Hi, I'm from France

Hi. I'm trying to progress in English and I was looking for an English-speaking discussion forum. So here I am. :p

If you want to ask me some questions about France or about anything else, I'll answer you with my (not) perfect English (don't hesitate to correct me :p).

Have you ever been to France ? Personally I've never been to the United States but I'd really like to !

Is there a W in French or do you just always use OU for that sound?

Not been to France but lived just a few miles outside of Quebec for a few years. Never picked up the French language, but then again I can't even fake an accent in English so...

I've been to France as a US GI with my family. We stayed a few days at Paris (obviously). I'm happy to know the French (and much of mainland Europe) drive on the right side of the road.....unlike the Brits who drive on the wrong side. ;) It was easy touring France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, and Italy. We drove. When we arrived at England, we took a package tour instead.

My French language skills suck. So, you're doing way better than me.

@france38:

Your English is really good for someone still practicing it.

Yes, I have visited the capital of France on holiday. I learnt French in school but sadly struggled to grasp it.

How far will England reach in the World Cup? I think France will do well in the World Cup. So many talented individuals with the like of Pogba, Greizmann, Mbappe and etc.

Can we use your flag in our military parade?

sorry i could not help myself

@br0kenrabbit : French and English have the same alphabet. So yes, there is a W in French. But this letter is one of the least used in the French language. Indeed we use a lot “ou” to make a sound similar to the W sound, like in the word “couette” (=Duvet in English). But we don’t really pronounce “Couwette”, the sound is not exactly the same

Never been to Canada (but I'd like to), actually I never went out of Europa. “but then again I can't even fake an accent in English so...” didn’t understand this part of your sentence, sorry. :(

@jun_aka_pekto : Ahah there are not many countries that drive on the left side of the road. I went to London and it was difficult (even as a pedestrian) to be in the street. I always looked on the wrong side to cross the road. :/

@nepu7supastar7 : Thank you, I will :) But I’m not posting on this forum without the help of Google to correct my mistakes. :D

@omegaMaster : Yep, French is a very difficult language. It’s so hard for me to learn English, so I can’t imagine the difficulty to learn French when you’re not French… I am not a big fan of football (Called soccer in the USA I think?), so I don’t know the English team. I don’t really trust in a French victory… But why not? We will see!

@Trylt : ? X)

By the way, I need some help in English. What is the difference between "here" and "there" (For example, should I use "I'm here" or "I'm there" ?)

'There' isn't where you are, 'here' always is.

You can use them interchangeably sometimes, like if you're putting something together and point to where something is suppose to go and say "put that here/there". Either would work in that instance. But in general, 'here' is where you are and 'there' is somewhere you are not.

If I'm going based off how you put together the written word, you're already more articulate and clear than many native English speakers. So keep at it, you're well on your way. Congrats.

@france38: Also, this is not only a US forum, there are people from all over the world.

Agree, I'm from South East Asia.

Also question to @france38, what's the current status of your country right now?

My parents, my sister and my wife have been to France. I haven’t and I have no plans to in the near future. My ancestors 1600-1700ish were from France. Went to French immersion and all that shit.

Funnily enough, I wouldn't use them interchangeably in that situation. I would never use "here" if I couldn't reach the place I was pointing at, and vice versa. I would, however, do it in my native language. I guess that's the foreigner's "be extra careful with how you say things and don't butcher the language" in me :)

@france38: Welcome to GS! As a Portuguese living in the Netherlands I think it's quite brave of you to just dive in for the sake of improvement. I've been living in the NL for 5 years and I'm still reluctant to post in anything Dutch...my Dutch is good enough to half pass as my native language but I'm always afraid I'll make stupid mistakes and be seen as those Americans who don't know the difference between your/you're and there/their/they're. Then again I'm quite pedantic so I'm not a very good example in this situation.

If you have any questions yourself just let me know (here or send me a message). You're doing great so far!

I learnt a pretty good amount of French a few years ago, but my knowledge of Spanish conflicted with it. The use of the definite articles in particular was odd to me at the time. I can still read some French at least. I've been to neither France nor the United States. I have a mild fascination with Marseilles of all places, probably because it's coastal like where I live.

