Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 3:30 am Post subject: Re: H aspiré vs. H muet
Elaine wrote:
Lastly, how the heck is a non-native French speaker supposed to know how to pronounce something like les haches?
Memorization. It's rough: I've been speaking French for about 13 years, and I don't always know. _________________ L'homme est comme Dieu l'a fait et un peu pire/ L'homme est le seul animal qui détruit pour le plaisir
Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 12:57 am Post subject: Re: H aspiré vs. H muet
Josh Lalonde wrote:
Elaine wrote:
Lastly, how the heck is a non-native French speaker supposed to know how to pronounce something like les haches?
Memorization. It's rough: I've been speaking French for about 13 years, and I don't always know.
Yep, that's about it. And there's also language change (sometimes approved by the Académie → kidding) like for haricot. Basically <les haricots> is /leaRiko/ but /lezaRiko/ is OK (although social hypercorrection, not the Académie, will have people frown at you if you make the liaison).
How terribly exhausting! Well, I guess English learners have a similar problem figuring out which indefinite article to use with words like honest, honor, hour, heir, etc. Thank goodness we don't have to worry about such things in Spanish!
Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 9:13 pm Post subject: Re: H aspiré vs. H muet
Elaine wrote:
I thought you're a native speaker? Hmm... so even fluent speakers don't always get it right.
Thanks! That's been my goal for a couple years now. (Though my spoken French sounds a lot less native than my written French looks.) For some reason though my ability to speak French seems to drop about 45% when I'm speaking to a native speaker. _________________ L'homme est comme Dieu l'a fait et un peu pire/ L'homme est le seul animal qui détruit pour le plaisir
Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2007 10:07 am Post subject: Re: H aspiré vs. H muet
Josh Lalonde wrote:
For some reason though my ability to speak French seems to drop about 45% when I'm speaking to a native speaker.
Rassure-toi, c'est parfaitement classique. Un locuteur non-maternel avec un bon niveau et une *conscience aiguë* de ses propres lacunes (même objectivement minimes) tend parfois à les extérioriser (voire à les grossir et à se confondre en excuses...) en situation de confrontation avec l'idée qu'il se fait de l'excellence, c'est-à-dire en présence d'un locuteur maternel. Quand en plus ce locuteur non-maternel connaît bien les phénomènes linguistiques, alors ça peut devenir la cata ! Cette sous-performance (relative) n'est pas grave : le plus souvent c'est juste une étape transitoire plus ou moins longue suivant l'individu et son environnement.
Elaine wrote:
How terribly exhausting! Well, I guess English learners have a similar problem figuring out which indefinite article to use with words like honest, honor, hour, heir, etc. Thank goodness we don't have to worry about such things in Spanish!
Yep ! Language complexity (because it *is* complex) is always specifically distributed within each language.
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Well, I guess English learners have a similar problem figuring out which indefinite article to use with words like 
