.

macdice 8y ago

One difficulty with French is that their system of stress makes it very hard for a beginner to know when one word ends and another begins. I lived in France for a few years, and I was initially surprised that after a few months of working hard at it, I could still sometimes understand Spanish and Italian a little more easily than French (even though I don't speak them at all), just because they have per-word stress like English, but French is unusual (for Europe at least) in having per-phrase stress (not sure of the technical term for that, but I'm sure it's a thing). That was extremely frustrating. But it passed... I'd say it took about 3-4 months of immersion to learn enough stock phrases (waiters say "Vous désirez ?" and other stock protocol phrases you just get used to) and common slang, and train my ear to understand the way words melt into each other (liaisons in real life, omitted words, strange sound transformations that no one ever tells you about... I like the aspiration that appears at the end of some words in the Paris accent, I do it myself, but I can't tell you the rule for it). You just can't learn that stuff from a book or whatever. I think I was relatively good at it (at least, much better than the other English speakers in our circle, but not as good as a couple of others whose foreignness I couldn't hear at all, so they knew tricks I didn't), and I put that down to vast amounts of immersive discussion in real life and also on IRC, where I could see people transcribing what they actually say.

dnautics 8y ago
It also doesn't help that pronunciation rules for French border on the bizarre (only English is worse) due to language evolution and the spelling being conservative to it's Latin roots, and there are some sounds that are flat out strange to English speakers (like the growling r). I joke that probably English speakers would have an easier time understanding African french due to the very careful pronunciation of consonants and the regularized rhythm