FRENCH WORD-A-DAY

Hi Kristi,
I remember going to language classes when we lived in Brussels. I thought I would learn both French and Dutch at the same time and took the metro to the US Embassy twice a week. The teachers had different teaching styles. The Flemish instructor just had us read the newspapers out loud and the French teacher was more by the book. I think I should have focused on one language. I ended up learning more French from our neighbors whose children were the same age as ours. I think I learned by just living in the community and having to learn the language to live day to day. It's so different just being a tourist and actually living in a country.
What's funny is years later on a river cruise in Provence, the Belgian cruise director was giving a talk to those who wanted to learn a few French phrases. He asked for people to yell out numbers in French and when he yelled out 90, I said "nonante" and he started laughing because it's really a Belgian way to say the number 90. LOL

Languages are very cool ! Yes to being a polyglotte :-)

The more languages the better! They give some insight to the people who speak them, and provide an avenue of learning more about them and into some relationship however superficial (as it would be with a shopkeeper or Market vender). It shows you value the other person enough to make an effort to communicate with them.
My one caveat would be to beware of assuming words are cognates with your own language. Voitures d'Occasion seemed like they'd be fancy cars for big occasions like weddings or something, and not merely used cars.
And it provides good effort for the brain, which never hurts.
Learning them works much better and more easily the younger you are when you do it, and using them afterwards is invaluable to retaining them.

This was one of your best columns ever, IMHO. I'm reminded of a couple I stayed with once: he was American, she was German, they lived in Nice, and neither knew much French. Their conversations were wildly trilingual. I'm American with basic knowledge of German and French, and it was so much fun talking with them!

P.S. Duolingo -- there are FAR, FAR better free and paid language learning platforms out there that will teach you more and better, with the added bonus of not subjecting you to cartoons and other things best suited to five-year-olds.

I do speak Italian, but I played with Duolingo Italian a bit to see what it was like when a few people sang its praises. I found errors in the Italian and awkward sentences that no one would ever say.

If you do use Duolingo -- assuming you can tolerate that green owl hopping up and down! -- you will need other resources to actually learn Italian in any useful way.

I have looked at a lot of online resources to help friends find good Italian learning sites. Check out ItalyMadeEasy.com. It has paid courses, but there are a lot of free videos, especially for beginners on YouTube (search YouTube on "Italy Made Easy"). I have no affiliation with the site -- it's just a good one I came across.

What a wonderful Frank Sinatra quote about language. I am going to use that in the future! Thank you. Merci.

Being Australian (but of Chinese background), I lament that Australia is so far from the rest of the world that very few people are truly bi-lingual here. My (adult) children have no Chinese language other than a few words and I am trying to expand my limited vocabulary with Duolingo!

I had great French teacher in high school (she sounded like a native speaker) so when I left high school, I could understand and speak a fair bit. Unfortunately, opportunities for speaking practice have been few and far between (our neighbours back then were Italian) so malheureusement, j'ai oublie beaucoup :(

I agree that we would have many more opportunities to connect with fascinating people but for my husband, the lack of a second language means that his communication with his own mother has limits because when his parents migrated (50+ years ago), they were told to speak to the children only in English. I don't know whether it was for fear of confusing the children or if it was something akin to racism. Now we know better.

At least the world has the universal language of music to fall back on - a blessing from our Creator God because we are made in His image and therefore, we too can create.

Kristi,
I took Spanish in second through fifth grade, a required course in SoCal in the early 60s. Then I took four years of French in high school, my choice. Spanish might have been the better choice, since 51% of the population in my area speaks Spanish. But I loved the beautiful sound of French. Now, when I visit another country and try to speak the language, I start out in that country's language, but end up in the opposite one. Doesn't matter if I start in Spanish and end in French, or vice versa. It always ends up the same. Now that I'm in my seventies, I'm on level four of a Spanish audio program, and it's starting to sway the balance. Learning a foreign language also has the benefit of helping me better understand English. What a wonderful ride I've had. Keep up your good work. I adore your blog.

Hi Kristi
I’m just catching up on the latest posts. I am all for multilingualism. I’m a native English speaker but international travel from a very young age created a fascination with other languages. I learned some Spanish and Tagalog in the Philippines. In high school I studied German for a year before moving to Japan where I learned basic Japanese. I took a French class in my last year of high school back in the US. In my thirties I studied French language and culture at l’université catholique de l’ouest in Angers. After living a few years in France I moved to Mexico where I learned Spanish. I’m living in France again, Yea! Whenever I go back and forth between France and Mexico it takes me a couple of weeks to stop using common words and phrases in the wrong language. Words such as avec/con or sans/sin pop out of my mouth. I usually just say je viens d’arriver de la Mexique or venia la semana pasada de la Francia. After a short time my brain (which is a marvelous organ) completely readjusts to my current location.