I'm not learning French

What you will often hear is the grammatically incorrect "Moi, je." Learning correct French grammar is not a bad thing, but it may not be so useful in the street, especially when listening to young people.
A really worthwhile investment is the wonderful Robert & Collins French-English dictionary, that not only tells you what the words mean, but also gives examples of how they are used.

@deborah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexive_verb

I forgot to mention my "homework" assignment for the next French lesson. Conjugating verbs adding "me, te, se, nous, vous and se" before the verb. Ex: "Je me brosser" -- "I brush (my hair)". What's that all about?!! Is this commonly used, or just "good grammar?"

If you're referring to the weather Shirley it's il fait chaud or il fait froid

Haha Shirley, you reminded me of the English man I corrected when he got funny looks for his French. He used beau for everything instead of jolie and in some sentences bon/ne, but also worse, he used it instead of belle. He was surprised, saying he had been coming to France for over 30 years for holidays and had his 'O' level French. I told it was wrong nonetheless, using the obvious example of a belle dame, not beau dame. His normally quite timid, silent wife chuckled which really got his back up. He explained that he felt that beau sounded more feminine than belle, to which I replied that was not the case for the 70 odd million Francophones worldwide. A few weeks later their holiday cottage was up for sale, I have always wondered whether my chastisement had anything whatsoever to do with it. I had the impression he was far too arrogant and self-assured to be aware of or admit to making mistakes, no doubt there were many others. I haven't seen him in this area for over three years either, is he perhaps allowing another place the great privilege of meeting a 'caricature Anglais'?

Americans are meticulous about pronouncing every letter, while the French are notorious for omitting them in speech. Takes time to get used to that.

Yeah, ĂȘtre and avoir are a plague on all their houses, hereabouts they are sometimes transposed making French learned at school ridiculous. Then faire sneaks in. Funnily enough, I don't have a problem as such but am most comfortable with those verbs when using the past tense when it is no longer transposed by anybody. Mind you, I get a smack on the hand now and again because the people here, many of whom normally use Occitan anyway, skip articles and then I go to even a tiny city like Bergerac and am treated like a backwoodsman for no le or la ;-)

I love this conversation and I'm learning so much from all of you. The lesson today went well. I learned that the big mistake even French people make is not using the verb "avoir" to talk about how you feel. Ex: I am hot = J'ai chaud instead of Je suis chaud. Who knew?!! I'm still having problems with pronouncing verbs. I'm from North Carolina and that adds another dimension to speaking French. I tend to drag out the end of words. Teacher says I'm at a plateau. I think she's being nice. She really means, "I'm sure you'll get better soon."

People have different ways of learning languages.
For some it's the academic approach, learning the grammar, struggling with the subjunctive, reading the dictionary.
Others might find it easier to listen to what people say in different circumstances and trying the same things themselves, as the occasion arises.
Apart from librarians and university professors, most French people find easy ways around the complexities of grammar so what you learn at school or in classes may not be particularly relevant in everyday speech.
And it has been said that French is just English, badly pronounced! You will certainly find that we share around 50% of our vocabulary, even if the words sound different when spoken. I think that explains why I find French easier to read than to speak.
If you have a special interest or hobby, it might be a good idea to join a local club or society. People with similar interests tend to get on anyway and if the conversation is all about gardening, or patchwork, or whatever, it is easier to work out what they are talking about than it is in more general exchanges.

You've given me lots to chew on. My teacher will be here in 30 minutes. Will keep you posted. Words of encouragement are always appreciated ... as well as horror stories about misunderstood French conversations!

And that moment of realization when you discover that the name of the person they are always talking about is not actually Monsieur Ceconla!

So here is my list of excuses........
French wife, but we always communicate in English, because there are enough misunderstandings in relationships without adding another hurdle.
I never worked in France - absolutely the best way to learn because you don't have any choice.
As my French gets better, my hearing deteriorates.
I no longer understand my own language, with the exception of Radio 4 and old movies, so I guess my hearing is permanently tuned to the speech patterns of the 1950s.
I have no memory.

