I can confirm I’m an actual French person…not an expert on this question, but here’s my two cents
Officially the distinction is between married and unmarried women. In practice of course when adressing an unknown this means that it is based on age.
From the feminist point of view it’s clear that making a status distinction between married and unmarried women (and not for men) is discriminatory and is why you may not want to use the term.
Until 10 years ago or so there was actually a distinction on official documents (I.e. 2 different boxes to tick). Obviously this was not good and “feminists” obtained that this was dropped. (I mostly remember this for the usual right wing bad faith along the lines of “why don’t they fight instead for [other stuff that conservatives would also oppose]”)
As far as adressing people I think there’s little chance of offending someone if you use simple heuristics… but I will only use “mademoiselle” for very young ppl (my cutoff would probably be around 20-25yo). E.g. I work at the university and would never call a student “madame”, but I would also never refer to a young colleague as mademoiselle even if I know she’s unmarried.
Is there not a similar problem in English? (Miss Mrs Madam ?)
So far I’ve only learned the alphabet gotten through 4 units on Duo and been learning vocab with an Anki deck of 200ish cards. I’m thinking I must just go the route of expanding my vocab and communicating like a caveman rather than getting into much grammar.
The alphabet is really different and a bit difficult. Compared to Portuguese where I could learn the pronunciations and am already used to Romance languages. I could probably have read an intermediate book out loud reasonably well after about 100 hours of study. Russian will likely take 5x that, maybe longer.
Still undecided how far I’ll go with it. I guess it depends how well I like visiting that part of the world and if I want to keep delving into it more and more. It does seem pretty useful, I saw a video from a travel blogger that had it as his 4th or 5th most useful language for travel. It can also be leveraged into a decent amount of other languages, so there’s that. Main thing is that I’m still enjoying my 15 minute daily study sessions, so as long as I have that I’ll keep going.
I think in English we just use those terms far less often. I’ll use sir or ma’am when addressing someone older or a position of respect “excuse me sir”, but if it is a younger person I’d just say “excuse me” without adding one of those terms.
Also Mrs or Miss seem to be more official titles for documents and letters or in school with teachers, and not really that important in everyday life.
Thinking about this, i honestly think that in American English just saying “excuse me” without even adding a sir or ma’am puts you in the 99th percentile of politeness. The baseline is “HEY YOU!” so I just use “excuse me” and almost never use a reference to the person.
My main problem with learning a language is staying comitted. I had 6 years of Russian in school but I barely know anything anymore. I did few french, spanish and chinese courses in university but since I was too lazy to learn vocabulary in my free time it went nowhere. Probably had a babbel subscription for some years and started french again but at some point I just stop for few days and then its hard to get back into it. Now I do french course on udemy where the instructor as everything divided into 3 minute lessons. Its not hard, lots of repitition but again I have phases where I just go without a lesson for days which is counterproductive. It tilts me to no end. 3minutes is nothing during a full day.
For me, I always had a trip to that country set up and a hard deadline.
Started learning French 6 months before a move to Montreal, then Spanish 6 months before a move to Mexico. Portuguese 4 months before a 3 month trip to Brazil, and now Georgian/Russian 9 months before moving to Georgia.
Kinda like throwing yourself in the deep end so I have to attain a reasonable level by the deadline or I’ll struggle in the country.
I understand that many won’t be able to just pick up and head to another country, so I would look into taking up a fun way to stay connected to that language.
For example, I love soccer so when I was learning French I started following the French Ligue 1 and reading articles, listening to podcasts, and watching matches in French. I adopted Lyon as my team because I was moving there.
Or you could join a language exchange app and start communicating with natives in that language every day, maybe via messages at first and then video calls.
Maybe even getting into music and movies in a certain language.
But I agree that most people will probably lose motivation and give up at some point, so it’s kinda important to find a fun reason to stick with it and keep going.
Multiple romance languages is kinda cheating especially if you get French out of the way early.
I did French first and then Spanish and Portuguese weren’t too tricky. Could probably add Italian pretty quickly, but it doesn’t seem too useful unless I ever plan to stay in Italy more than a couple weeks.
If you start with a decent base in 1 romance language, it’s probably faster to learn the 4 main romance languages than like Russian or Japanese from scratch.
I ended up making it into Duolingo Diamond league with some literal last minute lessons that took me up to an absurd ~4700xp on the week. @CaffeineNeeded was right, Diamond seems way more chill–it also seems surprisingly hard to fall out of, as it’s just the bottom 5 that get booted. @Fossilkid93’s advice of waiting a bit before doing my first lesson of the week probably helped too, because I think I managed to avoid the hardcore grinders.
Anyways, after getting over the initial hump I think the Duolingo approach is surprisingly effective for basic words and phrases, certainly much better than I expected. I may actually be able to use some of this while we’re in France next month, especially since Duolingo smartly puts travel-related and food-related vocabulary in the early lessons. Though I still can’t pronounce a French “r” and probably never will (“arbre” is fucking impossible)…
Alright wtf is up with this. I’ve been primarily doing Duolingo via the app, which requires 6 lessons per crown. But, if I do Duolingo using my phone browser, I only need 5 lessons per crown? What the hell? Also, using browser I don’t run out of hearts. Why bother using the app??
