Do you speak French?

[lindsayfawn]

lol Ang beat me to it for explaining the shiack lol shiack litterly goes like this je va unlocke mon car avec ma keys...or something strange like that. It's so confusing.
I took french immersion from grade 4 till I graduated so I'm bilingual and when I hear shiack I'm just dumbfounded that they would mix the two languages together when they're always complaining about french people being looked down at 'n stuff in Moncton. I remember a few years ago they were making a big fuss abut how the stop was on top of the arrete so they thought it was an example of how the english are trying to be dominant or something crazy like that lol so I'm thinking what does it matter you don't even speak the right french anyways! lol

 

[Cait]

No French for me. I can say yes. And goodbye. But that's about it. That's from one semester in junior high. Oh and I know like 3 colors. Hehehe.

Sin embargo, puedo hablar Espanol con poco o no problema. Y puedo escribir la idioma. Y entiendo la idioma.

 

[Fidget]

I remember the first time I went to meet hubby's family in Quebec and they asked if I wanted a guedille for lunch. I was totally speechless, in Ontario guedille is slang for snot. lol
In Quebec it's a delicious type of hotdog with French fries in it.

:rofl4: Oh lord, you'd think at my age I'd have outgrown finding body emission jokes so hilarious but that made me spew! Lol!

Ok, so 5 pages of discussion and I'm just more confused than in the beginning.... so what's the difference between Francophone, French Canadian & Quebecois?
Maybe just current number of rats? sounds like you have the United Nations living in your house.

 

[starfoot]

Non... Je parle pa Francais.... ????? ich spreche ein bisschen gut deutsch. aber ich habe der meisste vergessern!! I spreche nicht viele diesen Tage. Ich habe Deutsch in die Schule und der Oberstufe gelernt aber Ich habe keine neues Deutsh im vier Jahren gelernt!!

 

[Fidget]

Ferme la bouche. Ist nein Francaise.
how'd I do in either language strictly from my negligible knowledge? :?

*edit* my edit weren't cause of the other languages, I just didn't spell right in my own - lol!

 

[jorats]

We do a lot of franglais here as well. English is so much easier to learn than French... but I have to say, French is a beautiful romantic language.

 

[Bronwyn]

Perhaps I'm odd but I prefer listening to Spanish, lol.

 

[jorats]

I love Spanish too. I took two years of it in high school but wished I had kept up with it though.

 

[Cait]

Spanish = love.

After my bro-in-law became part of the family, we had to quickly learn so that when we went to family things our side could talk to his. He is a good teacher!

 

[Godmother]

I have never understood the judgemental attitude of people who declare that another version of their language is "bad". Language is built into the brain, so all the versions are valid.... just different.

It is interesting what happens when two linguistic groups come into contact; people start speaking a pidgin (mishmash of the two languages) until, over the years, the blend gradually develops a consistent grammatical form and some children learn it as their first language: a Creole. If there is a linguist on this forum, they can explain it better than I can.

Wikipedia says that this is only one theory about how Creoles develop:

Gradualist and developmental hypotheses
One class of creoles might start as pidgins, rudimentary second languages improvised for use between speakers of two or more non-intelligible native languages. Keith Whinnom (in Hymes (1971)) suggests that pidgins need three languages to form, with one (the superstrate) being clearly dominant over the others. The lexicon of a pidgin is usually small and drawn from the vocabularies of its speakers, in varying proportions. Morphological details like word inflections, which usually take years to learn, are omitted; the syntax is kept very simple, usually based on strict word order. In this initial stage, all aspects of the speech — syntax, lexicon, and pronunciation —tend to be quite variable, especially with regard to the speaker's background.

If a pidgin manages to be learned by the children of a community as a native language, it may become fixed and acquire a more complex grammar, with fixed phonology, syntax, morphology, and syntactic embedding. Pidgins can become full languages in only a single generation. "Creolization" is this second stage where the pidgin language develops into a fully developed native language. The vocabulary, too, will contain more and more words according to a rational and stable system.[14]

 

[meep]

Nope, had it for 3 years and then my French teacher asked me if i could drop French because i sucked at it (seriously, he asked it!) :? Yeah i have learned sje ne parle pas frances. But i even forgot how to write that hahaha :lol:

I only speak/read/write Dutch (duh) and English, and understand German. I only speak it a little and i totally forgot how to wright it. :cry: Havent used German in 8 years so yeah, kinda forgot it, i had a 7 for German and a 8 for English when i graduated. To bad my German isnt good anymore. When i was in Switserland i spoke in German to the people and understood them well, although they have an accent.
I want it back..

I& want to learn Spanish. Love the language and my guy his parents moved to spain so we go there every year now... Better speak it then. Since they moved to a very little town where the people only speak Spanish lol.

 

[Riana]

I'm mentally challenged when it comes to French. >_< I just can't wrap my head (or tongue) around it. I can speak more Japanese than French.