> get a long term disability pension just by saying it
> but when I record it and play it back, I sound quite soft in the head
> Who would have thought that a phrase ... would be such a big problem for me?? :)
If this is how you envision yourself with speaking French, then is it any wonder you might be stuck or have issues with certain phrases? Good lord.
Learning how to talk like a native in another language is exceedingly difficult. It requires thousands of hours of practice, and by practice I mean actually physically speaking. Babies do this over and over and over and over again. We just gloss over it because, well, they're babies.
The only way to learn a language properly (as an adult) is to get over your fear and nervousness. When I hear obvious ESL people speaking English, my first thoughts are not of criticism. It's the exact same with people with other languages.
I have been learning Korean for almost 2 years now and my pronunciation is still not good in a lot of areas because I haven't practiced them enough, or well enough yet. That's just a part of the learning process. I'm understood most of the time, and the rest I just note down as things to work on.
Of course it sucks to hear myself compared to a native or make a mispronunciation so bad I'm not understood. But this is part of the process. If I -didn't- make mistakes I wouldn't be a learner of Korean, no?
> but if I hear people speaking French, I often cannot bring myself to introduce myself or ask how they are.
If you can't overcome this, you will never learn French. As long as you're afraid of making mistakes, you will never learn French. If you don't actually speak the language, you will never learn French... You don't learn a language only in classroom environments or with very patient friends. You learn it by speaking as much as you can, whenever you can, and making as many mistakes as you possibly can.
Even if you don't know how to say one exact thing in particular, circumlocution is your friend. Or rewording it in another way.
If there's one thing I remember from my linguistics courses in college, it's that one of the biggest hurdles for adults is that they may have a fear of embarrassment that babies do not.
The willingness to practice a ton while making errors is a huge advantage to children (or any adult who just goes for it).
In many English-speaking countries, most people hear foreigners trying to speak English, so we're accustomed to that. French people do hear a lot of non-native speakers of their language as well. But when I lived in Turkey for a summer during college, I made a concerted effort to built up some vocab in a few verb tenses. While I didn't get very far, it was pretty fun since it's so different from the English and Spanish I knew. It was no surprise that the Turks were amused at my pronunciation, etc. But what really stuck out to me was how a group of my Turkish friends were not only tickled, they actually were kind of confused about what they were feeling about how I was sounding until one of them put their finger on it: they thought I sounded like a small child speaking Turkish!
Why did that stand out to me? Because it dawned on me that unlike me, who had heard countless non-native speakers of my own language, they had never ever heard a non-native speaker trying to communicate in Turkish! I was amazed in trying to wrap my head around what that experience was like for them.
Sometimes non-English speakers, when someone tries to learn their language past a basic degree, can be a bit rude even unintentionally.
I have had a good native Korean friend quite innocently (although randomly) point out that although I rarely make syntax errors I don't speak idiomatically at all and make weird constructs sometimes. Which makes sense, given my almost 2 years of study, but I would never think of saying something that to any ESL learner.
The same friend said something along the lines of "I talk to you a lot, so sometimes I speak like you [non idiomatically/weirdly] with my [native] Korean friends haha".
??!? was my initial reaction, but then I remembered that it's quite rare for a foreigner to actually learn Korean at all, let alone to intermediate+ levels. Internally I got reminded that I will practically always be a foreigner, though.
We're so used to people learning English and using broken English in all manners of dialects that it's not even a blip on our mental radars.
I have had a good native Korean friend quite innocently (although randomly) point out that although I rarely make syntax errors I don't speak idiomatically at all and make weird constructs sometimes.
Sure, I find myself doing the same thing with the Spanish language — especially in a country with very different slang than the US. Even in English. Even in America. Think about how many ways there are to say soda. They'll almost all be understood but some will stick out more than others depending on the context.
I would never think of saying something that to any ESL learner.
Telling someone who speaks a language at an intermediate level that they don't always speak idiomatically is pointless - they already know that.
Sure, but do they know when they're saying something awkward? Recently I struggled in both England and Barcelona to get carbonated water. In San Francisco I'd be saying "soda water". In New York, "seltzer water". In England, apparently, sparkling water is the trick. I'm a native English speaker so it was fairly easy for me to pick up on that.
Meanwhile my Spanish is not great, but enough to sound like I speak Spanish fluently and make casual conversation and order things at a bar. In Havana I learned "agua sin gas" and "agua gaseosa". I tried that a few times in Barcelona (a city you can navigate entirely in English) recently and eventually got a weird look. Next time I asked and was told "agua con gas". Were it not for the weird looks I'd've stuck with awkward phrasing.
I generally tiptoe pretty gently with non-native English speakers, but have one friend who is insistent upon having their mistakes and awkward phrasing corrected. They're also the one friend who seems most like a native English speaker with written communication (the accent is a whole other story).
If you don't know when you're doing something awkwardly you won't ever improve.
That's not what I was talking about. If I say something that's awkward like that, it gets pointed out and that's fine.
My friend, randomly, said that I speak non-idiomatically / kinda awkwardly in general.
Great. What am I supposed to do with this information? I already know that. It's just frustrating, especially since at the time I was in a rut about my progress.
I already know where my skill level is. I know that I make certain mistakes and definitely don't speak idiomatically.
Telling me this is not only useless but a stark reminder of where I'm at. If you're in a rut, or the accursed "intermediate plateau", it really sucks to hear things like this, even if they're 100% accurate.
> but when I record it and play it back, I sound quite soft in the head
> Who would have thought that a phrase ... would be such a big problem for me?? :)
If this is how you envision yourself with speaking French, then is it any wonder you might be stuck or have issues with certain phrases? Good lord.
Learning how to talk like a native in another language is exceedingly difficult. It requires thousands of hours of practice, and by practice I mean actually physically speaking. Babies do this over and over and over and over again. We just gloss over it because, well, they're babies.
The only way to learn a language properly (as an adult) is to get over your fear and nervousness. When I hear obvious ESL people speaking English, my first thoughts are not of criticism. It's the exact same with people with other languages.
I have been learning Korean for almost 2 years now and my pronunciation is still not good in a lot of areas because I haven't practiced them enough, or well enough yet. That's just a part of the learning process. I'm understood most of the time, and the rest I just note down as things to work on.
Of course it sucks to hear myself compared to a native or make a mispronunciation so bad I'm not understood. But this is part of the process. If I -didn't- make mistakes I wouldn't be a learner of Korean, no?
> but if I hear people speaking French, I often cannot bring myself to introduce myself or ask how they are.
If you can't overcome this, you will never learn French. As long as you're afraid of making mistakes, you will never learn French. If you don't actually speak the language, you will never learn French... You don't learn a language only in classroom environments or with very patient friends. You learn it by speaking as much as you can, whenever you can, and making as many mistakes as you possibly can.
Even if you don't know how to say one exact thing in particular, circumlocution is your friend. Or rewording it in another way.