The more languages you learn the worse that is going to get and you'll end up having to learn how to turn the off-switch on some of them, which is not always easy. I was recently teaching Portguese to Dutch students and we were talking about vowels...doesn't get much easier than that, right? It's literally 5 letters but between their Dutch, their knowledge of English and the target language (Portuguese) it was a mess. The letter A is pronounced "ah" in Portuguese and Dutch but "ey" in English, but "ey" is how you pronounce the letter "E" in Dutch, while the English sound for the letter E is how you pronounce the letter I in Portuguese...I could continue but you see my point.

Overlapping languages is a pain in the neck, and even though both English and Dutch are German-based languages, my knowledge of English only served to make things harder for me in Dutch. I remember the first time I got here I got introduced to somebody and she said she was going to give me a "di*k kiss".......I'm sorry, what?? Turns out dik just means fat/big...so I was getting a big kiss...still weird from someone I've never met before but still better than what I thought she was offering...

Then of course, I saw this perfectly lovely advertisement

@korvus: Working on understanding pronunciation and orthography is something I enjoy, so I've not had much trouble with that side, even with some of the more unfamiliar phoneme inventories. I'm currently learning some Czech and there are some interesting sounds in there. I don't think I'll ever get around to Dutch, but Afrikaans is a possibility.

@kingkilla3: That's almost like saying you'll never learn Portuguese but might learn Brazilian. A bit of a grammar shift and spelling to match pronunciation but you should be able to understand both just fine if you learn one or the other. I'm starting with German now and then Swedish (since my wife wants to learn Swedish so might as well) and then probably revise French (learned it in school, never had anyone to practice with, so while I can read it, i can't speak it) and then start again with Japanese.

@korvus: As far as I'm aware Dutch and Afrikaans are distinct enough from each other to be considered different languages instead of dialects of one. I couldn't specify what those differences are though. One desirable aspect of Afrikaans is that (I've heard) it has no grammatical gender. it's also the second most common language where I live. German has a similar problem for me in that I want to learn Yiddish instead. Fewer resources though. I learnt a bit of Swedish years ago, but I switched to Norwegian not too long ago, and now it's coming close to my level of French knowledge. I've put Japanese on indefinite hold, the writing system is too much for me right now.

No no no, you have to state your address to everyone here, lol.

@korvus said:

Then of course, I saw this perfectly lovely advertisement

What's so bad about the ad? its clearly an advertisement for Overwatch... That's Reaper's death blossom after-all.

@kingkilla3: Dutch also has no grammatical genders but I know what you mean, you're referring to when you say "the table" in Dutch it would be "de tafel" but when you say "the house" the Dutch would be "het huis". With Afrikaans it would both be "die". I can understand Afrikaans with no problem after learning Dutch, a lot better than I can understand Dutch dialects, then again I can understand Brazilian with no problem being Portuguese while Brazilians tend to have trouble understand Portuguese since Brazilian is, to an extent, simplified Portuguese, so when we get into verb tenses that the Brazilian just dropped, they get confused. I suspect that Afrikaans might be something along those lines as well.

@GTR12: Little girl: Mister...my mommy said she wanted flowers for her birthday...
Reaper: Say no more...I got just the one....Re-positioning...

The English language is the most convoluted language in the world. Between words having multiple meanings and all the exceptions to the rule, learning it can get frustrating.

Actually English is known as one of the easiest languages to learn and use correctly. Of course when you add slang and weird expressions it gets more difficult but that's true for any language.

I adore the pomme des terre. If you know what I mean.

Maybe at a basic level, but I feel like most people don't know the difference between most of the tenses. I have learned Chinese to a conversational level so I'd say any language is easy if that's all you're after.

pommes de terre* but I know what you mean.

