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PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5474 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1
| Message 57 of 92 11 January 2015 at 1:37am | IP Logged |
Hi Lakeseayesno,
Welcome to Team français! Good luck with your 2015 language goals!
It's funny how we often have these silly little dislikes of certain things for no apparent reason. I totally
understand your past avoidance of French. I'm the same with Italian. I just don't like it, yet it's closely related
to Spanish and French, 2 languages I love. There are also loads of Italian speakers here in Australia
including many of my friends past and present. Perhaps this is partially why I have avoided it- it's either too
easy a challenge or not 'foreign' enough. One day like you are doing with French, I might dare to go against
my own strange ideas and learn it!
I'm curious as to your location/setting. I didn't think there'd be that many French speakers in Mexico. Are you
in a tourist area perhaps? Is French relatively popular in Mexico as a foreign language?
And what about English? Yours seems excellent. Is this usually the case in Mexico nowadays?
Nahuatl is yet another language I did not know of. Redirecting myself to French wikipedia again proved
useful. That's a decent and honorable endeavour Lakeseayesno to seriously undertake a minority indigenous
language, well done! I read that it is actually an Aztec language renamed, and it's great to see the English
term for the language itself being replaced with the indigenous terms.
Good luck in 2015 Lakeseayesno :)
PM
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| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian
| Message 58 of 92 14 January 2015 at 11:54pm | IP Logged |
I used to hate English and German...
I wish you all the best in the year 2015, especially in French, teammate.
Well, the members of the team really make us learn more about the world,PeterMollenburg,
I had to wiki Nahuatl as well :-)
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| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 59 of 92 15 January 2015 at 4:34am | IP Logged |
@Peter et @Cavesa, merci beaucoup! Vos commentaires sont très bienvenues. J'ai suivi vos logs (pardonnez-moi pour ne pas avoir fait cela avant). :)
I certainly understand why you're not attracted to Italian, Peter. Although, while French is progressing really quickly at this point, I wouldn't go as far as to say it hasn't proved challenging for me. As for it's "foreign factor", it's plenty foreign-sounding to me, at least within the Romance language family. If you ever knock down your Italian "walls", I'd love to follow your progress! When I started learning it, I thought that with Spanish as a mother tongue I would have no problem speaking it, but it's probably been more challenging to speak it correctly than any of my other languages.
Regarding my location, French is the second most learnt language in Mexico, after English, so I reckon it's pretty popular as a foreign language (I know this because I was curious about the popularity of Japanese as a foreign language when I started teaching it, and was slightly shocked to learn it was at a very humbling 10th place). I don't live in a tourist area, but my house is pretty close to not only to the city's historic area, but to a district which as of the last two years has so many francophones living in it, people are starting to call it Montmexique.
Nahuatl is a world in and of itself. I'm glad two more people in the world now know about this beautiful tongue. :)
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| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5474 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1
| Message 60 of 92 15 January 2015 at 6:35am | IP Logged |
Tnx for the reply Lakeseayesno,
Very interesting info there on the state of affairs of French au Mexique. Too bad the French didn't gain control
of Mexico (tongue in cheek), more like too bad New France didn't survive in North America, or that the French
didn't opt to govern all of Canada instead of Haiti (that was the proposer choice set by the English according
to documentation of historical events in North America following French defeat), or too bad the English fleet
secretly lined all the ships with copper thereby creating a major unknown advantage over the French fleet
(who were expected to win) and smashed the French apart.... otherwise the linguistic map of North America
would look potentially very different today. Sorry, got carried away.
PM
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| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 61 of 92 15 January 2015 at 7:13am | IP Logged |
No, please, carry on! It's always fun to play the "what if" game. Besides, I've often wondered what Mexico would be like if it had been conquered by England or France... surely, the destruction of native cultures would've remained unchanged, but one can only wonder what different administration could have done to this country!
If you want to know a little known piece of historical information on France-Mexique relations, France DID attemp to control Mexico, only much latter than the conquest. It was during Napoleon III's rule: Benito Juarez (Mexico's 26th president and a major player in the liberation of Mexico) stopped external debt payments to Spain and England because the country's coffers were in the red. Obviously, the two countries blew a gasket, and decided to team up with France and Mexican bourgeois to overthrow Juarez and install an emperor in his lieu.
In broad strokes, the result of this was:
1. Maximilian of Habsburg becoming last emperor of Mexico,
2. Mexico becoming an empire,
3. Benito Juarez counter-blowing a gasket of his own,
4. war (one of its battles being the Battle of Puebla, the reason why the now infamous Cinco de Mayo is even celebrated: it was a fight was between Mexican republicans vs the French, and the Mexicans won in spite of being terribly outnumbered),
5. Maximilian getting unjustly executed, and
6. Mexico returning to being a republic (and it remains one to this day).
There. Now we can REALLY play the "what if" game. :P
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| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5474 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1
| Message 62 of 92 15 January 2015 at 8:24am | IP Logged |
Lakeseayesno wrote:
No, please, carry on! It's always fun to play the "what if" game. Besides, I've often
wondered what Mexico would be like if it had been conquered by England or France... surely, the destruction
of native cultures would've remained unchanged, but one can only wonder what different administration could
have done to this country!
