Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

To: TexasRepublic
And don’t even let me get started on my rant about assigning a gender to nouns.

Heh. When I was a young-skull-full-of-mush learning French in Quebec, the noun genders were a real Pelosi. It was interesting to find that my French-Canadian buddies didn't know the genders, either.

When I'd ask them, say, if the word for car [char] was masculine or feminine, they'd have to say it out loud with the masculine article (un) and then the feminine (une). Finally, they would pronounce that, indeed, it was masculine -- un char sounded right.

I provided them with no end of hilarity as I struggled. I remembered that they use the English word for jacket and, one day, pronounced that I'd forgotten ma jaquette. Well, that resulted in howls of laughter because ma jaquette is my nightgown -- mon jacket is my jacket.

Eventually, many of them came down here to visit and to practice their English. I got them back in spades. English is tougher -- glad I was born into it.

59 posted on 11/30/2012 5:09:08 PM PST by BfloGuy (Workers and consumers are, of course, identical.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 58 | View Replies ]


To: BfloGuy; TexasRepublic; SunkenCiv; All

When my husband had to learn Spanish for an extended business trip to Latin America, we had a lot of fun with mistakes. For example, the verb, “to be able”—poder—is changed to puedo for I can, but my husband kept saying “no pedo” for I can’t which means “I don’t fart.” One morning he came to breakfast wanting orange juice—jugo de naranja—but asked for “juego de arana”, which translates “game of spider.” Then there was the time I was sick in bed when my Bolivian girlfriend called. I had overindulged with eating cake the night before at a party, and he said I was sick from eating demasiado caca. This translates as “too much shit”, rather than cake which is queque (or at least is pronounced like that). We had a lot of laughs as he learned.


100 posted on 02/05/2016 10:06:03 PM PST by gleeaikin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 59 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson