7 ms·

As a French native speaker, I'm a little bit surprised by the corrected text OP posted in her/his article (http://www.runwes.com/images/learningfrench/image1.pn

As a French native speaker, I'm a little bit surprised by the corrected text OP posted in her/his article (http://www.runwes.com/images/learningfrench/image1.png http://www.runwes.com/images/learningfrench/image1.png). Most of the corrections she/he received are not justified at all. Like using the work "crédits" is totally fine in this context. I can't get why they corrected some connectors like "à" or "pour", as the usage of these in the text seem at least as correct to me.

user5994461 7y ago
Poor corrections indeed. Using "dans" is less correct than the original "a". It's like saying to register "inside" a gym in English. Not the greatest choice of word unless you're really trying to point out the location. In fact, the only correct correction among all that red is to replace "gym" by "salle de sport". Not to be confused with "gymnasium", it's similar but not the same thing. The 4th line is misusing the future tense. Should have been pointed out.
- rq1 7y ago
  No they’re equally correct. https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/fr-sinscrire-dans-à.2379077/ https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/fr-sinscrire-dans-à....
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Both forms are equally correct in some cases but not all cases. In this case, 'dans' is at the very least 'more correct' than 'à'.
throwaway41968 7y ago
Yeah basically half the "mistakes" in that text aren't even wrong. I mean perhaps some annoyingly pedant French teacher, grammarian or Académicien would find something to say about things like using à une salle de sport vs. dans une salle de sport but like 99.9% of French speakers wouldn't notice anything wrong.
bdg 7y ago
It's a typical side-effect of writing anything online. I've had this experience with nearly everything I've ever posted (also: a lot of great comments too). Whenever you want to share knowledge about X: out of the woodwork crawl out the little pests who have nothing to do except hold you to the highest level of scrutiny they can imagine, and they'll word it like they want to crucify you for the slightest infraction. It doesn't mean anything except that there's a lot of people who are situationally deficit of social skills and anxiously trying to prove they're even smarter than the original poster. My pet theory is that these jeklers want acceptance and a sense of community, but don't know how to do it.
- swimfar 7y ago
  I don't usually point out mistakes in non-native speakers' writing because I know most people will perceive it the way that you do. However, I always wish that people would correct me when I make a mistake in a foreign language. So part of me always wants to point things out to help people like me.
  - throwaway41968 7y ago
    Like most complex interactions in life, it really comes down to just feeling when the time's more appropriate. Sometimes people explicitly ask you to correct what they just said ("was that right?"), sometimes they halt in the middle of a sentence and look at you expectantly so you just finish/reword it for them, etc. But generally speaking you shouldn't try to correct people too much unless it really impedes proper understanding, it can really undermine people's confidence in their speaking ability even when they are otherwise fluent. And when you do correct them, only do so with respect to grammar or improper choice of words; correcting pronunciation can be a minefield given how it can change widely within a native population, what with accents and suchlike. (Some people, especially in such a centralized language featuring very normative institutions, will argue that they don't have an accent and everyone else does, but they're wrong.) It should only be corrected when it would otherwise lead to misunderstandings.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  out of the woodwork crawl out the little pests who have nothing to do except hold you to the highest level of scrutiny they can imagine You say, with derision and personal insults to those people who dared not meet your standards for perfect corrections and perfect judgement of feedback desirability.
narag 7y ago
Most of the corrections she/he received are not justified at all. I know it sounds absurd, but maybe the corrections weren't made by native speakers.
- GuiA 7y ago
  From the article: > I initially preferred native French speakers, but after taking lessons with non-native speakers, I found that I couldn’t really tell the difference between natives and non-natives.
mytailorisrich 7y ago
I'm also a native speaker (France's French if that makes a difference). "Crédits" was replaced by "bons", which means vouchers. In the context that would indeed be the likely correct option (and I never heard "crédits" used that way...) It's grammatically incorrect to write "s'inscrire à une salle de sport" and should indeed be "dans une salle de sport" and so it was warranted to correct that. The other corrections are similarly warranted. I'm a bit worried if you guys all think the original text was fine... ;)
- clemParis 7y ago
  Interesting points! Thanks. I didn't know "inscrire" is a transitive verb, so indeed "s'inscrire à" is grammatically incorrect. As often with french it raises the question of "does this rule make sense regarding usage". A quick google search for "s'inscrire à une salle de sport" shows a lot of results, even from people specializing in sport. And many native speakers were fooled by this rule. As for the "crédit", the dictionnary definition seem to state it is correct (even though "bon" would be a bit better). https://larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/cr%c3%a9dit/20314?q=cr%c3%a9dit#20203 https://larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/cr%c3%a9dit/20314... Crédit: Autorisation de dépenses accordée par les autorités qui établissent, votent ou règlent les budgets ; somme ainsi allouée : La bibliothèque dispose d'un crédit de dix mille euros.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Both "s'inscrire à" and "s'inscrire dans" exist. The trick is to pick the right form. Both may be correct in some cases, but not in others. Sometimes the meaning changes as well. For example "s'inscrire à l'école" and "s'inscrire dans une école". The latter means "to register with a school" but the former is more "to register to start school" in the sense that it is 'school' in general. As for "crédits", indeed the meaning is basically the same as in English and the original sentence is correct in the language. But it's not something anyone would say. The terms used would most likely be either "bon" (voucher) or "forfait" (inclusive special rate), or perhaps "chèque" (cheque) instead of "bon" if it was given by your employer as a benefit.
