Reflection Post #2

[Wyatt Jackson]

I have enjoyed learning french thus far. I think that learning french culture is very intertwined with learning the language, as it would be more difficult to learn french without knowing who speaks it—just as it would be harder to learn any language without knowing which people speak it. Perhaps the most difficult part for me in learning french is trying to learn the pronunciation of the words. It’s a very soothing language phonetically, which differs the most from all of it’s romance language counterparts in sound. This is why TV5Monde, or TV cinc will be such a valuable resource for me as I continue on with learning french. I need to improve knowledge of syntactical elements of speech and reading. French is fairly similar to English in that it uses the same subject, verb, object format for the most part. In order to communicate in a language that I have limited knowledge of, which I have only been able to do with spanish, I need to master the art of circumlocution. Circumlocution is a skill that we never really need to use if we only communicate in one language, but becomes absolutely crucial when we don’t have a full vocabulary at our disposal. I will continue to get better at circumlocution with continual expansion of vocabulary and understanding how someone fluent in french would communicate an idea they did not have the word to express. One interesting way of getting better at circumlocution would be to communicate with someone else who has a limited knowledge of french. This would require both of us to use our finite vocabularies to talk about deeper topics than just by using the words we know.