[OCB]

Funnily enough, when I was 11, I Iived in SW France for a year and attended a local school (I'd done 2 years French in primary school in UK, so had a bit of a head start) for a year.

At the end of that time I went to stay for 4 weeks holiday in the Cevennes above Nimes with my school best friend whose parents had a family house there.

The local French village kids refused to think I was English and told my friend 'mais non, il est Belge, ton copain'....

Prolly because I had picked up a pretty strong SW France regional accent....

Peter

ROFL - that's a first, a SW French accent being mistaken pour les Belges

for the majority reading this - saying "les Belges" in French can be condescending. Sometimes it's honest and not intended to be - but sometimes it's deliberately a bit like saying "Mick" for Irish....

[PeteSpencer]

Must’ve done something right: it was enough to get me the French prize every year at school back in the UK up to O level.....

Peter

[kanga]

Must’ve done something right: it was enough to get me the French prize every year at school back in the UK up to O level.....

Peter

ISTR the oral element of 'O' (and even 'S') -Level French (and Russian) exams ('60s) were relatively undemanding and minor, compared to the written (grammar, spelling, literature, essays). My children's GCSE ones were both more demanding and more practical (French, German and, for one, Russian). For my French, my problem (briefed by schoolteacher beforehand) was to speak 'proper' not 'Swiss'

Then when I got to Canada it took me quite a while to get used to local francophone accent, grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. A francophone Canadian couple, former colleagues, both fluent English speakers, were later posted to UK. While visiting Amsterdam they booked a French-language guided tour of one of the Art Museums. After a few exchanges, the Dutch guide, fluent in European French, insisted they could not possibly be native francophones as she could not understand them, and suggested they switch to an English-language tour. They were most indignant.

[akg1486]

A francophone Canadian couple, former colleagues, both fluent English speakers, were later posted to UK. While visiting Amsterdam they booked a French-language guided tour of one of the Art Museums. After a few exchanges, the Dutch guide, fluent in European French, insisted they could not possibly be native francophones as she could not understand them, and suggested they switch to an English-language tour. They were most indignant.

A similar story: I took a training course in Dublin once together with a Brazilian colleague. We were talking, in Portuguese, during a break with a fellow student from Portugal. After a while the Portuguese guy said to my friend "You speak Portuguese fairly well. When did you learn that?"

[OCB]

Kanga - we've spoken about the Confederate Helvetica connection before.
I love it., if nothing else it's a very evident Calvinist "doigt honneur" to the Academie F.

FFS - when you look at the francophone Canadians, they are the only ones to have "ARRÊT" roadsigns. Even the French simply say "STOP".

I remain amazed how often "second" and "weekend" crops up in French, and that's from a language that's "protected by law".

One project I worked extremely hard on for nearly 7 years, we integrated the IT infra from the west of Ireland to the eastern seaboard of Kamchatka. 17 different official languages.

The only one who refused to accept English as the base language for the base build(Windows + local MUI pack) was France. France had a law that says, if a bit of software is available in French, then it must be in French.

So, it was a French build with MUIs from everywhere else. Except it didn't work well - so when we had German/Belgian/Dutch/Lux colleagues working in France - they couldn't work properly. Scripts written in French or German VBA didn't work any more etc. All our fault of course....

FF nearly 20 years, and my current client suffers from the fact that in Dutch culture, the decimal separator is a comma, but the english and french one is a dot. In english, we use comma as a thousands separator.

In the financial sector - those little matters count.

I have to be honest, I once transferred 10x what I intended because of that. From one day to another, my online banking switched from English to Dutch separator. It look nearly 3 years to get my money back....

[akg1486]

FF nearly 20 years, and my current client suffers from the fact that in Dutch culture, the decimal separator is a comma, but the english and french one is a dot. In english, we use comma as a thousands separator.

At least Excel manages that without a problem: you can choose the setting and if you save with a comma as decimal separator you can open in another computer with a dot as decimal marker.

Word documents is another matter, though....

[Foo Gee]

I think learning a language (or anything for that matter) is all about whether you have a need or desire to do so. I am stuck on the same chords of my guitar that I've been playing for more years than I care to remember but I've picked up two languages to a conversational level (not always grammatically correct but understandable) in the last few years.

I put my lack of guitar progression down to the fact that I can't possibly be that interested to progress further than I am and my ability to pick up the languages because I had/wanted to.

Our English neighbour in France still can't speak or understand French despite living there for over ten years and I was conversational after six months. He spends all his social time with other English people whereas I only socialise with French people.

My Swedish mother wanted us to learn the language from a very early age but my father didn't want us to. Thankfully we did learn and had a meaningful relationship with our grandparents who couldn't speak English whereas my father sat there waiting for someone to translate every conversation.

