Occasionally I’ll string a couple of sentences together, be more-or-less understood and more-or-less understand what is said back to me and think to myself “French is do-able, I need LOTS more practice but it’s do-able”.
Then Véro says something like that and I just think OMG I’ll never get the nuances and subtleties.
Mind you regional accents must dismay learners of English - especially strong ones such as Welsh, Geordie or the Black country. When I worked in Birmingham my boss had a strong Black Country accent and I often struggled to understand him.
Paul… my French pals assure me that they can understand me… they chuckle… and sometimes look a little puzzled… but I speak with my hands and my voice and face are very expressive… so folk are not left in any doubt what I might be on about…
though they might sometimes wonder "what I am on… "
it sometimes takes courage to rumble on, without worrying about verb tenses etc… but it’s worth it…
Je n’ai pas habité longtemps à Paris = I lived there briefly (some time ago).
J’habite à Paris depuis longtemps = I’ve lived in Paris for ages
Longtemps j’ai habité Paris = you are Marcel Proust, you’ve lived there for ages but possibly no longer do
J’habite plus à Paris depuis longtemps = I don’t live there any more and haven’t for a while
Je n’ai pas habité à Paris depuis longtemps = no really I haven’t lived in Paris for yonks
J’habite à Paris depuis peu/pas longtemps = I’ve just moved there
I have always been led to believe that because there is no equivalent of ‘am-ing’, is-ing’, or ‘are-ing’ in French, that the present tense means both ‘I do something’ and ‘I am doing something’, and thus J’habite means both ‘I Live’ and ‘I am living’.
Therefore, would it not be the case that “J’habite à Paris depuis longtemps” means ‘I am living in Paris since a long time ago’ which would be more naturally expressed as by an anglophone as ‘I have been living in Paris for a long time’ with the inference being that I am still living there now.
To say that I have lived in Paris doesn’t necessarily mean that the speaker is still living there, but the use of ‘J’habite’ surely requires a present tense interpretation.
Dangerous ground I know, but then the technical intricacies of language intrigue me.
@Robert_Hodge
Yes, I’ve lived in Paris for ages and I’ve been living in Paris for ages = j’habite à Paris depuis longtemps, we have neither the present perfect nor the present perfect continuous tenses in French, they just don’t exist, so we use the present. You could also say Il y a longtemps que j’habite à Paris. When I was a little girl it was considered unnecessary to use a preposition (à) before Paris in a phrase like that.
If we want to say I am currently engaged in xyz we say je suis en train de xyz.
We can use a present participle or gerund to say eg be careful while walking in the street : faites attention en marchant dans la rue.
In Spanish you have exactly the same be+ing construction as in English eg estoy leyendo = I am reading.
People drop the ne more and more, but yes, strictly it should be there. I dropped it because I wanted as many examples as I could think of both positive and negative.
almost never used in informal chatter, but a huge problem putting it back in when you write anything, trying to drill it into the kids is a nightmare !
I have learnt much of my French by speaking to people, going to the cinema, that sort of thing. So writing can be incredibly slow as I have to reflect on the spelling and correct grammar of so much…I doubt it’s acceptable to write something like ‘chai pas’ instead of ‘je ne sais pas’.
French is a beautiful elegant language but it’s complex. In countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg or Canada the French language is never their first choice.
That rather depends on who ‘they’ are! For lots of people in those countries French is just their first language and choice doesn’t come into it. In Antwerp for example much older people speak perfect French and younger ones choose not to, but that’s a political rather than purely linguistic choice. I didn’t speak French when I lived there, only Flemish because if you spoke French you had a good chance of being ignored. The Wallons all speak French, obviously.
Most of my Swiss friends are native French-speakers and manage fine in at least two of the official languages. My Luxembourgeois friends speak French and did their degrees in Strasbourg for the moqt part although they also speak German and Letzebuergesch.
That makes more sense! But French is the language used/of choice within the francophone areas/régions etc within the mentioned countries, well Belgium, Canada and Switzerland.
Same for me with the preposition “à” in such a phrase. Did it just become fashionable again, or did the Académie decree that it be used, or was there some other reason?
