January 10, 2005

• This reminds me a little of my college french classes, where a student once asked, "Can we ouvre une fenettre? It's a little chaud in here."
• I learned French (poorly) from a non-native speaker. She was also the Spanish teacher. I had a great deal more experience in speaking Spanish than I had with French and, when my brain did not supply the correct French term immediately, it provided the Spanish term. She almost never noticed. I have become semi-proficient in Fraspanglish. Fraspanglish was adequate to allow me to navigate the Paris Metro to find a train to Rome.
• If your library (or you) has the books, you can view the accompanying videos here.
• I, like many Anglo Canadians speak "cereal box" French. It's amazing what you can learn over a lifetime from bilingual product packaging. Flocons, gagnez, ovrir, boite, agitez bein, are some of the many useful words and phrases that trip off my tongue.
• The brain is kind of amazing. When I started learning Czech, I always wondered why, when I didn't know a word, my brain would automatically subsitute the French word, rather than the English one. To me that suggests that there's a connection in the brain between all the new languages that you learn, regardless of whether they're similar in any way or not, as distinct from your native language.
• I firmly maintain that "Boite de 6," pronounced "boyt duh six," would be a fantabulous name for a band. Or perhaps we could have a Canadian rapper called Double-Double; he could team up with Toffee Glaze sometimes.
• My Canadian, French-immersion educated, anglophone ex used to give nice demonstrations of the obvious (even to someone like myself who knows no French) difference between the quebecois dialect and standard French. Also, her favorite example was (pardon my misspellings, if any) parque le car.
• I, like many Anglo Canadians speak "cereal box" French. La meme bon gout! Croquant! Fetchez la vache! well, maybe not the last one
• I haven't been in Canada long enough to learn much French from cereal boxes, but even I can tell that all the posters so far are kind of missing the joke here. Hint: it's not just that french and english are mixed up.
• Parke le char sounds pretty bad to this Québécois. I'd say Va parker le char to give an order, or J'ai parké le char to say I've done it. I think it's from the classic sentence used to show that the French and the Québécois have made different borrowings to English: In France, on se stationne dans un parking. In Quebec, on se parke dans un stationnement. And Parke is far from universal -- almost nobody in my family or social circle uses it. But yeah, the joke is not there. Although it's not very funny to me.
• Oh, I got the joke, but there is an edge to some of it bordering on meanness. I'm all for parody, but maybe due to the sensitivity of French/English relations, I'm not too comfortable with some of the jokes. We've had enough trouble between the cultures in Canada without this kind of "help". /goes away to lighten up.
• Yeah, I got it too, thanks for the help though.
• They got the day of Thanksgiving wrong. It's the first or second Monday in October, not the third (usually something like the 10th). Today I mixed up French and Latin. As I am trying to relearn a year of Latin in one week, I imagine this is just the first of many such mistakes.
• Hah, the hockey ones are classic.
• Hmm, I see the attempt at humour, but the approach is so ham-handed that the jokes are lost in juvenile nonsense. Chacun a son gout, I suppose. Having all of my inlaws be at the very least bilingual (French and English, and some have added on more languages), I see the importance of being able to communicate to more people in more places. When we travel, I usually (er... always) let my wife do the talking while I fumble around trying to say 'please' and 'thank you' properly and avoid asking people to violently penetrate me with broken wine bottles (don't ask).
• This isn't funny. I can see the attempt at humor, but as has been pointed out, it's tinged by xenophobia. It's the same joke, repeated hundreds of times ("Haha! They talk funny! They're different!"), with barbs on the language and the people who speak it. Some of them are pretty offensive. But hey, what do I know? I'm just a "fuckwit pas d'clue" Québécois (as the page would have it). Now I gotta go down to "La Caféteria" and fetch me a smoked meat sandwich. Oh. Pis un Jos Louis pis un Pepsi, 'stie.
• This is moronic. Ce site peut aller se faire enculer, c'est que de la merde analphab