How I Learned French

today i want to talk about how i learned french [Music] hi there steve kaufman here and today i want to talk about how i learned french uh if you enjoy these videos please subscribe you can click or tap on the bell to get notifications and please come and join me at link which is where i now learn languages so i'm going to talk about my history of learning french some of the things that i learned about learning french and then i'm going to have a little walk through a part of my library just to show you some of the resources that i have for learning french um so before i get into this subject uh i wanna digress a little bit i remember at school i think maybe grade eight grade seven i can't remember which year it was we were asked to as a project to do a scrapbook of an imaginary trip to italy or maybe we had the choice of countries and i chose italy i don't remember i wrote to the italian tourist bureau in montreal and they sent me just a stack of stuff on all the different uh provinces or whatever they what i don't know what they're called in italy and uh you know peru whatever it was i can't remember campagna and perugia and i like it like a stack they sent me and so i went in there and i cut out the pictures of the different churches and the scenery and stuff and i made this imaginary trip where i went from i don't know i can't remember now but starting somewhere and going to this place in that place and then showing you know what i had cut out off from these uh tourist brochures uh pictures of uh what were whatever were the major attractions and i think i even read up a little bit about the history and so forth and so on now said not to do with french however if at that point at school they had introduced the italian language i would have been interested in learning it we never had anything attractive presented to us about french at school all i remember is at one point we had to memorize the 16 verbs that take et as an auxiliary verb so just visa you know just the 16 motion verbs that take et as an auxiliary verb instead of avoir so that was a big deal we had to and a lot of stuff was presented to us that way you know sort of individual snippets of grammar i remember we had a french teacher maybe in grade 10 who was from england and when it was time to speak french he would say all right you guys now we're gonna talk frog language that was really inspiring like that we all had a good chuckle frog language what the hell uh then we had a teacher who was a reverend and he would come into class and he not only wore his you know black thing which is whatever collar but he had a cape to keep the dust off his thing and so in those days there was a very popular tv program called zorro and it had a theme sort of theme tuned to it so whenever he showed up in class we'd all start humming the theme to zorro uh other than that he put us to sleep in his class so with that uh i would say by the time i was 16 i think all of us we had some words the funny thing is they focused entirely on grammar and boring stories about some guy traveling on a steamboat or something like that totally uninteresting stuff we had no choice in terms of what might interest us in the language uh and at the end of it all all we could do in montreal mind you is put words together like we couldn't even speak grammatically correctly we just had words in the end all we got was words which is not bad because to me language learning is all about words so what changed what changed was that i went to university mcgill university uh not knowing what to study i decided i would study french and english whatever literature you know they had a these are things that were at least familiar to me i was 16 at the time uh we had an option in montreal we could go to first year university or finish and do a grade 12 at school i opted to go to university because school was sort of boring and not knowing what to study i just chose that and we had a professor maurice rabotan who made french civilization interesting much like these you know the brochures that i received from the italian consulate in montreal all of a sudden there were some things that were sparkling there and there was a book about you know the history of france and the different eras and the famous painters of that era and the famous you know whether moliere or david and all this stuff and it was a very nicely done book and i got interested and as a result i started you know there is a french two french newspapers in montreal you can start trying to pick your way through those which i then started to do uh they and so everything french became interesting french musicians listening to them even though i couldn't understand them you know or watching movies like julie jim was one of the early ones in la nouvelle vag and so i became a bit of a francophile because there was something there that was attractive uh so now to work on my french language the main thing was to do a lot of reading and i'm going to show you're going to walk through my library and show you some of the books that i have but i have enjoyed reading and reading this is just so powerful uh french you know i think french i think for a lot of people is harder to understand than spanish say but even in spanish for most people mexican spanish is easier to understand than spanish spanish from spain and the reason is because it's more sing-songy in mexico and so the more sing-songy the language is the easier it is to pick up where one word ends and the next word begins well guess what french is essentially monotonous and so the first thing that you have to realize which i started to realize was that you have to start to you know listen to how they're speaking uh and that's how you're gonna speak and it's also gonna help you to understand once your brain is used to how that language works and so and another thing that i had to do is to figure out how to pronounce because that right off the bat is the hardest sound