Listen on Spotify here: Learning the Françiano Way
Listen on YouTube here: Learning the Françiano Way
Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on a journey through my language learning process and learn my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…
Learning the Françiano Way, Or, How’s the Italian to French Going?
So, how is my Italian to French learning journey going? Plain sailing, or am I stuck in port without a paddle? Yes, I know that’s an idiom mismatch, but that’s where my brain went.
Well, I have had a number of issues plaguing my progress, which is to be expected. Let’s start with the big one first. Questions in French.
Questions in French seem much more complicated than they are in Italian. I don’t remember them being quite so difficult first time around, but that may be because of how I’m doing my learning and that my detailed memory doesn’t stretch that far, not by a long chalk. Oh, dear. I seem to be somewhat testing the intimate knowledge of the English language of non-native English speakers this time. Uh, sorry? That’ll be, not by a long way.
Italian is pretty easy for questions, as long as you pick the correct question word, you just add a question mark.
French, however, has a lot of variations for asking the same question. Sometimes, you can just put a question mark at the end of the sentence and you’ve got a question. That, I believe is more informal, which makes sense. Other times, you invert the verb. I remember doing this and that’s not too bad. This, I believe is more formal.
However, getting the right question form — I won’t say word, some of them are more than one word, or seem to be, at least — at the beginning, that’s been more of a problem. Is this my issue, or is it Duolingo? Or the way I’m learning from Italian to French?
Well, there’s definitely one thing that Duolingo is wont to do, and not just in French. For certain sentences, you use have to use one form, for certain other sentences, you use another form, even though both are acceptable, it will only accept the one that Duo has fixed into his tiny bird brain to be the acceptable version. For example, in French, there are two forms of basically saying which one. There’s the lequel forms, which after a little research, I found are usually used for small numbers of things, and the quel forms, which are used for larger, less specific numbers of things. In the very simple Duolingo sentences, there’s no indication of scope, so it’s literally a guessing game. Looking at the old discussions, a lot of people have this problem.
It’s also been a little confusing trying to match up the Italian and French questions in some cases. I know this is probably just a me problem, because I imagine an Italian would know much more easily which French form to use, but I lost so many lives doing the Questions module, because I couldn’t work it out, I was losing any will I had to continue. Well, not really, but can you speak French never asking a question?
I did try going to the English-French tree and couldn’t see a questions module in the opened up sections, or for several sections beyond, so that was no help, at all.
Anyway, eventually I got through it and I guess it’ll sink in over time, the more I practice.
Another thing that’s felt a little weird is the vocabulary being used. Not the vocabulary in French, but the vocabulary in Italian. Clearly, the equivalent verbs that have been chosen are the ones that most closely match the French, but many of these verbs are not ones that were frequently used in the English to Italian tree, so although I’ve seen most of them before, they’re not always immediate recognition for me. And they don’t always appear with tip sentences, you know, the ones with text you can hover over. If I can see the French, I can usually work it out. If I can’t, well, I’s gonna have to cheat and look it up. I do wonder if these are actually the words that an Italian would use in these sentences, or is this the equivalent of the awkward sentences that crop up in English? The things we would never actually say. I’ll probably never know the answer to that one. Oh, well, at least it’s practice with Italian verbs, too.
But, there’s also what many consider to be a problematic word being used in the Italian, so it matches the French. Turns out it’s also a problematic word in French. And it’s definitely one in English. The word in question is the one for a female dog. That word, in English, unless it’s being used as an insult to a female, is only generally used by dog breeders and those who attend dog shows. And the other thing I discovered when researching this is that, in French, the female version of cat is even worse of an insult. There are ways around these things, by adding the word feminine to the male version, or in English, we’d probably just say is it a boy dog or a girl dog, if we didn’t know, and I think Duolingo really shouldn’t make us repeat problematic words like this, especially given that it’s clearly designed to attract young kids to study languages.
One more thing that I just came across was a sentence using the subjunctive in Italian, where a straightforward present tense was used in French. I have no memory of the subjunctive use in French, but, perhaps, they don’t use it with the same verbs, or constructions. That’ll be fun when they don’t match up. The subjunctive is difficult enough without that. It’s possible, that might break me. We’ll see.
All in all, though, my experience doing this, so far, has been fairly positive. I do recognise a lot of French, and if you follow me on YouTube, you’ll see that I’m listening to podcasts and understanding quite a lot of what is being said. Obviously, not every word, but it is all still there, somewhere in the recesses of my brain.
I’ll do another update soon. Things are definitely going to get more difficult as I progress. Halp!
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.