French Canadian here, always have a good laugh at people trying to speak french

Easy to learn is not just about complexity....there's a lot of stuff that affects it...namely your native language and especially availability, which English has a metric ton of. Most people are exposed to English from a very early age...movies, shows, music...stuff bleeds in and when you start actively trying to learn you realise you already know a lot. Heck, my 2 and a half year old son asked me to learn English (we're having an English speaking friend staying over in a few days). 4 days in our English "lessons" the little turd can already have basic conversations in English...I doubt he's been having lessons on the side and he has no English speaking buddies (we're in the Netherlands) but he does hear English here and there.

As for verb tenses in English I found them surprisingly simple but then again I'm sure French people find other language's counting systems laughably simple. When your own language has a messed up need to complicate everything, everything else seems to make sense more quickly :p

Finally understood, thank you! :)

I really want to be sure of my sentence before I post, I take the time I need to make it without 50 mistakes. I check several websites like Google Translate (be carefull with it), Linguee (very good website) or directly English grammar websites. Or I type my sentence on Google, and if there is no suggestion it's because my sentence is probably wrong. In class (I'm a student), I don't want to give a report to a teacher if I know I can do better. It's exactly the same here, I don't post until I think I can't correct me anymore. ;)

Oh, so I'm not really a stranger on this forum. :p

I'm not sure I understand what do you meant by "current status". If you talk about things like our economic situation, it's pretty good since few years, so much better than late 2000s and early 2010s. Unemployment is decreasing!

Oh, so you have French roots! If I understood (thanks to my Google searches), French immersion is a program to learn French?

Thank you :p Waah, it's not just the French who are confused with this kind of words!

It's exactly the same in France, people don't know the difference between "c'est" (it's, that's), "sait" (From the verb "savoir" (= to know) at the third person singular (il sait = he knows)) , "ces" (these), "sais" (From the verb "savoir" too, but at the first person singular (Je sais = I know)), "s'est" (from the verb "être" = to be. Complicated for me to explain it in English, sorry),"ses" (used for the possession, for example "ses livres"=his books"). These words all have the same pronunciation!

Sorry for the little French lesson that might be unclear. Anyway, that's not a problem if you make mistakes with another language. It's more a problem if you make a lot of mistakes like writing "you're" instead of "your" being English-speaker, or writing "ses" instead of "ces" being French-speaker... So don't worry if you make mistakes in Dutch ;p

I have actually two questions. How did you learn English? It seems that you master it. And what does "then again" means?, I saw it several times on this topic and Google can't help me :(

Don't have any knowledge in Spanish but I guess there are similarities between French and Spanish. I never been to Marseille... Where do you live?

Pronunciation problems...

In French we don't differenciate words by the pronunciation of the syllables. When I was in lycée (=high school), I said to my English teacher "b*tch" instead of "beach"...

@korvus @kingkilla3 : Wow, you learn a lot of languages. Mastering English will be enough for me :p

Indeed, English is an easy language compared to other languages. But it's still very difficult for me to learn it :( So I think people who try to learn French are brave. X)

I like potatoes too. :p Does French Canadian all master English?

Two hours and half to write this post! I could take several days to answer you again. Answering you is longer than I thought :p

If it's just to learn basic use so people can understand you, English is easy. But, when it comes to the finer things, it gets irritating. For example, I see many people still write "a M.R.I." instead of "an M.R.I." which should be second nature to most native English speakers.

I'm forced to do group projects in many college courses and it's ridiculous how much time I spent double-checking my teammates' grammar. Luckily for me, it's my last semester.

@france38: I'm from Auckland, New Zealand. French is spoken by about 1% of the population here.

It's hard when you introduce double negatives just because its easier to say,

"I don't like pie" vs "I dislike pie"

"English isn't easy" vs "English is hard"

Then you have English locale's, in a country/city a word may mean something very different to another place,

Thongs in Australia means flip-flops/sandals/slippers/etc, in the US, it means female underwear.

Then you got spelling, different spelling for locale's and there's no set rules for words.

I do the same, I always have to correct other people. I thought it was because French was difficult but apparently this problem is everywhere in the world.

So your country still have a rugby team ;) France will fight tonight against italy not to be last in the Six Nations Championship. RIP "XV de France"...

