I used to think that everything I say in English has to be 100% correct, but when I started using Internet and saw that others (non-natives as well as natives) make some mistakes as well, I told myself: "I don't care about it, as long as they understand me. Well, everyone knows it's not my native language, so they will not hold it against me." So I just started communicating, but surprisingly, it helped me improve my English a lot, because whenever I saw I was making a mistake or wasn't sure if it was correct, I checked it out and started using the correct form.
Greg,
“jette-toi à l'eau et le reste suivra”
J'ai fait ça (littéralement) toute ma vie, et tout de même je peux à peine nager.
But I hope I'll have better luck with speaking foreign languages than I did with swimming.
By the way, is there a difference between "je peux" and "je puis" (besides the spellling)?
Deborah,
A hint : when hesitating between <je peux> and <je puis>, always choose <je peux>. You error rate is 1 % maximum instead 95 % if you'd choose the opposite.
A nuance : if your sentence is interrogative, always drop <peux> and go for <puis-je ... ?>, which is mandatory while *<peux-je ...> is impossible. Then your error rate is 0 % for sure. However <est-ce que je peux ... ?> and <est-ce que je puis ... ?> are OK, even if the frequency for the former is 99,99 %.
<Je ne peux pas> and <je peux pas> are fine. <Je ne puis pas> is more formal or literary. Never heard about *<je puis pas>.
Interronegative = interrogative. <Ne puis-je pas ... ?> = mandatory. <Est-ce que je ne peux pas... ?> is a fine variant. <Est-ce que je ne puis pas ... ?> is rare.
I'll try to find a more comprehensive link for you.
I think that one problem for adult language learners is that they often don't get the chance to practice talking little by little. I mean, take little kids/babies, before they know any words they practice pronunciation (babbling) for several months, first simple vowel sounds and then gradually utterances that resemble adult words (=protowords). Then they start using "real" words and about a year later they start to form sentences and so on. And little kids can make and do make a lot of grammer mistakes and they can't pronounce all words/sounds correctly and the sentences are pretty simple at first.
The problem is, when you're an adult, you are often not allowed to go through these phases, especially the babbling part :), and instead you should (or at least many people think they should) be able to speak like the people of their age right away. When your an adult in a foreign country you probably wouldn't start with simple sentences like "Look, a puppy", "I want that doll", "I saw a bug" etc. These are acceptable for kids, but at least when I speak to someone in a foreign country I feel like I should be able to express a lot more, like my personal opinions and feelings and plans for the future and stuff like that. So I think it's only natural that people are so shy about speaking in a foreign language, as they haven't had the chance to practise it like kids do.
Thanks, Greg.
You make a very good point, Anna. Perhaps I shouldn't have felt so primitive with my one-word responses in the taqueria. That is, perhaps I should have felt primitive, but shouldn't have thought of it as a negative quality.
According to my mother, she was worried that there was something wrong with me when I was a baby, because I didn't speak for such a long time. She says my first utterance, other than early grunts, was 2 complete sentences. So I guess I've had this tendency for a very long time.