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As a Canadian who has never lived in Quebec, I do low key have a bit of a chip on my shoulder regarding French but only because it was completely useless to me outside of French class. It was only mandatory from grade six to grade nine, after that it was optional. Unless you live in Quebec or interact with a lot of French stuff it just doesn’t stick, and that sucks because knowing a second language is a very good thing!
I wish French was more useful to me but it just hasn’t been. Maybe it’s just the way it is taught too because it was only usable in that one classroom (and it also felt like a chore). Maybe the governments could’ve done a better job at integrating multiple languages into our lives besides translations on products.
Also, while it may be off topic, but our Indigenous languages deserve the same respect and recognition.
This redditor has (of course) never been to Europe, and I would go so much as saying they’ve never left their hometown. German? Who tf speaks German? If anything people here have to speak it because we only get bourgeois morons that can’t even speak a bit of English.
Learning French is mandatory for every communist because it’s unacceptable that you can’t spell or pronounce “bourgeoisie”.
The communists of China promoted literacy by creating simplified Chinese and developing pinyin. The communists of the West must follow in their footsteps by eliminating all remnants of French.
What word should we use instead of “bourgeoisie”? Bürgertum?
Imo those are not really the same thing. Bürgertum refers purely to people living in cities, those can own Means of Production or not. Bourgeoisie are always owners of MoP.
How about “dipshits”
The masses would enjoy reading theory a lot more if we rewrote everything with funny words.
I know I would
資產階級
Makes sense but you might want to change it to simplified chinese or daddy Mao will come back to spank you.
Might have just been japanese. lol
A lot more people speak French than German, even if this is declining as parts of Francophone Africa are trying to ditch French. It’s not going to disappear overnight from those countries. I wish this wasn’t the case since my French is much worse than my German, but French is still objectively more useful than German for the time being.
Yeah, my French is terrible and I don’t think that I can actually understand a sentence, unlike German, which is weird considering that everybody was saying that German is way harder.
That comes down to romantic languages being more widespread. English is a edge case. It actually is a germanic language like german, but was influenced so much by french that it has more romantic loanwords than germanic ones. Furthermore, it got so simplified during its colonial era that most of what makes germanic languages precise (but a removed to learn) got thrown out.
Meanwhile german got lots of latin influences, with plenty of loanwords from neighbouring languages, but the structure of sentences barely changed over time.
This sounds like the poster being annoyed that they were forced to learn French and don’t get much out of it. Which is kinda understandable for any language or subject matter. And languages can be pretty tedious to learn, depending on how they are presented to you.
For another perspective on it though, I kinda wish I was pushed more to learn a second language in the US. I had a little bit of Spanish in high school and that was it. The rest of my second language learning has been purely by choice, through language learning apps. And it’s a real pain once I get past the basics with a language because there’s this “don’t know what I don’t know” chasm between beginner and fluency; apps don’t tend to cover that chasm well and I suspect a lot of bridging it is painfully rote practice. Apps tend to be centered more around making you feel cute and competent as a tourist and it makes sense because that’s where the bulk of interest is going to come from, rather than hobbyists.
That said, if you’re optionally learning a second (or more) language purely based on whether it’s a top most used language in the world, you’re probably going to struggle with the motivation to reach fluency anyway. You need something to sustain you in the long-term and popularity is fickle.
Apps are pretty good at teaching you vocabulary and pronunciation but they suck at teaching grammar which is what you need to advance in a language beyond that basic level.
In my experience, they don’t even tend to be very good at teaching vocabulary - unless I guess, you’re willing to do lots of review exercises (at which point, seems like you might as well use flash cards).
Some of the following is a bit theoretical and based on my own brain. I have not tested it out with an app design of my own and it may not apply to all kinds of brains (I know not everybody remembers the same things or in the same way):
My working hypothesis is that part of the problem is a lack of variety for one and a lack of context for another. As an example, 我 (I) in Chinese is relatively easy to remember because you will organically encounter “I” over and over, and in a wide variety of different contexts. Now for comparison, consider characters like 叉子 (fork), 勺子 (spoon), and 筷子 (chopsticks). You might encounter these in the context of ordering food at a restaurant (which makes sense for an app trying to help out tourists, right?). But you probably won’t see distinctions like “I would like a spoon because I am eating ice cream” or “I would like a fork because I am eating pasta”. Both would sound awkward as real sentences to order with and just in general as things people are going to tend to casually say, but in terms of associations between concepts, I think it matters the absence or presence of that “because” clause. Without that context, all your brain has to latch onto is the generic concept of ordering food. So maybe your brain bundles those words under associations to do with ordering food, but it doesn’t distinguish on a finer grain level beyond that and as a result, it’s hard to remember which is which. You might remember there are these something 子 words that go together with ordering food, but beyond that, it’s harder.
So the apps tend to focus on common phrases and common words and things such as that, but they’re not focusing enough on how the brain processes concepts and remembers them.
Second to last paragraph this guy showed his ass. Conveniently not mentioning the one real benefit of learning French, being able to communicate with half of Africa, which apparently isn’t worthwhile because they’re “poor”, piss off.
Tbf they’re replacing it, he mentioned that.
Specifically only mentioned Arabs and Arab countries, this guy is almost certainly a racist PoS, the fact he’s bringing up football as if that matters to anything, massive red flag.
Well he is Canadian after all.
If French isn’t worth learning neither is German tbh. German economy isn’t that much larger than French, and in slow decline due to austerity.
Spanish and Portuguese are spoken outside their “home” countries and Russian is popular throughout the former Soviet Union.
Germany sucks, I want to see it burn. In minecraft
Eh, German is good for theory, philosophy and literature in general.
French did have the large vowel inventory, homophones from lost of final consonants, and grammatical gender agreement that made it difficult to learn. English is the more neutral Western European language in terms of linguistic features due to their mixture of Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages.
Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Korean, Spanish
I continue to stand by my assertion that understanding Newfies has more practical applications in Canada than speaking French.
I would far rather learn my native language than french. But they make try to make me feel guilty about not learning french properly. I speak french better than I speak my own language. What does that say?
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
true genocide the french language