On the plus side -
Being an old geek, I can find my way around a French Website with less difficulty than many natives.
I find that "Bonjour" and "A la prochaine" and a bit of smiling and nodding in between, saves me from getting into arguments about such things as politics and child rearing.

Surprising how easy it is to get by most of the time and how frustrating and infuriating it is when you desperately want to say something and can't find the right words!


Flash cards are used to implant engrams, they work for people as a rule. We are similar enough age and I too learned Latin that way. Try your hardest to unlearn that method and put the sounds on the back burner, just get the foundation to build on them include getting sounds, thus pronunciation, right on the way. Bear in mind the majority of people around you probably use some kind of dialect so take a pinch of salt when the teacher insists on one way of making a sound and all the people thereabouts make another. Vowels are so diversely spoken in France, rather than in 'French', that the freedom is there for you to take and use, despite what teacher says.

All, I really appreciate your input and it's all going into that brain mixer of mine. First, let me say that I am in my late 60's (did I say that?) so yes, part of this new life and learning is to keep my brain alert. I'm finding, however, that when someone tries to get me to mimic a phrase in French, I end up needing to see it in writing to remember it. It's that "visual learner" thing, I guess. Martin, I too remember the days of "amo, amas, amat, etc" and I'm drawn to learning French that way. I want to understand the language and how sentences are constructed. My teacher is happy to oblige since it's the way she teaches sounds. But it's painfully slow. Perhaps a combination of techniques is what I need. My inner self says "learn the verbs" ... by other half says "learn by rote". I do find that flash cards help tremendously. When your niece is ready to share her research learning, Martin, I'd love to know her thoughts about this, too.

Exactly Martin, engrams are a permanent impression left in the memory banks of the brain (or indeed as computer data and all in between animal and machine acquired knowledge) as the result of stimulation such as being taught or the durable memories left by self-learning and acquisition or more simply, a transcript of what remains in the brain conscious experiences have left there. The difference is that with my background I knew about that and was therefore more open to relearning by recall, thus retraining with some mimesis perhaps, at least a the creative tool which is too often forgotten in language learning. Using even a Platonic or Aristotelian ancient view, language is like a poem. The words are easy to learn but the meaning is less often apparent. However, that is complicated socio-linguistics that explain Deborah's dilemma but would certainly not help her unless she wants to learn that science at the same time :-(

Yes, you make an important point about not using the language being learned to teach it. That is perhaps a bit too much for novices but would be absolutely the best thing if introduced transitionally to be the ultimate way of bringing the student on. Training to think in the 'new' language is not an overnight thing and takes a bit of time, so should also be learned gradually until the switching process becomes reasonably automatic. The other point I forgot before is to forget accents, perfect vocabularies and grammar, perfection is also beyond the vast majority of native speakers of any language anyway. The target should be to achieve moderate proficiency that will improve steadily and not fluency after a few months. I don't 'appen yer know, 'cos the troof is more of us getta banana than a Nobel prize! Excuse my vernacular!

Brian, I think - no I know - you're spot on on this. We all translate "on the fly" but having to translate from thought to language to another language is cumbersome and difficult. Much easier to move straight from thought to language.

There is an academic body of knowledge building up around mimeses and the relationship to engrams, literally the mechanisms by which we "learn by imitation". This is, I believe the natural way to learn anything.

"Monkey see, Monkey do, Monkey experiment, Monkey understand, Monkey awarded Nobel prize".

So, I've kept the text books as reference but use an online translation app as a learning tool, think the thought and listen to the French to go with it. English only required to communicate with the app. You can do the same with people but it's much harder to start.

I think my teacher doesn't approve but I'd like to get her to teach me French grammar in French. I accept it's a bit difficult as I don't speak much French yet but I don't see the point of learning the rules in English and then trying to apply them to French constructs. (I remember hours of amo amas amat etc from my childhood, not fondly).