in french and one of the suggested ways of doing that is to say ooh which is what would be as english speakers are default sound and then try to say e at the same time so i go first you gotta be able to make the sound and then you have to as with so many things you have to do it on the fly so uh you have to be able to get that in there in the middle of something which takes a little more practice so again i must admit french and then later on mandarin chinese are the only languages where i made any special effort to work on pronunciation another thing in french which can be difficult at first and all of these pronunciation things impact your ability to understand and so the listening and practice of listening is also part of getting used to the sounds of the language and then trying to imitate them and then you understand it better when you listen so the nasal sounds you know oh now a lot of english speakers when they say provence which is an area of france right they'll say provence which is province and so you have to make sure you get the own oh right so that takes a little bit of effort but i must say in my own case when i was learning french i might it's just so far back i can't remember i might have made the special effort to get those sounds right uh somewhere along the line i focused in on the fact that again to sound french you got to have a lot of uh you don't say um when you're waiting thinking about what what you want to say is and the uh sound pervades french and it's particularly important that in the middle of a word like uh boswa jo duvjar uh whatever that is uh and so many people say beswa and not just english speakers because there aren't many languages where e is uh but it is in french and it's a big part of speaking properly and also understanding it well and the uh at the end of a word can be pronounced or not pronounced so the uh is almost like a non-sound so you can say for example become the second e it you can say de vernier but mostly it's just divnir so you get used to this so you can like there's the famous song by jacques at the end you can also say no but for the purposes of the song it's always there as an option whenever the uh appears at the end of a word you can pronounce it or not pronounce it and for this reason the sort of you know tying one word into the other the uh having a few o's around make and speaking monotonously uh makes you sound more french uh what else was i going to say so that's important oh and the other thing that makes french hard to understand is the liaison again i'm sure it took me a long time see i have no real once i got carried away with french and wanting to hear it and speak it and read it i have no recollection of any specific effort that i did to improve my french i became aware that they have the passage samp it's there okay you know you see it more and more often in books you hear it all these things just gradually sunk into my brain as i did enough listening and reading but at some point uh i had to realize that you know when you say come on tale the t come on is how. come on televu how are you how are you going how's it going come on televu you know like uh in a you know as a taboo katamoa in so far as i'm concerned [Music] this whole liaison thing where the last consonant of a word will be pronounced only if there's a vowel in the next word and it almost seems to be a part of the next word so if you say tu tafe it's tu al tu tafe you know by all means tutafe it's almost as if the is the next word but it isn't so these are some of the things i think that i just started getting used to and of course i ended up going to france because i got so carried away with french and france i went to france and i studied there for three years and you're there you're surrounded by the language i did all my studying in french my hand got tired from writing you know essays in french turning in papers doing exams in french reading in french and now i'm going to end up so that's the thing so how did i learn french i don't remember but it all happened once i got turned out of the language uh and that's the way what they should do in schools you know the first thing they should do is they imagine you know an imaginary trip in quebec or france or belgium or switzerland and go let them go out and find what is in those countries and the cities and the people and the customs and the history and whatever put together a little scrapbook so that at least you begin by being interested in the everything that surrounds the language then you might have a chance to put the effort in as i did into letting that language wash over you and every so often a teacher can point out certain things in the language that you might miss and maybe need to be pointed out so that you start to notice them and gradually create the right habits so i'll end up with a little tour of my french book section and i apologize for the mess i haven't cleaned up for this it's just i thought it would be fun to show you that okay bye for now okay so here we are in my audiobook section uh you see that marcel proust that was deadly to read but when you listen to the audiobook it's lovely and so i have up here is our check section but we won't go there down here you'll see that there's a lot of balzac and and i like traditional literature and uh down here as well it's still french yeah i'll check in there yeah some of the uh some of the uh where are we here uh that's swedish and jack and something all right so you see a lot of well-worn books from the leave the push lots of balzac what do i have here cuisine cuisine like cooking and then we're wandering into other languages what do we got down here oh this is my portuguese anyway you'll see that there's a lot of books in french so and of course in other languages [Music]

Channel: Steve Kaufmann - lingosteve

Views: 140,425

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Id: J4QaJdSdkMM

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021