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Is comprehension measurable? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4667 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 185 of 211 27 August 2014 at 6:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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He may be referring to the fact that the oral distinction between many persons and even tenses is either nonexistent (e.g. je parle, tu parles, il parle, ils parlent) or "decaying" (in some speech communities) like the difference between word-final "é" / "è" [e.g. parler / parlais or parlerai / parlerais]. Thus in speech the only difference is the pronoun used. Edited by tastyonions on 27 August 2014 at 6:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 186 of 211 27 August 2014 at 10:21am | IP Logged | |||||
That doesn't make the conjugation redundant though? It just requires that people do not drop the pronoun like in Spanish. But in my view the bigger problem with that is not the conjugation but the spelling. The conjugation hasn't decayed; the spelling of French hasn't been updated along with the language. Along with the fact that some people do uphold some of the distinctions you mentioned (I think that in Quebec and Belgium é and è are differentiated in those positions, at least in Belgium you do). Edited by tarvos on 27 August 2014 at 10:22am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4667 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 187 of 211 27 August 2014 at 12:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes, Quebec has kept that distinction clear as well. This can lead to the funny situation of a Quebecois correcting a learner's pronunciation of the conditional vs. future endings while a French person insists that there is no difference, as I witnessed once at a Meetup. :-D
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 188 of 211 27 August 2014 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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French gender is… special. And ultimately rather annoying for people who aren't used to gender at all. I certainly find it much more challenging than I ever found Italian gender.
French gender is about 75% predictable from word endings, but only if you memorize a fairly large set of rules and exceptions. As that page says:
Indeed, there's some evidence that French speakers below 5 years of age actually rely on word endings to a significant extent:
(I'm unfamiliar with this use of alternance. Marque has a technical sense which is normally similar-but-not-equivalent to "inflection" in English, but "marker" feels like a better translation here. Substantif is a French grammatical category which includes nouns, pronouns, demonstratives and adjectives which take the place of a noun.) This research suggests that younger French speakers rely on word endings to a greater extent than French adults, and that implicit gender information carried by a suffix such as -on can partially override grammatical gender indicators that are clearly present in the sentence. Non-native French speakers will often still have problems with gender despite years of immersion. Some people fossilize with lots of gender errors, but even the most proficient non-native speakers will often make subtle errors every minute or two. (See L’asymptote du français avancé, which I've posted before, and which remains the best overview I've seen on this subject.) Even native French speakers seem to have occasional problems with gender. There are words whose gender is frequently mistaken (usually because they're rare words which start with a vowel or which have a misleading ending). There is also some evidence that French speakers are uncertain about the gender of some low-frequency words (but read the comments for more details). French speech therapists occasionally work with children who have problems with gender. The usual advice for non-native speakers is to "learn the gender with the word." While this is certainly better than ignore gender completely, I'm not actually sure that this advice is sufficient for English speakers. My advice: Completely master and internalize the gender of articles, adjectives and demonstratives. What do I mean by this? Well, if you hear the following, you should ideally react as indicated: 1. une-F X verte-F. "X is feminine."" If you had previously believed X to be masculine, of if X has an ending which strongly suggests that it's masculine, this should actually jump out at you. 2. un-M Y vert-M. "Y is masculine." As above, if you believed Y to be feminine, this should jump out at you. 3. une-F Z vert-M. "What the... !?" Ideally, this sentence should sound weird and wrong, at least in clear speech. If you get really solid on articles, adjectives and demonstratives, and if you train your ear to the point where you can detect a mismatch like (3), that will make a big difference. As part of this process, it can be useful to pay attention to the French word-ending table that I linked to above, and to compare the gender suggested by the word endings to the gender indicated by the articles, adjectives and demonstratives in a sentence. Again, the medium-term goal here would be to reach a mental state where la-F bicron-M grise-F sounded slightly odd, as it does to the young French native speakers in the study mentioned above. One reason I think that some non-native speakers struggle with gender is that they perceive word pairs like un and une or vert and verte as equivalent. And because they don't pay attention to the difference, it doesn't matter how much input they get. If they don't notice the differences between un and une, well, maybe they can spend 30 years in a francophone country without noticing that they say *un-M voiture-F while everybody around them says une-F voiture-F. I still absolutely make gender errors. But if I think that a word is masculine, and a French speaker uses it as feminine, the difference will often leap right out at me. One downside of this is that I find French beginner Meetups to be rather painful, because there's always somebody who make tons of gender errors, and I notice them. One upside of this is that my knowledge of French gender gets better simply by watching TV or reading, because the information in the input actively works to correct my mistakes. Anyway, to bring this long digression back on topic, I don't think that it's particularly useful to calculate "percentages" for output, because I have no idea what you'd actually measure. For comprehension, at least, you have things to count (words, sentences, etc.), and so you can define a counting rule and get something. For output, the best you can do is count errors: "The student made 4 gender errors in 1200 spoken words." But this seems to be of rather limited utility. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 189 of 211 27 August 2014 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There is a lot that can be said about how grammatical gender is perceived by native and non-native speakers.