Probably. I am one of those 1%

But that is the case for almost every language. I mean, don't get me wrong, I still mess up often...I tend to use "in" instead of "on" due to my native language or double past tense like "did you bought the milk?" I know the rules but for some reason those 2 situations always come out my mouth before being pre-approved :p

@france38: I learned English watching movies and reading books, mainly which helped my listening and reading comprehension. Online friends helped me develop my writing but the speaking was more difficult. Even with my English being almost as good then as it is now, whenever I had to talk I would take forever to form a sentence. Listening to something, translating it to Portuguese in my head, think of my answer in Portuguese, translate it to English, make sure the sentence was built properly and then say it...very long pauses in a conversation. Eventually when I stopped thinking in Portuguese it became a lot faster.

Also, "then again" is normally used when you share an opinion and then contradict yourself. It's like telling you I'm very thin and then telling you my trousers are starting not to fit me, which would mean I'm gaining weight so I could say "I'm quite thin, then again my trousers are getting a little tight so maybe I'm not all that thin anymore". Does that make sense?

Can't tell for the rest of Canada, but in Quebec somewhat. I won't say we master English, but anyone under ~35 right now had several years of English courses during our school programs that are in French.

Never been to France but I am Canadian and visited Quebec a few times. Sadly I was never good at French myself and haven't learned it in over 15 years when I first started high school.

I dunno, it seems like English has a lot more slang than other languages. Like, if you learned how to speak English properly from a book and then started speaking to someone on the street they might not even be able to understand you. What's the point of even learning rules if English speakers themselves don't follow them? Plus there seem to be a LOT of English words that either sound exactly the same or are spelled exactly the same (discrete vs. discreet, pair vs. pear). If I ask you what a bow is how do you answer? There are at least five valid answers, some of which are pronounced the same and some of which aren't. You probably don't want to get me started on "Thou," I'll be here all night.

French, in comparison, seems pretty easy. The thing that strikes me about other languages is how organized they seem compared to English. Like with subjects it's first, second, third person, singular and plural, and they're all different (not like in German, say, where "sie" means "she," "they," and the formal "you"), and 98% of the verbs follow a very specific pattern. There are SO many weird verbs in English that don't follow conjugation patterns. The only thing that really threw me with French was getting the "sense" of when to use certain verb tenses right, like the three past tenses and the subjunctive form. Other than that it seems pretty simple, at least in hindsight.

My recommendation is to not worry about being correct on forums, you're not going to learn that way. Use the words you know, maybe use a dictionary if you really need to (just use an English one if you really want to up your game), and give it time. You'll be typing perfectly well in no time, but you have to give it time. Also, in case you didn't know already, when you're reading replies just focus on the sense, don't worry about knowing every single word.Only look up words you think you need to know to understand a sentence.

I'm also learning German for the first time as well. It isn't bad so far but man "The" in German can be a huge pain in the ass. It can be very confusing for me.

@france38:

You: I really want to be sure of my sentence before I post, I take the time I need to make it without 50 mistakes. I check several websites like Google Translate (be carefull with it), Linguee (very good website) or directly English grammar websites. Or I type my sentence on Google, and if there is no suggestion it's because my sentence is probably wrong. In class (I'm a student), I don't want to give a report to a teacher if I know I can do better. It's exactly the same here, I don't post until I think I can't correct me anymore. ;)

Me: That’s a fantastic attitude. Keep at it and don’t stop moving forward, ever.

Yep. I already have trouble with that in Dutch...German is more difficult still. It's one of those "polish" things though...not super important when you're first learning (people will understand you just fine even if you use it wrong) but if you ever want to sound native, it's one of the things that will stick out like a sore thumb.

I have a friend who moved here when he was 4 so almost native but while learning the language he decided "de/het" weren't important so he used "de" for everything so now he speaks flawless Dutch, perfect accent but then I hear him say something simple incorrectly like "de huis" (this is probably the first "het" word you learn when you get here) and I think "Oh yeah, you're a foreigner too..."

Let politics stay in the politics forum :)

Off-topic is our safe space so don´t ruin it.

Oh, I don't know the rules of the double past. I should learn that.

