It has been eleven weeks since the beginning of the semester. My self-directed learning has been on the right track for quite a while. It is not hard for me to write in French due to its resemblance in English in terms of handwriting. The hard part for me is grammar. I always need to find the correct conjunction such as que or qui to make sure that the sentence is written down as how I wanted it to be. In most cases, the overall structure of French is as what I thought, similar to that of English: the main subjects come at the first, which is later followed by verbs, and nouns. The part that I always struggle in is that I have to conform all verbs, nouns, and adjectives with their corresponding masculine forms or feminine forms. Those forms are just like transformations of words we use in English when being situated in certain tense. Some of those transformations are regular while others are not. Memorizing them will definitely take me a while. In addition, making speech in French is nothing less difficult than writing in French at all. Usually, the last letter in a word remains silent, and that makes listening to French a completely different task than listening to English. Although my listening has improved a lot, I still feel quite uncomfortable with connecting words with each other without pronouncing the last letter. As we know, in English, because of the connection between the last pronounced letter and the first pronounced letter of the next word, we have a picture in mind of what two words that got connected are. Unfortunately, with the last letter silenced, such method does not work in French. Having so many challenges, I still learnt something useful enough for me to introduce myself. Je m’appelle Adam, un edudiant en University de Richmond. J’ai un famillie de cinq. Je suis un personne tres optimistic, et Je vois faire connaisance.
You need to be a member of The SDLAP Ning to add comments!
Replies
It's great to hear that your self-directed learning in French is progressing well. The similarities between English and French, especially in terms of handwriting, can indeed make the transition to learning French easier. I completely understand the challenges you face with French grammar, particularly the need to select the correct conjunctions like que or qui to structure your sentences accurately.
I often though it would be a lot easier to learn languages that sound similar to the language that you already know. However, althouth certain vocabulary may sound similar the grammar is totally different. That threw me off when I learned spanish during my high school.
Hi Adam,
I took French in middle school, and I had the same issues when learning the new language. When words are assigned masculine/feminine qualities, it took me a long time to remember whether the article was "un" or "une". I would try to give masculine or feminine qualities to those words to help me remember if it was "un" or "une". You definitely have an advantage in learning French because you know English. Some words may be spelled differently, but you are able to figure out what that word means using your knowledge of English. For my target language (i.e. Korean), I can find phonetic similarities with Cantonese/Mandarin, but the written language doesn't offer me any clues as to what the character means.
Yeah. Korean writings differ substantially from Mandarin writings. Masculine and feminine qualities are kind of confusing because they are not only assigned to every single French word, but also to grammatical structures. Sometimes the adjective goes before the noun and sometimes after based on the quality of the subject. I do not know much about Korea but I think it is kinda cute. You can reach out to me at anytime if you wanna get clarified anything about Mandarin. I believe you will be a great Korean speaker in the near future.