Meanwhile, as someone who “speaks” French and is currently here in France, it’s clear to me that the real challenge is not so much what you can say as what you can hear. Based on years of French classes back in the day, I’m pretty darn good at taking a moment or two to think about what I want to say and coming up with an understandable way to say it. I can read French text, albeit slowly, and more or less understand what’s happening. But the risk of saying anything is that someone might reply! Parsing other people’s spoken language in real time is about 10 times harder than deciphering a text or composing your own statements.
Nothing would terrify me more when I was in France is when I would practice some phrase, get it sounding approximately correct, have the person I was speaking with ask me a perfectly reasonable follow-up question, and have to resort back to "I can't understand, sorry."
6 comments:
As I've mentioned on my blog, at Georgetown SFS the students have to be proficient in a foreign language, which in this particular case means being able to read a newspaper article sans dictionary and then discuss it in entire in the foreign language with two professors for 20 minutes. I spent, and still spend, a lot of hours listening to French news to get the real time listening translation down.
Well, unlike Yglesias, I've never taken French and I have no particular academic use for it, so that's my excuse.
Everyone in this country needs to learn Spanish. French is nice if you're traveling but Spanish is spoken here!
Aha! Yo hablo espanol tambien.
Huh. I have the opposite problem with Dutch/Flemish - I can understand a great deal of what people are saying, and will reply in English to join in a conversation, but can't come up with a thing to say myself in that language, having never formally studied it.
Phoebe,
By the end of my time in France that was how it worked--I could pretty much understand what people were saying to me but couldn't respond. The problem was more one of learning French by phrasebooks: you can master one sentence and think you have it down, but it's really just the beginning of a conversation. On the larger point I'd disagree with Yglesias. I think it's probably easier to listen, given time for comprehension, than to compose. It's just rare to get that time in conversation.
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