  - astrobe_ 7y ago
kace91 7y ago
For a while, I used to hang out in a subreddit for people who are learning Spanish to give advice (I'm a Spaniard). You wouldn't believe the amount of times I was "corrected" with suggestions that were clearly, blatantly wrong if I didn't outright say that I was a native speaker. I think it was mainly Americans from Spanish speaking immigrant families who were overconfident on their skills, but it was funny nonetheless.
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  How many of those were folks correcting you were Spanish? I wonder if the folks correcting you just learned a different dialect. For those not familiar, American Spanish diverged significantly from "mainland" Spanish. Even then Mexican Spanish is quite distinct in its own "charming" way from nearly every other Spanish speaking American country. It's not just the vocabulary, even the verb tenses are used differently in different countries. Case in point, the only time I've heard vosotros used outside of school was in a La Polla Records song (ya ahora que?). Or looking for the baños in the Barcelona airport…. The differences are significant enough it's possible you're both right. Whenever I've seen language discussed online lots of people come out of the woodwork defending their own niche regional variations. The comments section on Vanity Fair's Slang School series of youtube videos is a particularly obnoxious example. The videos themselves are great IMO. It's not always that bad though. I was trying to figure out how to differentiate between a banana and a plantain in Spanish (yay spanishdict forums) and I didn't realize just how many different ways there are to say banana/plantain. It's like Eskimos and snow.
  - kace91 7y ago
    Nah, I am aware of how broad the Spanish language is, but these were basic mistakes that wouldn't be correct in any dialect. Kinda like how Americans might not know British English vocabulary, yet they know at a glance that "me will spoke English afternoon this" is not correct anywhere.
    - loeg 7y ago
      Maybe it is, in New Zealand!
rq1 7y ago
I hope you’re kidding. The initial text isn’t good, the corrections are maybe not perfect and some are more a matter of taste but definitely better than the original wordings. “y dédier du temps” is closer to the original formulation and equally good for instance. I noticed that most of native speakers of any language are not that good actually in their mother tongue. For someone who’s learning the best disservice is to not point their mistakes out. And sorry it’s not being pedantic to ask people to be precise enough to not spend my time guessing what they maybe were thinking. It’s already hard enough when well written.
- throwaway41968 7y ago
  >I noticed that most of native speakers of any language are not that good actually in their mother tongue. That doesn't make any sense. Maybe they're not good according to the normative institutions attempting to control the language, but that doesn't have any bearing on the ability of billions of people to communicate with their peers using their mother tongue. Just because an institution says a certain form is "incorrect" doesn't mean people are going to stop using it and make themselves understood with that form.
  - rq1 7y ago
    If these institutions attempt to control it, then they’re not normative. It does make perfect sense when the improper use of tenses or grammar break the temporality, spatiality or relationships of the narrative. Eg. The obvious ones in french: ce/se, ça(cela)/çà/sa... etc. A bit less obvious: “après qu’il ait”, subjunctive after stating a fact or is the subjunctive intended and it wasn’t a fact... etc. And sometimes it becomes poetic “à l’insu de leur plein gré” when both forms are correct but with completely different meanings.
    - throwaway41968 7y ago
      Except the subjunctive almost completely lost its initial semantic value of expressing the hypothetical or fictious in French, and in most cases has been replaced by the indicative. (Contrast with languages like Italian or Spanish that did retain the subjunctive in these cases, and look at the (many) situations where the indicative is used in French and the subjunctive is used in Italian/Spanish). These days, the subjunctive is mainly used in clauses where an infinitive could be used (pour qu'il ait/pour avoir, sans qu'il ait/sans avoir, etc.) In that sense, après qu'il ait, on top of feeling more "natural" due to the symmetry with avant qu'il ait, isn't as outrageous an error as académiciens would have you believe, it simply follows this very handy rule of thumb. Generally speaking, proper use of tenses and moods is overrated; it is inconsistent across Romance languages yet speakers of either have no difficulty making themselves understood, or learning others' systems. Many non-Romance languages dispense entirely with this system and yet their speakers don't encounter any difficulties expressing the same shades of meaning as they would in French.
roel_v 7y ago
I co-supervised a British PhD student once who did his PhD at a Spanish university. Not only was he a native speaker, but he also wrote very clear - no passive sentences, clear structure in thinking and writing, very good. He had a paper reviewed by someone who only saw his university on that paper (blind review) and wrote 'paper could do with review by a native speaker'. Why? No idea. I knew who the reviewer was (small world) and he wasn't even a native speaker himself. My theory: when you ask someone to correct language, and they know the author isn't a native speaker, they'll nitpick on things that native speakers wouldn't be corrected on; but the corrections will be much more about the idiosyncrasies of the corrector than the level of the author (when that author has reached a certain level of proficiency of course).

