Spoken French

Catherine. I agree about the numbers, they can be a nightmare - particularly when you giving your RIB details over the phone. Never sure whether to do them in groups of 2/3/4.

Going back to the meat of the debate there is an element of people who believe that they don't need to speak a foriegn language because everyone speaks English don't they? However, I also have a thoery that people are afraid of making mistakes and therefore looking foolish so don't want to risk it. All I can say is that foreigners are very understatanding and appreciate any effort you make to speak their language, and will ignore your grammatical errors, provided they get the gist of what you are saying. I have worked with many nationalities over the years, they will just go for it and I have lots of lovely examples of things that people have come out with - one Swedish guy asking if I wanted ordinary water or jumping water - but he was doing his best, I understood what he meant and thought it quite cute.

One thing for sure is that life is much richer when you enhance your understanding and communication skills

I am loving this string because my family is a 'mess' in a way. I am bilingual in English and German, my wife in Italian and French, we share Spanish and our bit of Portuguese. I consider Dutch and Flemish the same bar pronunciation (and yes I can do the Northern Dutch 'G' - gemakelijk!) but also simply one of the German dialects I know. After living in Norway for a few short months but attending classes I realised I slip into the Sandinavian languages. Then I have learned Quechua, Kinh and Ki-Swahili for work and Cymru for a laugh because we lived there for five years... Ironically, as a Scot of Highland origins I do not know much Gaelic at all (excuse, NE Moray had almost no Gaelic speakers in even the first census in the 1830s). Other Brits simply ask me why I have them when everybody speaks English). I usually threaten them that I shall dump them up in the Andes where I did fieldwork and their waiter-on-the-Costa-lotta-money-Spanish will not even work. Yeah, French is one of the hardest, but we live there so er-er-er try speaking and, more importantly, thinking it.

Yes, I have French region residing in-laws who say septante, huitante et nonante. Octante is, as I understand it, more regional or dialect along with settante and neufante/neuvante BUT, naturally, you will probably never find all three in one place... Small nation with FOUR languages, of which the smallest, Rumantsch, has more dialects than imaginable. Even my wife's Italian minority has more dialects, almost valley by valley, than imaginable and as for Schwytzer Dietsch write a book. So a few numbers in the French is really easy and anyway they know what the French say even if they pooh-pooh them for it.

Many thanks Pascale and yes, motivation really does make all the difference ;-)

Brilliant demonstration Andrew !

You are absolutely right about the reasons and the ways of learning a foreign language, the problems of its use, ...

but don't you think that if you are strongly motivated for learning it (private or professional aims) you could get it more efficiently ?

Yes, I read a Margaret Mead book that somebody's father had probably accidentally bought from one of those bookshops that used to sell things with brown paper covers. I then found Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques in the school library and there I was gone - so how I got infected. Incidentally, one of my contemporaries got a job with Claude Levi-Strauss so that I got to meet him in his latter years and not so long ago I got to meet Maurice Godelier who is one of my absolute anthro heroes. Been worth it, so not that sad about not becoming a linguist, was just an option I would go for with another round.

Brilliant and yes I'm linguistically ill - imagine a class of chinese students all saying they had a present for breakfast j'ai mangé un cadeau - they have great problems with "g", the different between deux and douze and so many more that really make you laugh - love the "bath aloner" - my Dad can never quite get Millau so I did the same "me yo". as for students learning Englishtry "crisps" the sps is a real giggle. But it's just as fun in the native tongue - my daughter came home from school telling us all about the "pecstacle" they were doing for Christmas! Funny how a holiday and a "get started in Italian" book and tapes can radically change a person's direction in life!

Andrew has got it, Gretchen too. I suspect other people as well but not so distinctly. Lingoitis, an infectious disease you catch when sticking your nose into language and then digging deeper. I am incurable by the way.

I had a bit of extra work for the summer one year. A holiday company asked me to research the relationship between British holidaymakers and traders in Spain. It seemed that a few Brits took the bother to learn a bit of Spanish then went shopping and neither side could understand the other. So I took on four second year undergrads who had no jobs fixed up and fancied a bit of sun and sangria whilst earning. Each effectively lied about speaking Spanish as well as they had pretended so I had to go for drumming it into them fast, for which I have neither training nor experience. They needed to know pronunciation to match the bit they had in order to move the process on. I was trying to get the 'th' for 'c' or 'z' into their range properly and going blue in the face. One of the lads was from Bakewell in Derbyshire and it was his accent that rung a bell. I had him say 'bath aloner' with his accent which he did obligingly and made the others listen. After some shoulder shrugging I wrote Barcelona on the board and heard them all say 'aaahhh'. It took off from there.

Here I sometimes help do some classroom support in one daughter's class where they have just started English. They tried using her, but she is bilingual plus and too young to work out what the problem is. The one English boy is a little less bright than helps. So I have delightful sessions having children with mouths against windows and glass partitions saying "hahahaha" until the H sticks and exagerated tongue movements to show TH face to face and hoping I do not have halitosis... I do have a couple of problems. Firstly my job has cost me a few teeth at the back over the years, I got a virus that gave me massive ulcers so out they went. My tongue gets caught. Plus I have Sjoerenson's Syndrome which is drying of the mouth with chapped inside cheeks and tongue splits (sorry about the gory details) that occasionally makes my diction terrible. So my eight year old kind of sighs, steps in and says words to the effect of 'what he means is' and then shows her classmates how. Actually, it is all fun, but then fun without a little suffering is never quite on so I try to do so with dignity and without teaching children common English cusses and swearwords. Hard!

