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French - separating spoken and written? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 1 of 14 24 January 2011 at 6:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm thinking of starting French (I have the Assimil with Ease book and recordings at the moment, not sure when I
would start). I leafed through the book and listened to the recording. The pronunciation certainly seems to be a bear, at least in comparison to Spanish. Has anyone tried to focus exclusively on listening and speaking at first? It would be total gibberish, because you wouldn't look at the English translation, but it would prevent you from being biased by the written language into pronouncing things incorrectly. I wouldn't mind going through the whole Assimil book or half of it just parroting the sounds I hear before tackling the actual writing and meaning of what I'm saying. Post if you have input- either way- regarding the efficacy of this method. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6143 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 2 of 14 24 January 2011 at 7:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Your idea sounds interesting, but I don't think that it would have personally worked for me. Why? Because I'm often a visual learner, I usually need to see how the word is written down to remember it well. If I'm just listening to the sounds, I will probably end up making incorrect assumptions on the spelling based on what I hear which will take a long time for me to rid myself of. An example of this was when I was in Tanzania this summer, I started listening to Michel Thomas Russian but didn't have access to the transcript or any way at all for that matter of looking up the spelling of the words. One of the words taught was здесь, meaning "here." However, as I was listening to the word repeated by the students and the teacher over and over, I formulated a guess on the spelling, which turned out to be incorrect: здись. It took a long time after I learned its true spelling before it seemed normal to me.
Your method could be good for trying to form a good accent and getting used to the sounds though (sorry if that's what you meant in the first place!). For French I never really bothered with formally learning the spelling rules; I just absorbed them naturally by looking at countless words and learning the pronunciation for them and gradually forming rules for pronunciation. Strange as it might seem, French spelling does usually make sense, but it might take some time to adjust to it. Edited by ellasevia on 24 January 2011 at 7:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 3 of 14 24 January 2011 at 7:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yeah, I was thinking of trying to get a good accent at the very beginning. It's always harder to try to do that later, especially if one attains a good degree of proficiency. I'm sure that French spelling is much more rational than its reputation would suggest, but seeing a word written in French makes me mentally plan to pronounce it incorrectly. From Kato Lomb's book "Polyglot: How I learn languages" ( http://www.tesl-ej.org/books/lomb- 2nd-Ed.pdf )
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| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5600 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 4 of 14 24 January 2011 at 10:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Each child pronounced quatre so perfectly (like “cut”) that I heaved a deep sigh of envy. A sympathetic fellow mother said to me from behind, “The reason why they don’t say it ‘cut-r’ is because they have no idea the letter ‘r’ is in the word.”
But quatre is [katr], at least in educated speech, I think; or am I totally wrong? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 14 24 January 2011 at 11:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The danger of never seeing the written form is that you can fail to notice the difference between similar phonemes -- eg (in French) ou and u. One of the things that Michel Thomas did (but that the Russian teacher failed to do properly) was to make sure that the students always knew what phonemes they were pronouncing, even if their pronunciation was terrible. So it can be done without the written word, but I think it needs some conscious instruction. With self-instruction, the only way to find out which phoneme it is is through the written form.
French has the added complication of sometimes-silent-phonemes. Eg the s in "ils vont" is silent, but it reappears in "ils ont", which is pronounced differently from "ils sont" (where the first s is again silent, and only the second is pronounced). To say there is no R in "quatre" is wrong -- there's an R phoneme that I think is sometimes silent. (Disclaimer: I'm not a native speaker.) The idea of saying "catte ans" or "catte heures" just doesn't sit right with me -- in both cases the R feels necessary. And when I say it, it feels like liaison. The only problem is that the R isn't the final letter of the written form, so doesn't look like liaison. I don't buy the "visual learner" thing though. As far as I'm concerned, written forms help almost everyone, but they only help to memorise words, not to truly learn* them. That is that we can file away a mini-dictionary in our heads to use for later learning. Some people are happy doing this. Others find the process of looking up an internal dictionary too slow and frustrating. This is not a difference in learning style, it's a difference in coping strategies. And there's a risk that the "internal dictionary" user will be satisfied with the use of the internal dictionary and will never develop a habit for learning words. * I reject Krashen's self-serving redefinition of "learning" and the false dichotomy he sets up with "acquisition". When I say "learning", he would say "acquisition". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 6 of 14 24 January 2011 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
But that's precisely the point! You should be able to hear the difference between "ou" and "u" - you don't need (or you shouldn't need) the visual cue to tell you that they are pronounced differently. Likewise, knowing that there is an "s" in "ils vont" can only influence you to force it in where it shouldn't be. You should be thinking of the "ils" in "ils vont" as a different word than the "ils" of "ils ont" because phonetically they are different, even if orthographically and semantically they are the same. Kato Lomb may be completely wrong with her example (I don't know either way), but I think she is completely correct that what is written can exert an undue influence on what is heard. I see it with my own dad, whose native language is not English. When he says the English words "wrote" or "wrath," he artificially throws in a slight "w" sound at the beginning even though I tell him that it is completely silent and he can pronounce those words just as "rote" and "rath." I do agree that this method would be very time-consuming, in the beginning at least. Edited by Merv on 24 January 2011 at 3:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 14 24 January 2011 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Sometimes you need to know something is there before you can see it. Do you remember the first time you saw the optical illusion where some people see two faces and others see a vase? You could only see one -- until someone told you that both were there, and then you could "look at" whichever you wanted to. The same thing holds with all senses. Sometimes you don't spot meaningful distinctions until you know they're there. Both "ou" and "u" sound a bit like the English "oo" sound, and our English-speaking brains don't always notice the difference. The brain doesn't process every bit of information thrown at it -- it filters out the unimportant bits to leave only the stuff that matters. As far as an English-speaking brain is concerned, "ou" and "u" are just "oo". The brain needs to be shown unambiguously that they're different, or it will continue to bin that information.
Phonetically they are the same, but phonemically they are different. There is an S-phoneme in "ils", even if it is often realised by silence.
As I say, the brain hears what it expects to hear (see also the McGurk Effect) and an over-reliance on written language certainly does mess up accents. I'm in the camp that sees language as primarily a spoken phenomenon, and I always advocate an early focus on speaking and listening. However, I see the written form as useful reference material, so I'm not advocating reading or writing lots -- rather I'm suggesting that it's OK to use a dictionary or a reference grammar to look up something that you want to say. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 14 25 January 2011 at 5:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. What in the world is this phoneme s that is realised by silence? This is wrong, very wrong and totally wrong. But I'm not surprised. S exists as a phoneme in French, realized graphically with a single s in initial position, as is "sou", or preceding an consonant, as in "peste, prisme, rouspéter", with double s, as in masse, with -ce, as in "matrice" and with -ci, as in "social." On the other hand, the s in "case" is not the phoneme s, it is z. This is exactly how "case" and "casse" differ. Final s is rarely pronounced in French. The only examples that come to mind are "sens", "fils" and "lys". There may be others. Otherwise, there is no s phoneme in "mains, maisons, chiens", etc. The s in ils is not a phoneme at all. The s is simply a morphological marker to distinguish the plural form ils from the singular il. It is never pronounced. When there is a liaison, it's not an s sound but a z sound, as in ils-z-ont. In ils sont, the only s sound comes from the initial position in sont. Edited by s_allard on 25 January 2011 at 6:15am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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