I don't speak the lingo!

2spritelyislanders said:
:smiley: Thanks Frankie :smiley: Google Translate came to our aid on more than one occasion in France this year. I also use it to check pronunciation so it's good to hear it's correct, it'll make me a bit more confident at having a go at conversing in French. Have also downloaded Duolingo and I'm proud to say I'm 2% fluent in French at the moment  ::bigsmile: so will spend the long, cold, miserable winter evenings trying to improve before we go back to France next year. Vraiment impatients de notre prochain voyage en France :smiley:
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Well done you! You know you can ask me any question when you struggle with something you don't get. I can't remember the exact title of the thread I had started quite a time ago .. something like "all the questions you never dared to ask (or never dared asking) about (or in?) French". I'm not good at searching threads so may be you'll find it !!

@2spritelyislanders Edit : Just found it :
Broken Link Removed
 
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@Brakers
Hi Tony
Amen on most that has been said so far.

Grammar takes years, so don't worry about that too much. It's the speaking with the correct accent that is 'foreign' to us (if you'll excuse the pun).

We say 'Camping'. They pronounce it 'Comping'. Hence, a motorhome sounds like 'Comping Caaaar'. This is where books don't help because Camping is still spelt Camping and doesn't give the sound.

We know that 'Merci' is thank you, but it ain't pronounced 'Mercy'! We know too that Au Revior is goodbye, but it doesn't sound like it. They won't say 'Oh Reevwire'. It gets the cobbled together treatment and comes out like 'Ovv-waar'.

So; you arrive on the campsite. You understand the word électricité and he mumbles something that sounds like "Sez omp" You say, "Says who?" and so the fun begins......

Vocab' is king. You take your Comping Car to the emplacement (or peeech :D). Fill up with Eau Potable (Potable and not Portable) plug in your électricité and Bob et ton Oncle!

Seriously Tony, start small. Learning numbers is useful as are directions. For example, they don't have an equivalent for 'Straight ahead'. In French, that becomes 'Tout droit' which, when translated, means 'All right'!! So, turning right and taking that literally, it would mean you would be back where you started :(. They normally throw in a few "Par La's" which means go 'By there'. So it means that you go By or Past the church, then by or past the shops.

Little by little Tony; small steps at a time and you'll soon pick it up and be talking like a native! Have a virtual drive down a couple of French roads using Google's Street View. Twizzle around and look at shop signs or road signs and pick up some common words. No one ever forgets what Route Barré (road closed) means!

Also, have a punt around on YouTube. There are some conversational videos on there and they're FREE! Look for the basic ones with subtitles or you can try ' French with Julie' (Behave Funsters, please :rolleyes:)

Won't go on.....
Best of luck
James
 
wingman said:
@Brakers
<snip> For example, they don't have an equivalent for 'Straight ahead'. In French, that becomes 'Tout droit' which, when translated, means 'All right'!! <snip>
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Actually, it means "All straight". The French adjective "droit" has a number of meanings, including right, straight, upright (in the senses both of vertical and of honest); as an adverb, it means (inter alia) "in a straight line".
 
wingman said:
'All right'!!
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Ok you had some fun... But NO, droit doesn't mean ONLY right, it also means straight , a straight man , is someone you can rely on.

Let's do it in English :
A man says: It needs a good screw to fix this ...

A woman says the same .....

Now James , does it mean the same???? Or have I gone stupid all of a sudden? Same word isn't it? But different meanings. You must understand that all foreign languages have similar words which have different meanings. Not only French . Plenty of examples in English language... believe me I learn everyday!
 
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" No one ever forgets what Route Barré (road closed) means!" @wingman

I can clearly recall a trip to France in the company of two other campervans. Our leader that day (an ex trucker and then a uk taxi driver) decided to ignore the route barre sign. Before the days of sat nav.

We had no planned meeting up place so after a brief conversation between hubby (driver) and me (navigator) along the lines of " you can't go down there" (navigator) " well they have" (driver), and to my endless embarrassment we set off through the roadworks following the other 2. I thought the workers were pleased to see us, there was much arm waving and even a digger moved out of the way, how nice! Luckily the road works consisted of the re-laying of the cobbled centre of town on a bed of sand. I am not sure if we left nice deep wheel tracks in the lovingly laid sand, I wasn't looking, just pretending not to be there.
I am sure they will never forget the day that 3 VW campervans came to town.:eek:

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Then of course, when you are confident with your few learned French words and start using them, you realise there are regional accents and they pronounce some words differently. Throws you for a while, but you get used to it.
 
