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As a kid, I spent a couple of weeks living with a French family as an exchange with my French class. Prior to arriving to the (lovely) home in a south of France
by yesbabyyes 7y ago
As a kid, I spent a couple of weeks living with a French family as an exchange with my French class. Prior to arriving to the (lovely) home in a south of France village I had spent some time in Paris, and picked up "ouais", mostly subconsciously, but boy, did I feel French and in the know. It took all of five minutes for the mother of the family to take that bad habit out of me.
- alexis_fr 7y agoI love that, in pure French tradition, we went as far as designing a circumvoluted spelling for this word, with a « s » at the end. Proof that we have an intuitive reflex about where to put the S, even when there is no grammar rule for new words.
- ramshorns 7y agoWhy is it a bad habit? I thought "ouais" was just like "yeah". Is it an urban/rural dialect difference?
- lazyasciiart 7y agoI knew adults who didn't like children saying "yeah", I think they said it sounded lazy/disrespectful? So maybe the same thing.
- yesbabyyes 7y agoI'm not familiar enough to say, but I guessed it's similar to what some other posters in the parent thread are saying: it's lazy and rude. This was also a family on the southern French almost-but-not-quite country side, and the son I was exchanging with had never even been to Paris, so it might be a metropolitan/country divide, as well. I grew up in the Swedish countryside, and we use a slightly different vocabulary from Stockholm, even though it's not far outside. Some words sounding more dated, less or different slang, less or different curse words. And again, I was there to learn proper French, and I guess Mme Picq wanted to make sure the French I learned was indeed proper. It made me happy to be corrected, and also her cooking made me very happy!