I watch American series but I can't remove French subtitles. I am thinking to myself that I could use English subtitles but I don't want to pause each time I didn't catch something. Maybe I will do that when I would have progressed. However I don't read any book. I just read "White Feng" because it was for an English course. I think 100% in French when I'm writing here, still have some progress to make :/ (These 5 lines to write may took me 20 minutes... :p)

That make sense, I learned something more in English today, thank you :D

I have been learning English for a long time too. But I think French scolar system is bad because the level of English of the French is bad. According to what you said, it seems Canadian French-speakers are so much better in English than us... In collège (=middle school) and in lycée (=high school) I didn't listen to English courses, it was boring... :p

I learn English since the primary school, and I'm really trying to progress since I left high school so... It is never too late :p

I think all languages have words that sound the same. In French we have "verre", "vert", "vers", "vair" and "ver" for example.

Indeed, each language is organized differently. And I think English organization is simpler than other languages (sadly that's not why I speak English well :( ). In English we must know every irregular verbs yep. In general I know basic irregular verbs but if I start reading a book with "weird" verbs, I think I would be lost.

The French conjugation is pretty difficult, even the French are lost with it. But I'm used with that, and I'm lost with the English conjugation which is probably simpler... When I'm writing here I always have to correct my conjugation with Google Translate/Reverso/Linguee. :(

For example I'm so lost with "I have been learning English for a long time" and "I learn English since the primary school". I don't understand why translators use "I have been learning" with "for a long time" and "I learn English" with "since the primary school"...

Well I just read your third paragraph, I have already writen what you can read above. I'm not really worry about being correct on forums, I'm just like that, I want to do the best I can. As I said, "I don't want to give a report to a teacher if I know I can do better. It's exactly the same here, I don't post until I think I can't correct me anymore". Mh so should I give up Reverso/Google Translate/Linguee and just use English grammar websites ?

@ruthaford_jive Ahah I'm like that, thank you :p

It should be "I have been learning" for both your examples since they both refer to something that is still occurring. The reason why you get different results is most likely because online translators are still quite bad in translating entire sentences, and sometimes it can be difficult to tell if the translation you get is correct. The problem is made even worse by the fact that a lot of the less known translation websites use the same database, so just because they all show the same results it doesn't mean they are correct :(

Yeah when it comes to using "The" in German it can be a very odd. Like to say "The Man" and "The Boy" in German it's "Der Mann" and "Der Junge" since Der is the German masculine word for "The", and for The Woman it's Die Frau since Die is feminine but for The Girl it's Das Mädchen which is odd since Das is neutral. And it gets really confusing when you have to use The for animals and objects. Hopefully I can master it one day.

Anyways it's interesting that you know a lot of Germanic languages. Do you speak any other Romance languages as well since you're from Portugal?

I agree with what you say, but it's not easy for others. My students really struggle with the tenses since Chinese is very different in that respect. They've been learning for six years but they do not have the environment that your son has. It's all rather subjective.

Of course ^_^ My post wasn't intended as chest thumping :) My point is that since English is so wildly available it's easier to pick up (even to a small child) than most any other language because it seeps in even without them realising it. I'm pretty sure my son wouldn't learn Mandarin in 4 days...or me, for that matter :p

@AcidTango: In Portuguese we also have "genders" for objects but only male/female, no neutral and it's easy to see which one a specific word is. As for Latin-based languages, Portuguese (I would hope XD), Spanish, French (can understand, read, a bit of writing but due to lack of practice, can't speak it) Italian (barely enough to go by...mostly deduction from Portuguese and French). Absolutely no Romanian XD

I thought I was carefull enough with the translators. :(

I have to renember that, this is not the same logic as in French. In French I would literally have said "I'm learning" or "I learn". English conjugation is definitely my weakness... ^^

I've been to Paris.

"I'm learning" is also valid for some situations. "I'm learning German" is correct, but "I'm learning German for 5 years" is not

I've been to Paris just one time. Did you like?

I wanted to say "I'm leaning English since a long time" before I correct with translators. I realised it was sooo wrong ^^

@france38: Well, that sentence would have made it obvious that you are not a native speaker but it's perfectly understandable so I would still say "well done" ^_^