In article <[email protected]>,
Mxsmanic <[email protected]> wrote:

> Dave Smith writes:
>
> > Oh? I have met lots of French speaking people who speak excellent English.
>
> I've heard that so many times. No, they don't speak "excellent" English; they
> just get by.

What they speak is English words with French intonation, which is
totally alien to English.

--
Mary, biblioholic

bib-li-o-hol-ism : the habitual longing to purchase, read, store,
admire, and consume books in excess.

http://www.airstreamcomm.net/~erilarlo

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:21:12 -0500, erilar <[email protected]> wrote:

>In article <[email protected]>,
> Mxsmanic <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Dave Smith writes:
>>
>> > Oh? I have met lots of French speaking people who speak excellent English.
>>
>> I've heard that so many times. No, they don't speak "excellent" English; they
>> just get by.
>
>What they speak is English words with French intonation, which is
>totally alien to English.

Only the ones you met.
--

Martin

"erilar" <[email protected]> kirjoitti
viestissä:[email protected]...
>>
>> Is that why so few of the French speak "English" that sounds much more
>> like French than English??
>
> Mistyped: that came out wrong "why so many speak" My mind obviously
> wandered off in another direction in mid-sentence 8-)
>
It is all right. You can use one phrase when the listeners are English
speaking and the other when you are chatting with French speaking people.
One American basketball player has lived in Finland several decades now. His
wife speaks Finnish as her mother tongue. When the chap is making an effort
to say it in Finnish, listeners have to concentrate very hard to grasp any
of it and yet it is such gibberish which is probably understood only by Lord
Greystoke's chimpanzee. The fellow was good at basketball and that is what
matters though.

Make credence recognised that on Thu, 23 Aug 2007 06:43:51 +0200,
Mxsmanic <[email protected]> has scripted:

>Dave Smith writes:
>
>> Such a shame. All those smarts and not a lick of common sense,
>
>There's no such thing as "common sense."

Yes there is. It's the ability to distinguish relevant from
irrelevant.
--
---
DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com
---
--

Dave Smith writes:

> Which one?

http://www.polytechnique.edu/

> Are you sure that you aren't referring to francophones from a particular
> region in France?

Yes.

erilar writes:

> What they speak is English words with French intonation, which is
> totally alien to English.

Sometimes, yes.

I recall being on an Air France flight and listening to the announcements made
by a French flight attendant in English and French. She had virtually no
accent when pronouncing the English words, but her intonation was 100% French,
and so interfered with comprehension that I couldn't understand what she was
saying. I had to wait for the French version to figure out what she had been
trying to say. Her main mistake was a total lack of proper stress in English.

Doesn't Frequently Mop writes:

> Yes there is. It's the ability to distinguish relevant from
> irrelevant.

But this depends on perspective.

Stupid people are like people who stand at a fork in the road and say "take
the west road to get there," and then wonder why smart people seem to be
confused. Smart people, however, have a large map, and there are many roads
on the map that lead more or less west--almost all of which are invisible to
the stupid person in the fork of the road. Stupid people assume that there is
only one possibility because they see only one possibility. Smart people see
many possibilities and find it hard to guess which of them has been
arbitrarily discovered by the stupid people.

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 06:39:49 +0200, Mxsmanic <[email protected]>
wrote:

>me writes:
>
>> It always has.
>
>It has long been theorized; it has never been proved.
>
>> Or you don't want to credit the phenomenon. Hmmmm? How
>> should I decide who is correct?
>
>With standardized tests of language competence for the languages in question.

May we assume, then, that for French you would devise a test for
Parisian French, devised perhaps by the forty Immortals?

--
************* DAVE HATUNEN ([email protected]) *************
* Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow *
* My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *

Hatunen writes:

> May we assume, then, that for French you would devise a test for
> Parisian French, devised perhaps by the forty Immortals?

There's no such thing as "Parisian French." It's just French.

Following up to Mxsmanic <[email protected]> :

>The Reid writes:
>
>> groan, we are clearly talking about understanding the *interface*
>
>Understanding the interface requires only a few minutes of study.
>
>> the interface, numbnuts.
>
>Well, teenagers have trouble with the interface, too.

Even though it only takes a few minutes to understand?
--
Tim C.

Following up to Dave Smith <[email protected]> :

>
>I suppose that you could be right. I, a native English speaker, thought
>their English was excellent. They were fluent, articulate, had tremendous
>vocabulary. But hell, you could be right. They were just speaking. How was
>I to know they didn't understand what they were saying?

LOL!
--
Tim C.

Following up to Dave Smith <[email protected]> :

>Are you sure that you aren't referring to francophones from a particular
>region in France?

The ones in his classroom.
--
Tim C.

Following up to erilar <[email protected]> :

> My mind obviously
>wandered off in another direction in mid-sentence 8-)

And totally understandable when reading Mixi's posts.
--
Tim C.

Following up to Mxsmanic <[email protected]> :

>Tim C. writes:
>
>> So your:
>> "What I notice about people who were raised bilingual is that they have no
>> accents, but they still confuse the two languages in many situations. "
>> people were actually "code-switching".
>
>Yes. Good!

So, to be clear: confusing two languages is code-switching, and
code-switching is confusing languages?
--
Tim C.

Following up to [email protected] (David Horne, _the_ chancellor (*)) :

>I used to see my mum talk to her sister in English when there were
>English speaking guests around!

I walked into a bar (no comments about not looking where I was going,
Martin!) late in the evening in Winter in the Brecon Beacons and most of
the locals suddenly stopped speaking Welsh and carried on in English. It
was very like the situation in the Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf
In London.

--
Tim C.