Zentrope

logique et cohérente

Okay, I know I’m only about a month in to my project to learn to understand spoken French and so just about anything I say is uninformed, but, hey, this is the Internet, right? And this is just my particular journey and I ain’t no scholar.

So here’s my impression:

If you ignore French orthography and just go by the spoken sounds, French grammar seems a lot simpler than it did when I took a class in it a long time ago. (And by simple, I mean it’s like what English would be if we didn’t have a crazy system (ahem) of splitting and then tossing chunks of words about a sentence like peas on a toddler’s plate.) To boldly go to some un-fucking-believable place where he was at.

For instance, when you look at written French or at a patient and optimistic grammar book, French verbs all have different forms depending on number and tense, but when you pronounce them, a lot of them sound the same, or similar enough that it seems easy to get to an intuitive understanding. Reminds me of English where nearly all the inflections have been worn off just about everything. It’s the least of your problems, you might think to yourself.

Gender? It just doesn’t seem like it’s that big of a deal if you’re not writing the language. When you learn vocabulary by hearing words in sentences, you just sorta remember the gender. As an English speaker, I know I’ll screw it up, but as a listener, it just doesn’t matter. I couldn’t imagine myself ever saying mon famille for instance.

About the only thing knowing a bit about the written form of words helps you with is knowing what consonants to use before a vowel when you need to elide two words together. So, “we are” is nous sommes, pronounced “new som”, but if you add ici (here), it becomes “noo soms ee-cee”. Even so, you still don’t need the written language because you learn these things by listening to complete sentences and somehow you brain just “gets” the pattern if you can manage not to over think it. It’s your musical sensibility you’re exercising when you hear and attempt to speak the language. And once you have even a small sense of the music of the language, you feel the logic. (I love that oxymoron.)

I expect to eventually get to the stage that children get to when they over-regularize their language before they properly attend to the irregular aspects, for instance, when they say “I runned” before learning “I ran”, correctly identifying the -ed pattern for past tense verbs, but not the exceptions for the verbs where the vowel changes instead). The thing is, by not focussing on the written aspect of the language, I feel like learning another language is possible for me and it’s possible for me to learn it musically, at least in part.

Which brings me to another part of all this: the sentences I repeat based on various audio lessons often start out as tongue twisters. The reason might be because I just don’t talk much anymore in my daily life, but also because in French, the vowels are important, whereas in English, just the vowels of the accented syllables are important. When trying to get out a sentence during a pause in the audio, I end up getting the words basically right (mostly), but most of the syllables sound like “uh” or “eh”.

Nous sommes ici depuis trois jours becomes “Nuh SOMS EE-CEE duh pwuh twuh zhur”.

And finally: I had such problems with the French R sound, but now I don’t have any problem with it at all, except, maybe, in words like prendre. Thing is, I didn’t “master” the French R, I just one day noticed I was doing a lot better at it. If I ever get to the point where I can crank out a French sentence to a native speaker, I’m reasonably sure my accent won’t be too terribly bad and will get better over time.

All in all, I don’t expect to really learn French well without going there, but I’m not naturally really bad at learning languages, either, I don’t think. It’s more about sticking to it than some intellectual block.