If you want to know a little known piece of historical information on France-Mexique relations, France DID
attemp to control Mexico, only much latter than the conquest. It was during Napoleon III's rule: Benito Juarez
(Mexico's 26th president and a major player in the liberation of Mexico) stopped external debt payments to
Spain and England because the country's coffers were in the red. Obviously, the two countries blew a gasket,
and decided to team up with France and Mexican bourgeois to overthrow Juarez and install an emperor in his
lieu.
In broad strokes, the result of this was:
1. Maximilian of Habsburg becoming last emperor of Mexico,
2. Mexico becoming an empire,
3. Benito Juarez counter-blowing a gasket of his own,
4. war (one of its battles being the Battle of Puebla, the reason why the now infamous Cinco de Mayo is even
celebrated: it was a fight was between Mexican republicans vs the French, and the Mexicans won in spite of
being terribly outnumbered),
5. Maximilian getting unjustly executed, and
6. Mexico returning to being a republic (and it remains one to this day).
There. Now we can REALLY play the "what if" game. :P |
|
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I knew something had occurred but I couldnt recall any details, so thanks for sharing :) Yeah I think it's safe to
say most if not all colonial powers would have caused a lot of destruction to indigenous cultures.
Had the French taken control of Mexico I doubt Parisian French would widely be spoken in Mexico today. I
would hypothesize a Frenish or Spench hybrid or creole of sorts, or perhaps more likely a bilingual country
(no disrespect to indigenous languages intended) with Spanish being a predominant mother tongue with
French potentially very gradually supplanting Spanish (although I'm almost certain 50-100 years later the US
& UK would have put pressure on France to forego their "colonial control"- ie stop pushing French language
you nasty French people as the Mexicans have rights and us English/US beurocrats really care BS). It really
would've created a more linguistically balanced America's in terms of European colonial languages. Perhaps
it would've gone the way of Canada in which only a certain region or regions wound up being predominantly
francophone.
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| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 63 of 92 16 January 2015 at 8:27pm | IP Logged |
Yeah, I don't think it would have really "taken" as the national language, but rather become hybridized like in the Caribbean nations. In any case, even while having had to fight France head on for control of the nation, I assure you that most Mexicans like French culture a lot, even unconsciously, since we've grown up surrounded by it. Porfirio Diaz, the president slash dictator known for modernizing Mexico (circa 1900), made sure to hire a lot of French and Italian architects and designers to rebuild a large part of Mexico City in european fashion. He loved France so much he's even buried there (in Montparnasse).
After reading your comment, I became slightly curious about French immigration. Mexico's huge, so there are actually whole towns that were originally colonized by immigrants (Acacoyagua in Chiapas used to be a Japanese colony, and the people of Chipilo in Puebla, which was originally an Italian colony, still speak a Venetian dialect of Italian). Two interesting facts turned up:
1. There is a cluster of small towns in Veracruz (the port through which pretty much everybody had to enter Mexico) that used to pretty much belong to the French diaspora and still retain much of the culture and many of the buildings they built over there,
2. After Spain, French heritage is the second most common heritage type in Mexico (this because a HUGE percentage of Mexico's population is descended from mestizos and castizos--because of the nature of the conquest, pure indigenous peoples are extremely rare nowadays).
All this I didn't know before I started French. It always nonplusses me that I somehow keep learning more about my own country when I'm studying other languages.
Edited by Lakeseayesno on 16 January 2015 at 8:28pm
3 persons have voted this message useful
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 64 of 92 17 January 2015 at 6:45am | IP Logged |
Aujourd'hui j'ai eu ma deuxième sèance au Italki. C'etait vraiment amusant! En-plus, toute la semaine j'ai continué a prendre des notes à chaque fois que j'étudié le français. Maintenant j'ai les doutes suivantes:
- Quand utiliser "on"?
- Comment construire une négation correct?
Ce soir j'ai vu une minisérie japonaise base sur le "Le Crime de l'Orient-Express" d'Agatha Christie. Le scripte etait adapté au Japon del'ère Showa par Koki Mitani, un réalisateur japonais que j'admire. Le rôle principal est Mansai Nomura, qui en fait est un acteur de kyogen (ou théâtre japonais traditionnel), mais il est vraiment parfait pour une rôle peculiar comme Hercule Poirot (même si en cette minisérie son personnage a un nom japonais).
Edited by Lakeseayesno on 17 January 2015 at 6:46am
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