English speakers ! Do you understand FRENCH ?

Guest   Sat Nov 05, 2005 7:37 am GMT
English speakers ! Do you understand FRENCH ?

Considering thousands of translingual Franco-English words, do you understand FRENCH ?

(I am not a native English or Romance speaker but thanks to English I understood some French )
Uriel   Sat Nov 05, 2005 8:57 am GMT
Well, I can certainly puzzle out quite a few cognates in written French. The spoken variety is much more difficult.
Kirk   Sat Nov 05, 2005 9:02 am GMT
<<English speakers ! Do you understand FRENCH ?

Considering thousands of translingual Franco-English words, do you understand FRENCH ?

(I am not a native English or Romance speaker but thanks to English I understood some French )>>

I've studied some French so I do understand varying degrees of the spoken language and very much of the written language. Also, I speak Spanish so in addition to cognates English and French share, I also recognized many cognates with Spanish when I was learning French (I knew Spanish first). However, while English speakers can undoubtedly understand at least some words in written French, that doesn't mean they'll get most of the gist of what's going on even in the written language unless they have studied French.
Mxsmanic   Sat Nov 05, 2005 6:43 pm GMT
I read, write, and speak French, but only because I studied the language. There's a lot of resemblance between French and English vocabulary, but not enough to make it possible for an Anglophone to understand French without study. And the spoken languages are so different phonologically that the similarities in vocabulary are obliterated when the languages are spoken.

So, in general, English speakers do not understand French unless they've studied French, and vice versa. For both groups, the spoken forms of these languages present the greatest difficulties.
Guest   Sat Nov 05, 2005 11:20 pm GMT
>>
Well, I can certainly puzzle out quite a few cognates in written French.<<
English doesn't have that many easily recognisable cognates with French. The only ones I can recognise are father (pere), and mother (mere), and the numbers. English does have a lot of French derivatives, though.
Tiffany   Sat Nov 05, 2005 11:52 pm GMT
It's all been said before, but English speakers, without studying the language, will not understand it. English and French are not mutually intelligible despite the cognates.
Guest   Sat Nov 26, 2005 11:43 am GMT
>>Well, I can certainly puzzle out quite a few cognates in written French.
English doesn't have that many easily recognisable cognates with French. The only ones I can recognise are father (pere), and mother (mere), and the numbers. English does have a lot of French derivatives, though.<<

Quite true. Most of the words that are similar in both languages are because of borrowings. True cognates are few. As well as Mother and Father the only ones I can think of are Night (Nuit), for (pour), in (en) and other (autre). Theres probably a few I missed but its been a while since I did French at school so I have forgotten most of it.
...   Sat Nov 26, 2005 12:02 pm GMT
Although both languages share some vocabulary because of historical reasons that all of us know , it's impossible to understand the other language without having studied beforehand.

I doubt a lot you understand some french thanks for english, surely you understand some words , but to understand some words doesn't mean you understand a complete written sentence and even less to understand the french pronuntiation which is very different from english, in fact spanish, portuguese and italian share more vocabulary than english with the french and for spaniards , portuguese... is almost impossible to understand what a french says since the pronuntiation is very strange for them .

I would bet on you are able to understand more or less the same words in spanish, portuguese or italian than in french since they have a common root , Latin ( surely in french you could understand a little more, but nothing outstanding
stella   Mon Nov 28, 2005 9:56 am GMT
yeah, some of the written French is quite similar...
Cro Magnon   Mon Nov 28, 2005 3:13 pm GMT
When I read anything in French, I might see some familiar words, but I don't understand the text. I think the large number of Latin/Norman words in English make it easier for an English-speaker to learn a Romance language, but French is nowhere near understandable to an English speaker who hasn't learned it.
Pete   Thu Dec 01, 2005 1:53 pm GMT
I speak English, but in fact I am a Spanish-native speaker. I also learnt Italian so that's why thanks to the Italian and English vocab I can read (well understand because I don't know the pronunciation) and understand aprox 75% of a French text.

I don't really speak French. But I've heard it so much that I am able to make out some words and understand the general sense of what a French person says. It's quite a struggle, I just know very little words and due to the similarities with Spanish and Italian I can understand like 50% of what they say. :) Very dificult, but I can! :)
Heehee   Thu Dec 01, 2005 3:23 pm GMT
I can only understand French because I've studied it.

On the other hand, because I've studied French and have a rudimentary knowledge of Latin roots, I can understand around 60% of an Italian text. Italian is turning out to be an extremely easy language for me to learn.

My case is similar to Pete's, I suppose.
Terry   Thu Dec 01, 2005 6:51 pm GMT
Tiffany said that English and French are not mutally intelligible and I agree. I also notice while watching British cooking shows that the English slaughter French much worse than we Americans do. For instance the French and Americans pronounce filet, "fil-lay" while the Brits pronounce it phoenetically as filet. It almost seems as if they do it on purpose. Then again US presidential candidate, Ross Perot called himself Ross "Pee-rot."

Of course many words of themselves are passed from one language to another such as the French cigarette. So often we don't know where these words come from. On a funny and related note, my husband and I are always asking our friends from Cuba how to say this or that in Spanish. One day my husband asked a Cuban friend about a cut of meat and the man said, "Well I don't know how you say it in English, but in Spanish it's called filet mignon."
Candy   Thu Dec 01, 2005 7:11 pm GMT
<<I also notice while watching British cooking shows that the English slaughter French much worse than we Americans do. For instance the French and Americans pronounce filet, "fil-lay" while the Brits pronounce it phoenetically as filet.>>

But in British English it's spelt 'fillet' not 'filet', and it's an English word, not French. 'Filet mignon' is not used in British English. We still, however, pronounce 'buffet' as 'buffay'.

<<It almost seems as if they do it on purpose.>>

LOL!!! Yes, it's all a conspiracy by the evil Brits to ruin the French language. Not, as a sensible person might imagine, because it's a lot easier for British people to give words an English pronunciation rather than a French one, just as French-speaking people might say, for example, 'peepleen' for 'pipeline'.
Tiffany   Thu Dec 01, 2005 7:20 pm GMT
Or the famous "Speederman"? Of course, isn't this because the long-i sound is not in their vocabulary, right? The "ay" sound is certainly in ours as in the "buffet" example.

By the way, I had no clue it was spelled "fillet" in Britain. Is it a recent change? Where did we get "filet" from?

Candy, what do you call filet mignon then? Because a filet and filet mignon are not the same thing so I can't imagine "fillet" encompassing both.