I’m heading back to the US on Sunday (weather and transit strikes permitting), after almost three months in Paris.\u00a0 I’ve been interested to see what would happen to my French during my time here.\u00a0 I think language is a fascinating phenomenon: there’s a long list of subjects I wish I knew more about almost, but not quite, enough to do anything about it, and linguistics is pretty much right at the top.<\/p>\n
When I arrived, my weak point, by far, was spoken comprehension: I could read and write pretty well, and even my speaking wasn’t too bad, but it was really hard to understand people when they spoke.\u00a0 My self-evaluation is that I’m now much less terrible at that than I used to be, but still pretty terrible.\u00a0 It’s\u00a0 striking how hard it is to improve in this area.\u00a0 One piece of evidence that I’ve gotten better: The fraction of times that I can get through a commercial transaction without the other person getting exasperated and switching to English is pretty high these days.<\/p>\n
I have noticed that I’m much less likely than before to consciously translate what I’m hearing word-by-word into English as I hear it.\u00a0 This is good for two reasons.\u00a0 First, of course, because it’s impossible to understand rapid speech in that way.\u00a0 More importantly,\u00a0 though, it means that my colleagues no longer sound like Hercule Poirot in my head.\u00a0 (“You mock yourself at me, my friend!”)<\/p>\n
It’s interesting to think about why oral comprehension is so hard.\u00a0 Comprehending speech is a many-step process: you have to process a continuous stream of sound into phonemes, assemble those into words, and syntactically analyze the result.\u00a0 You can imagine breakdowns at any stage, but for me the first step is the big problem.\u00a0 When I’m not understanding someone’s speech, it’s generally because I can’t hear the phonemes: I hear a continuous, undifferentiated stream of sound, rather than discrete consonants and vowels. The problem gets much worse with even low levels of background noise, and if two people are talking at once, I have zero chance of picking up anything.<\/p>\n
Grammar’s never a problem: I never fail to understand a sentence because the speaker used the pluperfect subjunctive or something.\u00a0 Vocabulary’s not much of a problem either.\u00a0 Sure, sometimes people use words I don’t know, but that rarely stops me from getting the gist of what they’re saying.\u00a0 (In the context of a restaurant menu, there’s a virtually 100% chance that the unknown word is the name of a fish, which makes things easier.)<\/p>\n
One stumbling block for me, ironically, is numbers.\u00a0 I still have to stop and explicitly translate them into English in my head.\u00a0 And when the number is a time of day in the afternoon, there’s the additional problem that the French commonly use 24-hour time.\u00a0 So when someone asks me if I’m free for a meeting at 4:00, there’s a ridiculously long pause while I think, “Seize = 16.\u00a0 16-12 = 4.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m heading back to the US on Sunday (weather and transit strikes permitting), after almost three months in Paris.\u00a0 I’ve been interested to see what would happen to my French during my time here.\u00a0 I think language is a fascinating phenomenon: there’s a long list of subjects I wish I knew more about almost, but … Continue reading En fran\u00c3\u00a7ais<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-me"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}