French, it's rocket science?!

Satan   Tue Jun 02, 2009 3:13 pm GMT
They are in the hell. ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha And you will come soon. ha ha ha ha ha......
K. T.   Tue Jun 02, 2009 4:20 pm GMT
Psst...Satan,

People don't have to go to Hell.

I've heard that it's too hot to enjoy all those activities there. People can't find their friends in the heat, there are no poker games with cards.
Horror gets old and unlike a horror flick in the summer it doesn't cool you down.

Unlike some people, I can't claim that I've been to Hell and back.
eeuuian   Tue Jun 02, 2009 9:27 pm GMT
<<That's limpid. I wonder why I even study people's problem-solving strategies in cognitive psychology when most of the answers lie in the simple equations:
French 1L = fiendish lace-like complexities = maths genius
English 1L = mind-dumbing, pidgin-like grammar = sucks at maths >>

I guess your challenge now is to find out why having a irregular verbs and grammatical gender in your mother toungue improves math ability. It must be that learning a complex native language exercises the brain early in life, conferring a persistent IQ advantage, especiallty in math.
Guest   Wed Jun 03, 2009 2:10 am GMT
<<I guess your challenge now is to find out why having a irregular verbs and grammatical gender in your mother toungue improves math ability.>>

It sounds unlikely. After all, exceptions are illogical, and maths is based entirely on logic. So having an illogical language should damage your ability to learn logical mathematics.
refugee   Wed Jun 03, 2009 1:28 pm GMT
<<So having an illogical language should damage your ability to learn logical mathematics. >>

Maybe an illogical native language turns the highly logical types off, so they pursue non-language-based studies. To get away from their unsatisfying and annoying native language, they seek refuge in mathematics and science.
???   Sun Jun 07, 2009 10:07 pm GMT
Haha, come on French is not considered to be a hugely difficult language. As a native English speaker who has learnt German, I have only ever heard that French is the easier out of French and German, and from more than one person. And neither of these two are massively difficult! Think about Polish, Hungarian, or, um er Navajo with its some 900 forms of every verb, how can we go on? French is just a simplified Latin, it obviously retains a grammatically more complex system than English, but even so a German told me, yes it's harder at first, but you will have learnt it after a few years, whereas English still has double the vocab and it takes longer. And yes that matters, it's not all about grammar and yet that remains an issue. Not least because extra vocab equals extra prepositions and structures to match up.

French is definitely one of the easier languages in the world, only its verb conjugation is hard, but that doesn't make it difficult, relatively.