Oh yes, young children. Right my friend. My son was 40 this year! It took me 30 years to do it again. The shock was profound and the loss of freedom. Mind you, we have had them paid to conference and a) had a penthouse in Singapore hotel paid for! and b) they have ridden elephants in Thailand, etc. But lots of things are cast aside. You'll catch up later, just get them out of the house as soon as possible. Give them the sermon about the disadvantages of studying late you have on your side...

I think Andrew is absolutely right - motivation is the key. I think everyone picks up as much language as they need. In my case there were two motivators: my family and my job. Other than my husband and my brother-in-law, no one speaks English and it was simply not possible to spend three weeks in Brittany on vacation without being able to talk to the people around me. And then there was the job - I was given a small IT team to manage and their languages were French and Arabic. Learn the language or lose the job. Took less than 2 months to be able to talk to the team and less than 6 to bark out orders reasonably fluently. :-) Same thing happened in Tokyo - picked up survival Japanese in less than a month (asking for things in stores, telling a taxi driver how to get to my house and so on.)

Yes Andrew, unless I get non-desk work I do not get far either. Trips between here and Swiss in-laws and sometimes to my sister in London. We are in the proverbial sticks and whilst I mainly use English for work, I am reading a whole mish-mash of languages and sometimes 'talking' with people in their languages. Love it, but sometimes need a bit of less professional stuff. The guys yesterday use me for practice, we are mates and all but with the prof talking about the dialectics of James Joyce and so on rather than small talk...

If it helps folks who do actually want to learn, don’t be too downhearted when you find it a struggle.

A bi-lingual friend told me that, if I was reading a novel in french, it can be better to NOT have a dictionary at your side and constantly look up every word but, rather, read it like a little kid would read a more grown-up story: skip the words you don’t know - the context often clarifies things a little further on. I did “Jean de Florette’ ‘Manon des sources’ in that vein. (Brilliant!)

In the same way, when I first came to France, with only O-level french, I used to concentrate furiously when watching a film on French TV but, after about twenty minutes, my little brain would be full and I’d stop concentrating. However, at the end of the film, I’d realise that I’d pretty much got the gist of it. Little kids learn that way to a great degree.

I have friends who learn by needing to know the ins and outs and the ‘subjunctives’ of all the grammar and friends who learn it idiomatically with their mates down the pub.

Either/or - a bit of both.

I learnt the most when I had a French girlfriend - but these days my wife won’t let me have one...

Ha ha Catharine... final year languages student so that would make it 22! No, only joking, I'm sure I put in there some where that I was a "late starter" with languages (30!) - I was 36 or 37 when the dicorce came through if you must know Mrs H!

Jeez Andrew - how old were you when you got divorced??

I'm so jealous - I only spent a week or so out there with a friend from Alla dei sardi although he lives and works in Olbia. I was invited to his wedding but couldn't make it and have lost contact since apart from the odd email. How long were you out there for? and what are you doing in Bourgogne now - was it too remote (especially in winter) out there? Apart from Olbia Sassari and Alghero there didn't seem to be much in the whole of northern Sardinia except goats and of course Burlusconi and his bunga bunga parties every summer in Porto Cervo!

Great map Andrew - I lived in Cannigone near Arzachena and now remember that it was actually Gallurese they spoke, as the region is Gallura. Still couldn't understand it though.

Yep socio linguistics was one of the things I really enjoyed at uni and I was almost talked into staying and going on to a masters and then research but I also went through a divorce during my last year at uni so wanted to move on (yes I came late to languages but all that's another story!) i too failed English O level - got it on the third sitting! Did all the sciences etc and couldn't stand languages at school. Dialects, vernacular, patois, regional languages - all so interesting, at times I wish I had persued it rather than going on to the more general teaching of languages. your field of work sounds fascinating and getting to see so much of the world, so many languages and peoples - i've found that the longer I'm here in france the less open I am on the rest of the world (one reason for participating in this forum otherwise I'm extremely "local"!) I now rarely get out of our corner of France whereas I had plans of travelling Europe more widely, getting to grips with Spanish, Occitan, why not sardinian or corsican but while the kids are young everything's on the backburner. and as we said earlier retirement looks like it'll be more of the same!!!

I'll stop my drivle now but I'm glad you started the thread and as for solving this muddled world... you need to ask somebody else - I can't see the way out!

I think it is one of the reasons as old as I get I cannot turn down contracts that get me back in the 'field'. I've done quite a bit in Viet Nam since 2000 and been top to bottom and stick my totally not understanding ear into each and every one of the 30 or so languages I have been amongst.

I learned Quechua from one little valley in the Andes in Peru that I could use nowhere else in the world in the early 1980s and WOW, if I could be born again I would probably study socio-linguistics rather than a particular language. Ironically, I failed English 'O' level three times and have never tried again, yet my 'A' level German oral examiner walked out on me after two minutes complaining he could not keep up with me!

I love, truly, truly love dialects and slangs (vernacular, as we should say) and could happily have studied them but I shall not complain about what I did choose because the door that opened to our world is brilliant in itself, so I would recommend social anthropology to anybody wanting to study people anyway. The world is a right muddle indeed and I would not want it any other way, except that we stop fighting and generally harming each other. What is a bonus is meeting people like the prof out of whose comments this whole string sprang and what we get to share. Vive the Unterschieder - as I would happily say.

Sounds like a right muddle! Yes Catalan is meant to be the closest to the dialect, sardo - sardu on the east, on the western side of the island Alghero for example - I was on the eastern side near Olbia where it's origins are different, got a map somewhere... here it is - in fact the Catalan influence is even smaller than I thought - I knew it was Alghero based but that's pretty much it.try this link and zoom in for clarity:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Sardinia_Language_Map.png

I spent a summer in Sardinia, struggling with Sardo, settled for Italian instead (had lessons from a Suisse lady, in English who when struggling would explain in French instead). She told me that Catalan was the nearest language to Sardo!