user5994461 7y ago

Poor corrections indeed. Using "dans" is less correct than the original "a". It's like saying to register "inside" a gym in English. Not the greatest choice of word unless you're really trying to point out the location. In fact, the only correct correction among all that red is to replace "gym" by "salle de sport". Not to be confused with "gymnasium", it's similar but not the same thing. The 4th line is misusing the future tense. Should have been pointed out.

rq1 7y ago
No they’re equally correct. https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/fr-sinscrire-dans-à.2379077/ https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/fr-sinscrire-dans-à....
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Both forms are equally correct in some cases but not all cases. In this case, 'dans' is at the very least 'more correct' than 'à'.

throwaway41968 7y ago

Yeah basically half the "mistakes" in that text aren't even wrong. I mean perhaps some annoyingly pedant French teacher, grammarian or Académicien would find something to say about things like using à une salle de sport vs. dans une salle de sport but like 99.9% of French speakers wouldn't notice anything wrong.

bdg 7y ago

It's a typical side-effect of writing anything online. I've had this experience with nearly everything I've ever posted (also: a lot of great comments too). Whenever you want to share knowledge about X: out of the woodwork crawl out the little pests who have nothing to do except hold you to the highest level of scrutiny they can imagine, and they'll word it like they want to crucify you for the slightest infraction. It doesn't mean anything except that there's a lot of people who are situationally deficit of social skills and anxiously trying to prove they're even smarter than the original poster. My pet theory is that these jeklers want acceptance and a sense of community, but don't know how to do it.