P.S. My niece is researching learning and Alzheimer's at UCL and is having some astonishing results in getting patients to "re-learn" stuff.

I am in at the other end. My OH and I only spoke French when we met about 15 years ago. Her first language is Italian but in Switzerland, her home, they are obliged to learn three at school. Her German is pathetic but French pretty perfect, so she went to study in a bilingual place but used only one language, French, which has now become her everyday language. She had some 'school' English but not enough to discuss what she was doing, which was post-doctoral research she had come to work on with my materials mainly but also myself as the adviser. That we became a couple and she also eventually had an academic fellowship in the UK made her learn English and perhaps our French became around 30% of our means of communication.

I also sometimes worked in Francophone countries, so was in good practice anyway. We moved to France, all good and fine. I was a bit rusty for bureaucracy particularly but that picked up. Then I got ill, that had no effect on language immediately but then I got worse with more than one condition and had a cocktail of drugs that knocked me out and scrambled my mind. Language went walkabout, however a large part of my English went with the French and I somehow reverted to the German that had dominated my first seven years of life. That remained intact, the other two not. Great, living in France and suddenly speaking a lesser language.

I had, as a result, to retrain myself. I had, in French, some speech therapy for a while until I launched off alone. Things got better, ironically I could write both languages as ever, but a lot has still got stuck somewhere. In speech I still stop mid-sentence, search for words, then move on. Then, just my luck, I have an allergy to one of the medications that gives me a permanently dry mouth and sometimes dry and blistered tongue and lips. So very often my speech is slurred. It is, therefore, often an uphill fight to speak. Vocabulary shot, grammar in ruins and people can't hear words properly at times anyway.

What I tried and is helping, is to develop my tiny knowledge of my OH's first language. By being a novice in mid-60s I went for Italian in order to train my brain to take in language that is not scrambled because it is not actually there per se in the first place. I also invested time in finding out about language learning in age groups. Unless somebody has passed a particular line, for instance a degenerative condition such as Alzheimer's disease is developing, then our language learning ability is very little reduced by the years. The problem it seems is habit rather than learning process. This is what happened in my scrambled brain. One of the keys, it would seem, is to use a 'switch' that is actually there for many things. In this case we have to use it to switch over to think in the language we are attempting to speak and develop that capacity. Whilst we think in our habitual language and try to speak in the language we need to use we are, in fact, simply going through the slow process of translating. That puts vocabulary before grammar and thus if the vocabulary is small to begin with comes out all wrong or even not at all because the frustrated habitual language side is asking "What is that word?" or something of that nature and actually restricting the output of the language we are trying to speak.

So, here I am in the second half of my 60s with a young, bi- and multilingual family and thus very often muted as they converse, especially with others. I have relearned what it is like for new learners but work very hard on the switching principle and try my hardest to do it. Ironically, much of the time, and now because I am thinking about it, I think in German still and write English but being aware of that I tell myself to think French as I try to do when I am trying to learn Italian. I'll test that next week when we go to Italian speaking Switzerland for a family visit and am determined to do as well as I can.

Bottom line. Do not be convinced the years are against you. Do not try to learn the language as taught only but try to switch into it, as bad as that may seem to you when you start doing it. It will not only help you speak and comprehend but open the door to learning by acquisition from the everyday use around you. Then it will take off. Above all, don't be afraid of doing that.

I'm with Vic on this one Deborah...I left France when I was 5 so I was educated in American schools. I never learned "official" French, just the day-to-day conversational kind and je me debrouille bien (at least I think so...who knows what happens when I turn away? They may be shaking their heads and laughing~). Vic, I think the French word for beer is vin:)

Nobody says “je dĂ©solĂ©â€ but many say “dĂ©solĂ©â€ alone .

Wrong. Here in the Monts d’Arree many people say " je desolĂ©". The correct form is “je suis desolĂ©â€.I don’t imagine this. I have had a house here 46 years! The favourite expression here is “Oh la vache!” At the same time many people locally cannot write cheques for themselves.

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