Le français

Hi all,

Though it seems to be a reoccurring theme in this blog, today I wanted to talk about the things that makes learning how to live in a foreign country that much more difficult; the fabled language barrier. Personally, as someone who loves learning as many languages as I can, I don’t like the name “language barrier,” which sounds as if trying to interact with someone in their native language were a bad thing or a burden (it really is an amazing opportunity). That is not to say, however, that there are not moments where I’m left scratching my head looking for words and getting increasingly frustrated. To make matters worse, French is not a breeze to pronounce and the grammar is often as incomprehensible as the sentences my spinning instructor yells over ear-poundingly loud music. So, what I propose for you is a quick list of things that seem to shove me uncomfortably close to the French language barrier.

1. Rendre visite vs. visiter- This is a nightmare when trying to explain where you went on vacation. Rendre visite is only used when speaking about visiting a person, whereas visiter can be used to refer to a visit to a certain city or monument. I mix these up constantly.
2. Awkward- Probably one of the most used words in English when describing an unpleasant situation, there is no real French equivalent and it my brain is not fast enough to search for synonyms when I’m talking about (and still recovering from) the crippling awkwardness that was the first night of orientation here.
3. Tu vs. vous– This is a classic dilemma in French, yet deciding what register to use with people is not very simple, especially when one of them is often much easier to conjugate than the other… Trying to conjugate a verb in the second person plural and in subjunctive is enough to stop your train of thought completely. In addition to that, you have to be careful; little slip-ups are fine here and there, especially for a foreigner, but some people are really turned off by an immature employment of tu.
4. Passe simple- A tense that is not used in spoken French yet that makes reading books x10 more difficult (dont even get me started on the imperfect subjunctive…) is not fun for anyone.
5. Chiffres– The way the French say numbers is, frankly, very poorly thought out. Instead of seventy-seven, they say the equivalent of sixty-ten-seven; instead of ninety-nine, they say four-twenties-ten-nine. For those who are not mathematically gifted, translating these numbers and then trying to add them up to see what the total comes to leads to some prolonged searching for coins.

That’s all for this time. J’espère que vous avez apprécié cette liste des nuances de la langue française qui m’agacent les plus. 

À la prochaine,

Thomas

If only in Tours I knew all the troubles of French yet to come…

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2016 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.