The best learning strategy is debatable. Something can be said for learning to predict gender by the look of the word because many words have very predictable gender. Others don't. Whatever strategy is used, the goal is to not make mistakes. What I find interesting is that while native French speakers nearly never make gender mistakes, or can correctly them immediately --and I'm not talking about dialectal differences -- non-native speakers inevitably make mistakes despite hearing correct French continuously. There is no doubt that the more exposure you get, the better you will become, but it's not a straight line. I believe that unless one has plenty of corrective feedback, one will inevitably fossilize and continue producing errors. This is why people will maintain a non-native accent all their lives in spite of being surrounded by French. To come back to the theme of the thread, my question, in this regard, is how does the learner really understand a phrase using grammatical gender when they say that they understand the phrase. The two following phrases are pretty easy to understand: Le beau café ancien a été détruit pendant la guerre. La belle maison ancienne a été détruite pendant la guerre. Why does even a relatively advanced speaker of French, after reading and understanding these two phrases among many others, still make mistakes like *Cet beau café a été detruite pendant le guerre? Without going into much depth, I think that we can say that native speakers store, in some manner, the grammatical gender links that run horizontally through the phrase. The non-native speakers don't. And this is the real problem of gender. It's not about getting the right gender of the noun; after all you have at least a 50% chance and many nouns have predictable gender. The real problem is getting all the horizontal links right. If the learner doesn't understand properly, in the sense of the grammatical level, at a certain point, they will never get it right. This is why I believe that while massive input is certainly great -- the more the better --it won't automatically lead to great performance. The real difference is corrected output. Let's take an example: you have to write an important professional e-mail in your target language, let's say French or Spanish. In today's world, with the right spell-checker and lots of sample letters on the Internet, you can cobble something together that is not bad. You know that the opening and closing salutations are perfect. You've cut-and-pasted some sentences that you know are correct. You look up some points of grammar that seem a bit doubtful. You read the damn thing at least a dozen times. It looks pretty good to you. Do you send it off as is or do you run it by your tutor or a native speaker? Most people here I think would have a native speaker look at the letter, especially if this is for professional purpose. Normally, you wouldn't have to do this in your first language because you are pretty sure of your knowledge of the language and writing norms. But in another language, there are things that you are simply not sure of. If you have an educated native speaker look at your email, you will inevitably see mistakes. If there are none, congratulations! For most of us, it will be a learning experience. There will be little details that you never thought about. Maybe differences in country usage. Maybe levels of formality. And in the end, you'll probably say "Thank God, I didn't send it as is." Edit: changes right to write per Luke's observation Edited by s_allard on 27 August 2014 at 11:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 190 of 211 27 August 2014 at 6:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
And what if you had someone who spoke fluent, grammatical and correct language, but in an atrocious accent that offends the ear of the native listener? How on earth do you measure that? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 191 of 211 27 August 2014 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's a good example of where a spell-checker alone is insufficient. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4034 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 192 of 211 27 August 2014 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
1. French verbs have irregularities in the person conjugations, not just the stem, for Spanish mostly it is the vowel or an extra consonant for the thousand or some so "irregular verbs" which can be predicted often. 2. What does it do? Like inflecting adjectives, incomplete conjugation just sits there because the speakers choose to use them. Languages without conjugation that must use over pronouns get along fine without incomplete conjugation endings. What is English (and thousands more) missing here? 3. It does not do anything except add irregularity. The pronoun cannot be dropped, and techniques such as a third person rephrasings I have seen in other pro drop languages does not exist in French. Sort of like pronoun cases disappearing in some varieties of Italian. I do believe conjugation will dissappear in French earlier than many other IE languages that have incomplete conjugation. The above of course never has happened elsewhere in the world, non-Euro/non-Euro influenced languages have never needed to be retweaked/"shaved" in the same way at all. They are all healthier. Edited by Stolan on 27 August 2014 at 6:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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