Sidebar 4 - If You Value Your English Spelling, Skip French

Yesterday I finished (pull back that deep arena announcer voice from Part #10) Pimsleur’s French 1. Starting from seventy in French, one counts sixty-ten, sixty-and-eleven, sixty-twelve. And so on, until eighty. That’s four-twenties, four-twenties-and-one, four-twenties-two… and so on. Until ninety, when one says four-twenties-ten.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that pronunciation is just as brain-bendy. Phonetically in French, -prends sounds like an abbreviated gasp after a surprise poke in the belly. Parlez, which means to speak (go figure), is pronounced similarly to how we say parley in English. Generally the second half of words are skipped or melt into the following word via a liaison. My favorite liaison was the first one I learned to read. How do you think one should “sound out” vous allez? It’s read like voozeli and would form a two-part rhyme with New Delhi. It sounds like one word, not two.

Contractions sound like liaisons, but structurally shift sentences around. And negatives (i.e. I do not like…) require two insertions into the positive version of the claim, instead of one. Listening is hard. Speaking is hard. Yet reading is the hardest for me because the phonetics seem to change each time I engage.

Studying French is an object lesson in getting uncomfortable and forging on anyhow. Billions of people have learned English as a second language to engage differently in the world we’re sharing. If nothing more comes from my French studies, at least I’ll have a higher level of sympathy for those masses. And I’ll have a tidy excuse for misusing and mis-spelling words.