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Je parle français très mal...
Jul. 20th, 2016 04:01 pm... mais je peux le comprendre très bien.
I can hear A. in the other room using a Learning French podcast and practicing along with it for our impending vacation. I'd have done so myself, but I have not had the time to do so. Unfortunately my brain is crunching numbers and bank systems all day, so if I listened to the same podcast, I'd only be half paying attention and learn nothing.
There's also the fact that I had four semesters of it in college and barely scraped by. It's very weird...I find I'm unable to successfully learn a foreign language. I think it might have been a few things: learning Spanish in high school, I was taught the "A Word = B Word" method with not that much immersion other than homework, so I never quite learned how to learn a different language. There's also the fact that my thought-to-speech process tends to be a bit different from other people; I tend to completely think out what I'm going to say and then say it; that's why I so often trip over my words when I speak. It's also why I get irritable when I'm interrupted.
In short, speaking French for me is pretty tough, considering that A) I have to think about what I'm going to say, B) I have to translate it in my head before I say it, and C) by the time I say it, the listeners' patience has worn thin. This is why I've pretty much resigned myself this time to the tourist basics of "bonjour" and "s'il vous plait" and "merci" and so on. Per Rick Steves, most of Paris probably knows English better than I do anyway.
On the other hand, I can comprehend it just fine if it's clear in my ears. I may not pick up every single word you say, but I get what you're talking about. That's about as far as I can get with foreign languages on a communicative level.
[Granted, I find it funny that I'm also a writer who's created a conlang for his novels. The same rule applies, though: I can create a great sentence in Anjshé if I have my glossary in front of me, but don't ask me to speak it in conversation, I'll just trip over myself.]
I can hear A. in the other room using a Learning French podcast and practicing along with it for our impending vacation. I'd have done so myself, but I have not had the time to do so. Unfortunately my brain is crunching numbers and bank systems all day, so if I listened to the same podcast, I'd only be half paying attention and learn nothing.
There's also the fact that I had four semesters of it in college and barely scraped by. It's very weird...I find I'm unable to successfully learn a foreign language. I think it might have been a few things: learning Spanish in high school, I was taught the "A Word = B Word" method with not that much immersion other than homework, so I never quite learned how to learn a different language. There's also the fact that my thought-to-speech process tends to be a bit different from other people; I tend to completely think out what I'm going to say and then say it; that's why I so often trip over my words when I speak. It's also why I get irritable when I'm interrupted.
In short, speaking French for me is pretty tough, considering that A) I have to think about what I'm going to say, B) I have to translate it in my head before I say it, and C) by the time I say it, the listeners' patience has worn thin. This is why I've pretty much resigned myself this time to the tourist basics of "bonjour" and "s'il vous plait" and "merci" and so on. Per Rick Steves, most of Paris probably knows English better than I do anyway.
On the other hand, I can comprehend it just fine if it's clear in my ears. I may not pick up every single word you say, but I get what you're talking about. That's about as far as I can get with foreign languages on a communicative level.
[Granted, I find it funny that I'm also a writer who's created a conlang for his novels. The same rule applies, though: I can create a great sentence in Anjshé if I have my glossary in front of me, but don't ask me to speak it in conversation, I'll just trip over myself.]
