ClumsyMonkey.net

dorky_brunette wrote:i was forced to be in french for 8 years, throughout elementary (grade 2 they started us) and then 9 and 10 in highschool. i've come out of it with nothing.
they don't teach what you need. i know words for the weather, clothes, and food (je suis un pizza!), and how to conjugate....but i would never be able to hold a conversation. i was always just taught words and conjugations, but never how to string them into sentences.
in half a semester of spanish, i'm more fluent in it than i ever was in french. they essentially just need to improve the french program most places, and make it more practical.

Yeah see, I was in immersion for 13 years and the program was amazing. It's literally a second language to me, where it doesn't seem foreign or weird to hear or read the french language. I just hear it or see it naturally.

I think it's the core french that suffer from the lack of actual proper education.

immersion is good. they do teach you what you need to know.
but...just plain old english schools, that throw a one hour block of french into your schedule, have the curriculum problem. that's what i went through for those 8 years. honestly, i'd love to know the language, but after 8 years of learning nothing, it's just not something i want to bother with anymore. the school program ruined french for me, in a way.

Cracky wrote:

Dr. Hobo wrote:

happeningfish wrote:What exactly is wrong with French? I never did understand this anglo-canadian high school student mentality against it. I think it's a lovely language.

i think part of it is the way the language is taught
if one learns how to use the language in a practical manner rather than the formal verb conjugation, etc of the language

Except that verb conjugation is a practical use of the language. If they only taught conversation it would be an incomplete knowledge of how to speak because you wouldnt know how to conjugate the verbs you want to use, hell you might not even know the verbs.

That's not true at all. People have the innate ability to absorb languages through conversational evidence without a lick of formal education or even anyone correcting them.

both ways are needed, in my opinion. you can go to a country, immerse yourself in a language, and learn how to speak it, but to speak it grammatically correctly, you have to know the verb conjugation and what not. otherwise you could be forming wonderful sentences such as 'this pie is very sexually hot!'

that's a good sentence though

Yeah, I don't think that's true, because wouldn't you learn the verb and conjunction stuff just by being fluent? Mormon missionaries are sent with very little language training right out into the field. They always come back after two years or one and a half completely fluent. Granted, they don't have a major grasp on how to write everything. Usually they come back and take classes though to improve.

May I ask, what is francophone?

My teacher cancelled class again tomorrow!!! Now I don't know whether I should go home or not. I'll have Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday at home. Goodness, that might be TOO much time.

oh it's true Cass, other languages have many different forms of conjugated verbs, there is a language called The Amele language of Papua New Guinea it has the most verb forms with over 69,000 finite forms and 860 infinite forms of the verb.

And then there's a North American Indian language Haida that has 70 prefixes and Tabasaran a language of southeast Dagestan that uses 48 noun cases.

Oh! and I almost forgot the Inuit or Eskimo language uses 63 forms of the present tense and simple nouns have something like 250 inflections.

Try picking up those languages from common usage and it's easy to see how although complex, yet limited English is in comparison.

Lando the morphological machine!
Or possibly googlogical machine...

Nope!

Didn't get that from the internet. I dare anyone to actually find that info, because I bet it's almost impossible.

What's true? That they can't get it from being immersed? Because we have missionaries in New Guinea.

In those cases though Lando the languages are aggragate in that there are certain small morphemes that are piled all ontop of each other to define and refine the meaning. They're not thousands of discrete, unrelated words.

A francophone just means someone who is french-speaking.

I'm sleepy.

I'm sleepiest.

A close friend of mine lost his father this morning to a severe illness. His mother died a couple years ago from a brain aneurysm. This is the second time that the ambulance has been at his house to pick up a corpse. And I can't do anything but be there for him. Please keep him in your hearts (and prayers if you so please).

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that's so sad. i hope he's okay.

Lando wrote:[I think it's the core french that suffer from the lack of actual proper education.

i agree with that fully and completely
i went thru the core french system
it sucked
it was really formal, conjugate this, conjugate that
my bro as ive mentioned went thru the IB/AP system for french after he went to jax and was in highschool (he took the same kinda core french stuff in nova scotia for a few years before moving down there)
and from what i see and notice its completely different and i'd rather go about learning in the way he did

I found my Spiritual Machines cd!!