I'm sure learning is more about willingness and much less about having a natural ability but as adults we tend to choose what we learn and children just suck it all in.

[OCB]

My school friend’s grandparents were Lithuanian - wwii etc, but they refused to teach their kids or grand kids a single word. My mate found that a shame, as he wanted to go to his ancestral home and be able to speak the lingo.

An ex of mine, her grandmother came to Brussels from England after the war to help however she could with the rebuilding of “poor little Belgium”

She didn’t speak a word of French when she got here, but picked it up - met a young man who set himself up selling bread door to door on his bicycle in villages south of Bxl, they got married/kids/grandkids and a successful bakery business.

In her last few months she ended up in a hospice. My g/f was reluctant to take me there - but one of the doctors thought that a native English speaker might help her out of a depression she’d gotten into.

The poor old soul refused to even acknowledge she understood me. The family thought her decline meant she’d forgotten her mother tongue. I spoke with her neurologist- and to him that was impossible.

Turns out she thought I was a doctor “in disguise” trying to pull a fast one on her! Shame, I’m sure she had some amazing stories to tell

[leiafee]

I remain amazed how often "second" and "weekend" crops up in French, and that's from a language that's "protected by law".

Living languages use loan words. It's very peculiarly anglophone to assume that any other language than English which does so is suffering some sort of malaise.

[akg1486]

I remain amazed how often "second" and "weekend" crops up in French, and that's from a language that's "protected by law".

Living languages use loan words. It's very peculiarly anglophone to assume that any other language than English which does so is suffering some sort of malaise.

Languages aren't owned by governments and can't be protected by law against loan words. If the majority of the French say "le weekend", that's what it's called. If they don't, it'll stay "fin de la semaine" like in Quebec.

I assume using the word "malaise" is a way of proving the same point, @leiafee .

[JoeC]

It's very peculiarly anglophone

C'est la vie

[OCB]

I remain amazed how often "second" and "weekend" crops up in French, and that's from a language that's "protected by law".

Living languages use loan words. It's very peculiarly anglophone to assume that any other language than English which does so is suffering some sort of malaise.

I never said it was a malaise - but L'Académie française is something peculiar. They genuinely do dictate what is "official" French and what isn't (oui, peut-etre)....

Today, for instance, I was in a technical meeting with a Neerlandephone and an old school francophone.

The sizing documented by the francophone was in "mega-octets", abbreviated to "Mo", except he genuinely thought he meant Go (Giga-Octets).

The storage guy - a very good friend of mine and insanely talented in many languages challenged the sizing. The francophone insisted his sizing was correct.

As a muppet PM, it was my job to stop the 2 of them going into the whole 1000 year history of why each side was wrong - and just get them to put the correct storage sizing in the spreadsheet so I could get the storage provisioned and not get my lilly white Scots erse roasted for yet another idiotic delay.....

[Bill Haddow]

Loan words are fine as they just provide a shorter way of saying the same thing, but the beauty of diversity is that one language will coin a phrase / term / word that leaves the others gasping:

From the US, "Grand Larceny" has a majesty, ring, and alliteration that beats "Serious Crime" into a cocked hat.

What phrase conjures up the presence and romance of heavy haulage quite like "Convoi Exceptionnel" ?

"Fire and Rescue", "Fire Brigade", and "Fire Department" are really prosaic compared to Spain's "Los Bomberos" - hey, you don't want to mess with those guys.

I'm not a polyglot, and happy to be educated, but what other language has a monosyllabic word to express the Scots "thrawn" or "dreich" ?

Forumites will doubtless have their own favourites.

As they say in Lanarkshire, "San fairy Anne"

Bill H

[OCB]

Seems a bit too much “loaning” - or is this fake news about fake news ???

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/04/non-non-non-pas-de-fake-news-si-vous-plait

[kanga]

..If the majority of the French say "le weekend", that's what it's called. If they don't, it'll stay "fin de la semaine" like in Quebec. ..

I worked in a majority francophone office in DND/MDN in Ottawa for 3 years, and French was the normal working language. We tended to use English only when we had US or UK visitors .. Anyway, there often seemed to be a nice dichotomy between the written and spoken languages: in official documents we would write le logiciel and l'ordinateur, but say 'le software' and 'le computeur'. The only times there where I heard anyone use the subjunctive or in spoken French were on news bulletins of local or national stations of SRC, the francophone analogue of CBC, ie equivalent of BBC. The bulletin readers on the independent Ontario francophone channel seemed not to use it. I recall an interview on SRC with the British High Commissioner, who spoke impeccable but very European French: after a couple of years there it sounded a bit strange to me. My French, which had been rather Swiss in and since childhood, now has a distinctly Canadian overlay, which confuses metroplitan French folk considerably.