Michael T D Nelson wrote:
lilli chiffon wrote:
Le vendredi 03 mars 2006 à 22:38 +0100, Christian Frisson a écrit :
In a rather humble than chauvinistic initiative, let's say it's a
common wisdom
french people do not speak english that fluently... ,-)
I'm not so sure about that.
It's more obvious that the average French person's spoken English is
*far* better than the average English person's spoken French!
I'm English. I used to do quite well in French at school. There was only
one kid in the year better than me, I think (and he'd spent a year
living in France).
Yet still, whenever my family visited France, almost all of the French
kids spoke much better English than I could speak French.
This is so embarrassingly true.
English is a strange language, not only does it have loads of irregular
verbs, it also lacks a proper future tense and often relies on
word-order and auxiliary verbs to make sense.
English language, like English law, doesn't have a written constitution,
in contrast to French, especially. I suppose it is the fact that you can
'get away' with all sorts of different sentence constructions and
imported phrases that makes it a good lingua franca. In terms of
comprehensibility, it is sometimes necessary to put extra effort into
the ordering of actions and making sure that it is clear which
adjectives apply to which objects. Take care when using 'not' and 'and'
in the same sentence, for example.
With most posters on this list, I forget it's not the first language for
most of you.
Respect,
tim hall
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