Allanm said:
Then of course, when you are confident with your few learned French words and start using them, you realise there are regional accents and they pronounce some words differently. Throws you for a while, but you get used to it.
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And some even have a complete different language! I had a university English ,and arrived ...very naïve...in ...Middlesbrough!
First day out asked my way to a.....Geordie...:Eeek::Eeek::Eeek::crying::crying::party:
 
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There are several good phone Translation apps which you can download for free. The French are quiet shy and although they probably can speak a little English they don't like to. But I have found if they see you trying to make a go of it and making a cock up they will normally jump in and try to help you out.
 
GeriatricWanderer said:
There are just two "types" of French people:

Mostly they will ignore your attempts to speak French as they like to show you how good their English is.
or
They expect everyone to be French fluent and will have no sympathy with stupid Rosbeefs.

But be sure to be fluent enough for the basic greetings, thanks and farewells.
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Dear GW,
With my tongue firmly in a cheek.
You're talking borrocks. Or sphériques as they say across the water.in

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Well, I wonder what the OP thinks about all of our replies? (Particularly my lame attempt to explain a few things!)

I would love to have a French 'workshop' at one of our rallies with speakers like @yodeli.
Features like, 'At the Péage', 'At the Aire' and a few conversational pieces should fill a rainy day?
So many of us travel over there :france:and others are tempted, I'm sure it would be fun and informative.
 
If I want to learn new languages I go to evening classes at a local 6th Form College, usually 20 lesson courses, as the 12 lesson courses are too short to retain anything.

I've been lucky with the teaching quality until the last one, German, where I found myself dropping off and wanting to skive. It wasn't the language, it was the teacher. I'm going to have to build on what I picked up by going online or something like that.

The big advantage of classes is you get to interact with others, which is crucial. You also realise that others struggle with the same things as you. You can also ask specific questions of the teacher, ie how do you say 'pitch' as opposed to 'room' when booking in.

I should add that I failed 'O' Level French at school, so I don't have any special gift for languages that makes evening classes easy for me.
 
wingman said:
Well, I wonder what the OP thinks about all of our replies? (Particularly my lame attempt to explain a few things!)

I would love to have a French 'workshop' at one of our rallies with speakers like @yodeli.
Features like, 'At the Péage', 'At the Aire' and a few conversational pieces should fill a rainy day?
So many of us travel over there :france:and others are tempted, I'm sure it would be fun and informative.
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Many times I've thought about having a rally here at the stadium....Lot of room , big gymnasium for sharing a few meals ... Thing is , at that time my boss said NO because gypsies could think it's an open place .... Then came last summer with all the gypsies and all the problems they brought along with them. I have a new boss now. I might try and ask but he just became Boss when the gypsies arrived... I'm afraid he might be a tad put off . Let's give him some time before asking.
Edit:Typos corrected... Sorry can't correct the quotes!
 
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yodeli said:
Many times I've thought about having a rally here at the stadium....Lot of room , big gymanasium for sharing a feaw meals ... Thing is , at that time my boss said NO because gypsies could think it's an open place .... Then came last summer with all the gypsies and all the problems they brought along with them. I have a new boss now. I might try and ask but he just became Boss when the gypsies arrived... I'm afraid he might be a tad put off . Let's give him some time before asking.
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Do you have a cane Miss ?
 
Learning another language is an immensely humbling activity. It helps us to appreciate the many efforts others go to in order to learn ours, and the great frustration that immigrants must constantly feel in not being able to express themselves as freely as they would in their own language. English is a difficult language to learn!

It seems that nowadays a lot of foreign schools feel that it is important to learn English and English language courses in schools are a high priority. However, that gives the English an excuse not to learn foreign languages, because everyone learns theirs. That is such a shame.

Language is the tool that should bring us all together but if we don’t know what it means or feels like to learn to speak another person’s language, then language is at risk of driving us apart.
 
magicsurfbus said:
If I want to learn new languages I go to evening classes at a local 6th Form College, usually 20 lesson courses, as the 12 lesson courses are too short to retain anything.