swimfar 7y ago
I don't usually point out mistakes in non-native speakers' writing because I know most people will perceive it the way that you do. However, I always wish that people would correct me when I make a mistake in a foreign language. So part of me always wants to point things out to help people like me.
- throwaway41968 7y ago
  Like most complex interactions in life, it really comes down to just feeling when the time's more appropriate. Sometimes people explicitly ask you to correct what they just said ("was that right?"), sometimes they halt in the middle of a sentence and look at you expectantly so you just finish/reword it for them, etc. But generally speaking you shouldn't try to correct people too much unless it really impedes proper understanding, it can really undermine people's confidence in their speaking ability even when they are otherwise fluent. And when you do correct them, only do so with respect to grammar or improper choice of words; correcting pronunciation can be a minefield given how it can change widely within a native population, what with accents and suchlike. (Some people, especially in such a centralized language featuring very normative institutions, will argue that they don't have an accent and everyone else does, but they're wrong.) It should only be corrected when it would otherwise lead to misunderstandings.
jodrellblank 7y ago
out of the woodwork crawl out the little pests who have nothing to do except hold you to the highest level of scrutiny they can imagine You say, with derision and personal insults to those people who dared not meet your standards for perfect corrections and perfect judgement of feedback desirability.

narag 7y ago

Most of the corrections she/he received are not justified at all. I know it sounds absurd, but maybe the corrections weren't made by native speakers.

GuiA 7y ago
From the article: > I initially preferred native French speakers, but after taking lessons with non-native speakers, I found that I couldn’t really tell the difference between natives and non-natives.

mytailorisrich 7y ago

I'm also a native speaker (France's French if that makes a difference). "Crédits" was replaced by "bons", which means vouchers. In the context that would indeed be the likely correct option (and I never heard "crédits" used that way...) It's grammatically incorrect to write "s'inscrire à une salle de sport" and should indeed be "dans une salle de sport" and so it was warranted to correct that. The other corrections are similarly warranted. I'm a bit worried if you guys all think the original text was fine... ;)

clemParis 7y ago
Interesting points! Thanks. I didn't know "inscrire" is a transitive verb, so indeed "s'inscrire à" is grammatically incorrect. As often with french it raises the question of "does this rule make sense regarding usage". A quick google search for "s'inscrire à une salle de sport" shows a lot of results, even from people specializing in sport. And many native speakers were fooled by this rule. As for the "crédit", the dictionnary definition seem to state it is correct (even though "bon" would be a bit better). https://larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/cr%c3%a9dit/20314?q=cr%c3%a9dit#20203 https://larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/cr%c3%a9dit/20314... Crédit: Autorisation de dépenses accordée par les autorités qui établissent, votent ou règlent les budgets ; somme ainsi allouée : La bibliothèque dispose d'un crédit de dix mille euros.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Both "s'inscrire à" and "s'inscrire dans" exist. The trick is to pick the right form. Both may be correct in some cases, but not in others. Sometimes the meaning changes as well. For example "s'inscrire à l'école" and "s'inscrire dans une école". The latter means "to register with a school" but the former is more "to register to start school" in the sense that it is 'school' in general. As for "crédits", indeed the meaning is basically the same as in English and the original sentence is correct in the language. But it's not something anyone would say. The terms used would most likely be either "bon" (voucher) or "forfait" (inclusive special rate), or perhaps "chèque" (cheque) instead of "bon" if it was given by your employer as a benefit.
- astrobe_ 7y ago

kace91 7y ago

For a while, I used to hang out in a subreddit for people who are learning Spanish to give advice (I'm a Spaniard). You wouldn't believe the amount of times I was "corrected" with suggestions that were clearly, blatantly wrong if I didn't outright say that I was a native speaker. I think it was mainly Americans from Spanish speaking immigrant families who were overconfident on their skills, but it was funny nonetheless.

