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Can speak fluently, but can’t understand! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| ozgoz Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5459 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 24 25 March 2015 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello,
I can speak French pretty fluently, I can say anything I need to. I don't know the word for shed, but I can easily say the little wooden structure down the bottom of the garden where you store things. But.......I literally can not understand a single word of it! Well, I can obviously pick out a few words here and there but have no clue what is being said. I know most people have the opposite problem. I feel this is because I learned from Michel Thomas and Pimsleur, both very speech based. How on earth can I remedy this?? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4143 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes  Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 2 of 24 25 March 2015 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Put in some listening hours! Find a podcast or a TV show, and listen, listen, listen. Here are two resources that you
might find useful. French in Action might be too easy for you. But if - as you say - you can't understand a word, then it's a good place to start: French in Action 7 jours sur la planète offers news stories with full transcripts: 7 jours Bonne chance! 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5235 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 3 of 24 25 March 2015 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Watch French TV. There is a ton of good shows to watch. You can find a list if you search for Super challenge resources. Look in the Super Challenge discussion thread, there is a lot of information in there with recommendations.
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| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5374 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 4 of 24 25 March 2015 at 2:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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I used to have a similar problem with my Spanish that seems to be made worse because when you speak well the response from the native speakers is always a lot faster and complex than if they note you don't speak too well. I did all the speaking based courses (FSI, Pimsleur, MT, etc) too and agree that is what leads to this challenging issue. I think it just takes a lot of time with books and audio. The good news is that you've got a great foundation and it will come fast and easy if you just put in the time.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 5 of 24 25 March 2015 at 5:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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It helps to rephrase it like "I can make myself understood in that language when my conversation partner is making an effort to understand what I am trying to say."
That's not a bad thing! It means you can make yourself understood, and you're in the best position to improve rapidly. Why I want to rephrase this is because once you realize that while you are making an effort to make yourself understood, the native speakers you are talking to make an effort to understand you, and their knowledge of their own language is so good that the message is conveyed. The other way around it does not work as well. You probably have two main issues, one being understanding everyday pronunciation and one being word choice and phrasing in natural language. If you understand the pronunciation you can often cope with phrasing that seems quite odd to you, and if you have a good idea of what words somebody will choose to talk about a certain topic you can even understand mumbling. But if you struggle with both, understanding natural speech can be really difficult. So, yes, in the end, you'll have to listen more to natural speech. Learning more vocabulary might make it somewhat easier. Going through a course to address all the things you've forgotten already might make it somewhat easier. Reading, too. But listening is key, and most of the time should be 'n+1' content. Something which you can understand, but you have to make an effort. There are courses specifially for listening comprehension in French; you can use a lot of free ressources or media with various tools to make them suit your current level. If you're lucky you have people around you who'll help you by dumbing down their speech just as much as you need to understand them. Also, if you don't work with a listening comprehension course for French you might look into working intensively with native audio, for example with transcribing or some variation of shadowing. And when it comes to native speakers' word choice and phrasing, I'd look for interviews, recordings and transcripts of free conversation and social media. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4888 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 6 of 24 25 March 2015 at 6:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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French is diglossic - the proper French we learn in school is very different from spoken French. It's not as
extreme as with Arabic, but it's more diglossic than any other language I've studied. Usually my listening lags a bit behind my other skills; with French it feels years behind. A few simple examples What we learn: Il ne marche pas. Nous allons au cinema. Oui Actual French: Il marche pas. (The 'ne' is rarely used) On va au cinema (We were taught that 'on' was an option for 'nous', not that it is the main 1st person plural form) Ouais I almost feel there should be separate courses on colloquial French. Or, as linguist John McWhorter argues, we should start with actual spoken French, and learn the formal (and rarely spoken) version later. I disagree that just watching more tv and movies (podcasts, radio, etc) will help much. You might as well listen to Maltese. I'd say you need to treat this as a new dialect, almost a new language. If you can get transcripts to the above, now, it will help immensely. Lingvist does a great job of using native French. I've ordered the French-language scripts to shows online, and I think others have done the same. Edited by kanewai on 25 March 2015 at 6:40pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4098 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 7 of 24 25 March 2015 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
That's an exaggeration to the extreme. There are plenty of media outlets where the higher forms of le français courant (as opposed to le français familier or le français populaire) is spoken. By curating your media a little bit, it's really quite easy to slowly ease yourself into the more familiar and even the popular forms of the language. You're unlikely to get le français soutenu in the kind of media mentioned, yes. That said, I don't know about you, but I sure didn't learn that level of French in school. For an example, taken from Larousse's Savoir rédiger, soutenu (defined as precise, a language laboured to perfection and sprinkled with rare grammar whenever it allows for the highest possible precision; although they also warn us not to fall into the trap of thinking it's a pompous way of expressing oneself) would be: "Il eût été préférable qu'on n'abordât pas ce sujet", whereas courant would be: "Il aurait mieux valu ne pas aborder la question". Having listened to Michel Thomas, myself, a few times, I highly doubt the OP is saying things like "Il eût été préférable qu'on n'abordât pas ce sujet." Edited by eyðimörk on 25 March 2015 at 7:21pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4888 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 8 of 24 25 March 2015 at 8:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, maybe a small exaggeration!
Though I definitely stand by this: after working through Assimil, a grammar book, and few levels of Pimsleur I was able to start listening to some native media for Italian and Spanish. It wasn't easy, but it was possible. For French I wasn't even close. And I don't think French is particularly harder than the other two - it's just that there was a much bigger gap between what I learned on the page and what I heard on tv. And the gap was big enough that just transitioning to native media wasn't enough - I'd either rely completely on the subtitles, or be absolutely lost. Edited by kanewai on 25 March 2015 at 9:23pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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