I've been lucky with the teaching quality until the last one, German, where I found myself dropping off and wanting to skive. It wasn't the language, it was the teacher. I'm going to have to build on what I picked up by going online or something like that.

The big advantage of classes is you get to interact with others, which is crucial. You also realise that others struggle with the same things as you. You can also ask specific questions of the teacher, ie how do you say 'pitch' as opposed to 'room' when booking in.

I should add that I failed 'O' Level French at school, so I don't have any special gift for languages that makes evening classes easy for me.
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I spent years at college evening classes attempting to learn Swedish as all my family live in Sweden, although they all speak excellent English. As fast as I tried to memorise one list of words, or even just one or two words, I would turn over the page and try and recall but they were "gone". I just cannot keep them in and I have tried all sorts of "tricks". Of course, I am very rarely called upon to speak any Swedish so that doesn't help. I try to refresh my German or French before travelling, but when push comes to shove at point of impact, as it where, all words desert me.
If I try to count to ten, a mixture of all three languages comes out!
 
You could be suffering from a little-known condition called 'continental dyslexia' (lol)
 
wingman said:
Well, I wonder what the OP thinks about all of our replies? (Particularly my lame attempt to explain a few things!)
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Hi Wingman
Don’t put yourself down there are more than enough people that will do that without you getting on the band wagon.
I appreciate all who try to answer my questions, let’s face it none of us knows everything, although I’ve known some people who think they do, so I thank all who have tried to help me.

Just been looking at Numbers in Google translate anybody know how to pronounce Fourteen, for the life of me I can’t get what the hell Google translate is saying. Anyone want to break it down for me?

Best Wishes Tony
 
Brakers said:
<snip>

Just been looking at Numbers in Google translate anybody know how to pronounce Fourteen, for the life of me I can’t get what the hell Google translate is saying. Anyone want to break it down for me?

Best Wishes Tony
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14 = QUATORZE sounds like CAT OARS

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Never mind all the lingo, just tell me how you did that snip. @TJBi . I spend ages getting a quote and then backspaceing out the bits I don't want!
 
One thing that I still have great difficulty is asking for 'one' of something 2 different spellings and pronunciations according to gender, I think.

un and une, the first sounds like a nasal 'an' and the second similar to in English, what happens to me is that I make this noise like uuuuun, which sounds very much, to French ears, like deux because of the elongation and not hearing the n on the end.

Nearly got 2 dozen oysters once:)
 
matamoros said:
un and une, the first sounds like a nasal 'an' and the second similar to in English, what happens to me is that I make this noise like uuuuun, which sounds very much, to French ears, like deux because of the elongation and not hearing the n on the end.
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Not sure if I should laugh or cry, does it get easier? :(
 
Riverbankannie said:
Never mind all the lingo, just tell me how you did that
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Just like that!:rofl:

Don't know how to do the snip thing but if you highlight a portion of text a box appears with add to multi quote and then enter that into your reply.:)

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Riverbankannie said:
Never mind all the lingo, just tell me how you did that snip. @TJBi . I spend ages getting a quote and then backspaceing out the bits I don't want!
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Having clicked on the relevant "Quote", just highlight the text that you wish to snip and then type <snip>. Make sure you don't highlight square brackets and what's inside them (unless you're looking to remove images, etc.).
 
@TJBi beat me to it. CAT OARS - I love it!

Just for info @Brakers , here's how 11 to 16 sound....

11. Aunze
12. Dooos
13. Trez
14. Cat oars
15. Cans
16. Sez

After that, you just add a digit plus 10. Soooo, 17 becomes Dix-Sept (Dees-Set), 18 is Dix-huit (Dee's- Wheat) 19 is Dix-neuf (Dees-Nerf)

Numbers 20, 30, 40 onwards have their own monika's, but I won't confuse things by carrying on (n)
 
I decided to mark it funny as I thought there was some magic button you were using!
I find it a bit hit and miss selecting portions of text on the iPad.
 
Riverbankannie said:
I find it a bit hit and miss selecting portions of text on the iPad.
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I'm the same when using my Ipad that's why I do most of my thread stuf on my laptop or desktop.

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