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I interact with french in France for some 13 years, spending most weekends there (Chamonix! but all over the place from east to west to south, not much north ye
by saiya-jin 3y ago
I interact with french in France for some 13 years, spending most weekends there (Chamonix! but all over the place from east to west to south, not much north yet).
First of all, french is not some beautiful language once you grok the grammar, rather pretty weird and old layered 'spaghetti code' with tons of exceptions to tons of obscure rules (nothing, absolutely nothing elegant there). Its needlessly complex especially when you know other languages solved it much better, and as with other bureaucratic stuff in France any attempt for reform failed. English to non-native (in both of those) is a beautiful magnificent blessing in comparison, you can be proficient with little, french will literally look puzzled at you and get really quickly fed up with you. Patience is really not a typical french virtue. But I guess if you like the feeling of struggling for whole life, looked down upon and gain motivation from it then its great.
Second, I don't know details of how schools work in France (seems a rather toxic place pushing way too hard for competitiveness but I may be wrong here), but I see result every day also in cca 50% of my colleagues - people are absolutely snobbish in the worst possible manner about their language to the point of being sometimes toxic, and automatically scowl at any tiny mistake. Guess what, as a foreigner trying to learn language you will make tons of them, even on C2 level. There is absolutely minimum help, they will just laugh at you like bunch of small kids, literally mocking you and pointing fingers at you. I mean 50+ years old higher managers bursting into laugh how stupid you are. Every single time. Schooling and overall mindset make french people behave like arrogant folks a lot (not so much say folks from African colonies, much much nicer folks to interact with; same for Swiss french and cca Belgians too. Don't know much about Quebec folks, but in casual conversation french mock and insult them behind their back pretty horribly). I've never ever been mocked by natives for making even basic mistakes in any other language, its just part of basic human decency.
I've seen recently shock and disgust among young French that some french local paragliding teacher exposed to decades of english-speaking tourists used some english words in his french. Those were some otherwise smart folks. I've had my very good American friend who is overweight literally gave up on french and France, on his month long trip there they were insulting and mocking him in the bars and restaurants, in hotels, in trains etc (I talk about staff, not other tourists). Man, I have hundreds of stories like this, unfortunately very consistent.
I know 5 languages, 3 of them very different compared to my native one, and French is by far the worst of them to learn and just use it (I know there are worse, just describing my experiences). French folks need to come in terms of not being superpower nor center of the world anymore and accepting there is more than their language in the world. I've visited every continent (apart from Antarctica) and generally travelled a lot and literally nowhere I felt so little welcomed and rather just tolerated due to money bringing in like in France. A truly beautiful place, history, cuisine, nature, but neither me, nor my wife (who studied in Lyon for quite some time) nor folks around us in similar situation certainly don't travel there for the local people, which is often the most important aspect of my traveling when going for exotics.
/sorry for long rant
- csdvrx 3y ago> nor my wife (who studied in Lyon for quite some time) Can you please ask her some recommendations for contemporary music? I find french rap wonderful! My new favorite artist is Aye Nakamura ; before I really loved Eva Queen.
- gumby 3y ago> First of all, french is not some beautiful language once you grok the grammar, rather pretty weird and old layered 'spaghetti code' with tons of exceptions to tons of obscure rules (nothing, absolutely nothing elegant there). Its needlessly complex especially when you know other languages solved it much better, Though I can’t disagree with the “ancient spaghetti code” characterisation, “needlessly complex” is linguistically meaningless. People continuously use language and infelicities are typically rapidly eliminated. My wife and I would between us resort to French express things that couldn’t be conveniently expressed in our respective native languages. I think it’s pretty common — probably universal — to inject foreign loan words or phrases in multilingual families or other groups. In the case of resorting to French, it’s usually for a word that has a lot of implications, ambiguity or other ramifications, which can be expressed compactly in French. A consequence of the spaghetti code you decry. Written Arabic is really great for this.
- d-lisp 3y agoWritten French grammar is particularly good at expressing nuances due to the expression of the variety of "times" and tenses. J'aimais and j'aimai (imparfait and passé simple) are both past but the first expresses "I loved (duration, action being performed in the past)" and the latter "I loved (instant, action completed)". Je finissais (imparfait) = I was completing (some stuff), je finis (passé simple) = I completed. Also Je marcherais (conditionnel présent) = I would walk, (possible) Je marcherai (futur) = I will walk (true) (Maybe the ability to express a nuance discreetly is a sort of elegance) You could say " this is spaghetti code" but je marche, je marchai, je marchais, je marcherai, je marcherais respects some kind of nearly mathematical rules that allows me to feel situations. March - e March - ai March - ais Marcher - ai Marcher - ais J'ai marché, j'avais marché, j'eus marché, j'aurais marché, j'aurai marché express a lot of different things based on the different forms of "to have". English has this kind of complexity too : I have walked, I had walked, I did walk, I will walk, I will have walked, I did have walked... I am not arguing about the possibility of nuances here but rather about the means by which they are expressed, of course.