3 ms·
Looking back at my years of failure at French in school I get the impression that French does not lend itself particularly well to scraping by. Any form of rudi
by usrusr 8y ago
Looking back at my years of failure at French in school I get the impression that French does not lend itself particularly well to scraping by. Any form of rudimentary word-uuuhm-by-hrmmm-word rendering of French is so far removed from actual French (and noticeably so even to the uninitiated, which might be the key difference), that it's hard to find your "scrapping by voice". Objectively harder than in many other languages I think.
- danieltillett 8y agoYes one of the thing us native english speakers forget is how easy it is to speak English badly and get by - with many other languages unless you have a good grasp of the language nobody has any idea what you are trying to say.
- usrusr 8y agoMaybe there is more to the dominance of the English language than just British and American pop music, movies and empires. Relatively high functionality at low skill levels should be the main quality metric for a common secondary language. English ranks terribly in consistency between spelling and pronunciation, but maybe selecting the wrong mapping rule for a word isn't quite as damaging to communication as over might expect. But I'm biased myself, as a native speaker of German I am clearly on the winning side of English dominance: just add the French half of the vocabulary, the rest is almost a dialect.