inferiorhuman 7y ago
How many of those were folks correcting you were Spanish? I wonder if the folks correcting you just learned a different dialect. For those not familiar, American Spanish diverged significantly from "mainland" Spanish. Even then Mexican Spanish is quite distinct in its own "charming" way from nearly every other Spanish speaking American country. It's not just the vocabulary, even the verb tenses are used differently in different countries. Case in point, the only time I've heard vosotros used outside of school was in a La Polla Records song (ya ahora que?). Or looking for the baños in the Barcelona airport…. The differences are significant enough it's possible you're both right. Whenever I've seen language discussed online lots of people come out of the woodwork defending their own niche regional variations. The comments section on Vanity Fair's Slang School series of youtube videos is a particularly obnoxious example. The videos themselves are great IMO. It's not always that bad though. I was trying to figure out how to differentiate between a banana and a plantain in Spanish (yay spanishdict forums) and I didn't realize just how many different ways there are to say banana/plantain. It's like Eskimos and snow.
- kace91 7y ago
  Nah, I am aware of how broad the Spanish language is, but these were basic mistakes that wouldn't be correct in any dialect. Kinda like how Americans might not know British English vocabulary, yet they know at a glance that "me will spoke English afternoon this" is not correct anywhere.
  - loeg 7y ago
    Maybe it is, in New Zealand!

rq1 7y ago

I hope you’re kidding. The initial text isn’t good, the corrections are maybe not perfect and some are more a matter of taste but definitely better than the original wordings. “y dédier du temps” is closer to the original formulation and equally good for instance. I noticed that most of native speakers of any language are not that good actually in their mother tongue. For someone who’s learning the best disservice is to not point their mistakes out. And sorry it’s not being pedantic to ask people to be precise enough to not spend my time guessing what they maybe were thinking. It’s already hard enough when well written.

throwaway41968 7y ago
>I noticed that most of native speakers of any language are not that good actually in their mother tongue. That doesn't make any sense. Maybe they're not good according to the normative institutions attempting to control the language, but that doesn't have any bearing on the ability of billions of people to communicate with their peers using their mother tongue. Just because an institution says a certain form is "incorrect" doesn't mean people are going to stop using it and make themselves understood with that form.
- rq1 7y ago
  If these institutions attempt to control it, then they’re not normative. It does make perfect sense when the improper use of tenses or grammar break the temporality, spatiality or relationships of the narrative. Eg. The obvious ones in french: ce/se, ça(cela)/çà/sa... etc. A bit less obvious: “après qu’il ait”, subjunctive after stating a fact or is the subjunctive intended and it wasn’t a fact... etc. And sometimes it becomes poetic “à l’insu de leur plein gré” when both forms are correct but with completely different meanings.
  - throwaway41968 7y ago
    Except the subjunctive almost completely lost its initial semantic value of expressing the hypothetical or fictious in French, and in most cases has been replaced by the indicative. (Contrast with languages like Italian or Spanish that did retain the subjunctive in these cases, and look at the (many) situations where the indicative is used in French and the subjunctive is used in Italian/Spanish). These days, the subjunctive is mainly used in clauses where an infinitive could be used (pour qu'il ait/pour avoir, sans qu'il ait/sans avoir, etc.) In that sense, après qu'il ait, on top of feeling more "natural" due to the symmetry with avant qu'il ait, isn't as outrageous an error as académiciens would have you believe, it simply follows this very handy rule of thumb. Generally speaking, proper use of tenses and moods is overrated; it is inconsistent across Romance languages yet speakers of either have no difficulty making themselves understood, or learning others' systems. Many non-Romance languages dispense entirely with this system and yet their speakers don't encounter any difficulties expressing the same shades of meaning as they would in French.

roel_v 7y ago

I co-supervised a British PhD student once who did his PhD at a Spanish university. Not only was he a native speaker, but he also wrote very clear - no passive sentences, clear structure in thinking and writing, very good. He had a paper reviewed by someone who only saw his university on that paper (blind review) and wrote 'paper could do with review by a native speaker'. Why? No idea. I knew who the reviewer was (small world) and he wasn't even a native speaker himself. My theory: when you ask someone to correct language, and they know the author isn't a native speaker, they'll nitpick on things that native speakers wouldn't be corrected on; but the corrections will be much more about the idiosyncrasies of the corrector than the level of the author (when that author has reached a certain level of proficiency of course).