I have no doubt your Spanish is great. My point was that it’s near impossible to “fool” native speakers unless you’ve spoken it for a lot longer than that. It’s not really a particularly useful goal (unless you’re like a spy or something), so maybe “made it” wasn’t the best descriptor on my part.
I’m sure you can pick out a non-native speaker of of English in a millisecond in nearly all cases even if they are fluent. It’s the same for them.
Yah agreed. It’d likely take professional training to refine an accent to that high a level, and I’m not that interested.
Anecdotally, my girlfriend’s had hundreds of students learning Spanish with her and she says women are able to improve their accents more on average. Maybe something with how each gender is wired.
As for me, I tend to thoroughly enjoy the process of getting my languages from like A1 to B2 (beginner to high intermediate), but then find it becomes too tedious once you’ve picked all the low hanging fruit and are fine tuning it. Still studying Russian and Georgian 30 minutes each day, mostly Anki flashcards, and enjoying it.
I used to do this a lot in France too. I’d think there’s no way their recognition of accents is good enough to be sure I’m British (they just know I’m not Francophone), so I’ll pretend to not understand English.
Still occasionally happens but these days I just tend to go with it, though I recently got into massive trouble trying to spell my name as the person who had switched to English was sadly only vaguely aware of how English speakers pronounce letters. Serves her right!
Yeah, I can imagine that the English style where letter pronunciation is independent of the sounds they contribute to words (when that even happens) might be tricky to get into. Obviously to myself it seems entirely logical.
I’m still shaky on the French system, I mean clearly “ee-grec” is not how you say “y”.
Hahaha wtfff, this is my obsidian league. I think I was playing when the weeks switched over so I got stuck with the folks who play way too much. That XP challenge has been a godsend.
Also this was last night so the 3000xp I’ve gotten this week is almost half of what I had in the year prior
3000 in a few days is insane. I think 300 per day for a whole week is the best I can do.
Lately I’ve been grinding Anki flashcards pretty heavily, but might get back to Duo once my Russian is good enough to make it worthwhile.
Did they change Memrise recently? I remember using it extensively last year but now it seems like you have to subscribe just to use basic features like review.
It took me 3 months of about 1 hour a day to get to an intermediate level in Portuguese, but that was leveraging my French and Spanish knowledge. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever even have basic convos in Russian or Georgian. Way different ballgame than the romance language family. Right now I know the alphabets in each and have a vocab of about 200 words in Russian (ignoring cognates like geologia) and 80 in Georgian, so still plenty of work to do.
French speaking bros,
Just finished bingeing Lupin (which I thought was reasonably entertaining) and I’ve got a question. Is an older woman that you know is unmarried Mme or Mlle? Does it matter if they have never been married?
Edit: OK, after a bit of google it sounds like Mademoiselle is just no longer used? Is that right?
That’s an amazing flex to learn four languages like that. I’m happy just stumbling through my Spanish children’s books.
I learned it as more of an age thing. Mlle for 30ish or younger, otherwise Mme. Others who have lived in France longer can clarify if that’s not standard. That’s also the way I use señorita and señora.
That seems more practical. I learned it as a married/not married. But my French is about 30 yrs old.
@pyatnitski , what say you?
I think it’s something that’s changing and you probably need a real French person to discuss the subtleties. It depends on context and if you know it’s Mlle then maybe that’s fine. But, as you’re saying, in casual use it boils down to someone judging your age (and, let’s face it, if you’re a man that judgement also involves attractiveness.) So in speech with someone you don’t know it would be a marker of that judgement, and, obviously, plenty of women are unhappy about such judgements being made as part of normal speaking.
Personally I really try and avoid using Mlle and always use Mme if I have to pick one. I also always write Mme, but this is because if I’m using them it’s in semi formal registers to people I don’t really know.
Edit - Realise I missed the obvious, which is that despite the technical difference being married / unmarried, in use it’s by far most common to use it speaking to someone you don’t really know e.g. ‘Bonjour Madame’ in a shop. So that’s why in practice it’s a judgement of age.
(And, sorry, didn’t realise I was replying directly to fossil who I’m sure knows all this.)
Thanks.
So is a 21 year old going to be insulted by some guy her age addressing her as Mme when he walks into her store?
Yes, exactly. Just asked my wife and she thinks the cut off is practically around 35, so below that most people will go Mlle. Also I’m probably too sensitive to using Mlle being possibly disrespectful in semi formal situations.
Heh, appreciate the offer but my Spanish isn’t nearly in enough shape to be reading on a podcast.
A foreign-language podcast with people here would be an interesting listen.
This seems like one of those sweating out which of two buttons to press situations.
If you call a young woman, Madame, you could offend her because she could interpret it as you saying she is old.
On the other hand, if you call her Mademoiselle, she could be offended because she could interpret it as being sexist. Or so I’m lead to believe. I’ve seen a couple of sources that say stuff like this (which is from wikipedia):
My wife has lived here for 20 years and is certainly a feminist and she didn’t think it was too big of a feminist issue. She said it never really feels like an overly personal judgement. My interpretation of it as an issue just comes from reading the sort of stuff you found, so I’d certainly defer to her, as least as it regards the average professional woman here in Paris.
We do have at least one ‘real’ French person here, @ctr123 (at least I think they are). Maybe they can shed more light?
If I can maintain my current pace, I should be ready to read a young children’s book in Russian in about 2027.
Man, I’ve heard Russian is crazy hard, much respect for taking on the challenge.
