Learn 12 languages in 12 months? Right.

[Le Baron]

I think to us as language-learners and native English-speakers, French is more transparent than it would be for a monolingual. We tend to forget that as language-learners we see patterns more often than monolinguals do. Of course, I have two French Creoles, Spanish and Portuguese under my belt. I can definitely understand a lot of written French thanks to my languages- native and learned. No way can I speak it... nor would I try.

If I ever decide to learn French, I don't think my learning would take nearly as long as it would if I were approaching it from scratch. I have discounts.

This is a true and fair point and I wouldn't argue with it. Though I think it's only fair to point out that the claim isn't any similarity between French and Spanish/Italian/Portuguese etc, but English. And I maintain that unlike those three English's base and a lot of the common language is simply not transparently relatable to French (or vice versa). For years those similarities of words with relatable endings and altered pronunciation have been used as some sort of easing-in technique. I've seen them do it classes and it's probably in the general courses. But these words won't help with reading, listening, speaking meaningful structure. That list I put above is a tiny fraction of such disparities and these are the real, core functional words.

If we were comparing Italian-French, that would be different. French is really an oddity in the romance group. Just watch those Ecolinguist videos where Spanish/Italian/Portuguese are getting along and French is all question marks. A good language learner will no doubt make better connections, but in general...

[tastyonions]

I'm like a dog with a bone...

But these words won't help with reading

Here's a front page article from lemonde.fr right now, chosen at random. Green words are readily available to any educated English speaker, yellow take some more thought or will probably end up with something "close to correct" rather than exactly, red are likely to cause confusion:



Same for sueddeutsche.de and German:



(And I was being more generous with German.)

I dunno about ya'll but that superficial resemblance is looking pretty helpful to me.

[Le Baron]

But there are a huge number of the other words and many of the green words are not used in the same way as their English derivaties, which won't help comprehension.

I don't think I was clear, or maybe I was and there is some confusion? I am also talking about the basic words and general construction of the language.

Here's a sort of general sentence you might find reading French:

"Il ne m'en voulais pas de lui avoir pris son vélo... D’ailleurs je lui rendais la monnaie de sa piece, quand on était au lycée il m'avait volé mon velo, et je crois que sa perte me fit plus de mal que n'en fit a lui la perte de son vélo."

I cooked it up, but it's perfectly normal. How transparent do you think that is for someone coming from English using English to map onto it? Note the almost total absence of relatable words and the structure is nothing like English at all.

[Le Baron]

Also in the German above I think that with some quick instruction in the words the structure won't be a great obstacle from English. But consider one of the same sentences in French:

OK, qu'en est-il des grands sentiments ?

Okay, und was ist mit den großen gefühlen?
(A rough gloss: Okay, and what is (it) with the big feelings?)

I think an average native English speaker will more quickly feel confortable with the structure of: 'was ist mit?' As meaning 'what about?'. I doubt the same would be true of: 'qu'en est-il ..?'

[Severine]

I'm not even sure I want to wade into this discussion about French transparency, but I can't help myself, so I will share two main thoughts and then nip out the back while nobody's looking.

1. Between French and English, I would say that there is a somewhat low vocabulary transparency for core words of extremely high frequency (pronouns and prepositions are good examples, as Le Baron pointed out) but an impressively high transparency with more advanced words of lower frequency. Le Baron presents this as undermining the argument for transparency, but I disagree. This arragement is, in my view, much easier for learners than the inverse (lots of cognates for common basic words, fewer cognates for advanced words).

If you're trying at all, you're going to learn he, she, they, for, with, to be, to have, to do, etc. no matter what, because you'll see them so often. You don't really need a discount with those words, so the fact that they're not similar, I would argue, doesn't matter.

The cognate discount is much more useful for rarer words, because once you know basic vocabulary and some grammar, those cognates provide enormous momentum and spare you a lot of work. Take a random headline I just grabbed off of LeMonde: Les écrans à l'école ou le règne des injonctions contradictoires. I consider 'school' and 'screen' pretty basic vocabulary, whereas 'contradictory', 'reign', and 'injunction' are not. However, all three of the latter are cognates, so a well-educated beginner anglophone French student should have no trouble with that sentence (and vice versa).

2. It's true that the grammar structure of French is very different, but much less so for English speakers with an advanced education and familiarity with a more old-fashioned, formal manner of speaking and writing.

A phrase structure like, "La situation dont nous parlons" is much less intimidating for someone who has read and perhaps even used structures like "the situation of which we are speaking." Do people speak like that today? Not many. But if you've read classic English literature at all, you've seen it. You don't need to speak that way yourself to recognize the structure as something you understand and have it click.

Same thing for pronouns like auquel, lequel, etc. If you know when to use 'who' and when to use 'whom', you won't have trouble conceptually with qui and que. And for those who have a solid mastery of English grammar, the concept of the pronouns y and en replacing structures beginning with à and de is hardly mystifying. If your teachers ever explained direct and indirect objects, it's not hard to understand when to use le/la vs. lui, and what they mean. I could go on. As it so often does, education pays off.

Similarly, the more expansive and advanced your English/French vocabulary, the easier you'll find advanced vocab in the other language, because the Latin-derived words that tend to dominate professional and academic speech provide a huge amount of overlap.

[emk]

But there are a huge number of the other words and many of the green words are not used in the same way as their English derivaties, which won't help comprehension.

I don't think I was clear, or maybe I was and there is some confusion? I am also talking about the basic words and general construction of the language.

My original point (which I made jokingly, and didn't properly explain, sorry about that) was that after you pick up the most common 1,000 vocabulary words, then you've got a lot of the basic connective tissue and grammatical structure. But what about the next 10,000 words you learn? For an English speaker learning a Romance language, you get a huge fraction of those next 10,000 at a ridiculous discount.

Let me pick my two badly neglected "just for fun" languages to show the difference. In Spanish, I have done about 1,000 sentence cards, maybe 1,200. And that's all my Spanish, basically. The other day, I was experimenting with ChatGPT, to see if it could help with flash cards. And ChatGPT decided to explain Spanish grammar to me in Spanish:

¡Por supuesto! Este tipo de frase es muy rica en estructuras gramaticales y expresiones idiomáticas del español, así que vamos a desglosarla para entender mejor cada uno de sus componentes.

"Quizás"

• Quizás: Es una palabra que introduce una oración para expresar una posibilidad o duda. Es similar al "perhaps" en inglés. Puede usarse indistintamente con "tal vez".

"lo que sea que tenga que hacer"

• lo que: Esta expresión se usa para referirse a una cosa o situación de manera no específica. Funciona como un pronombre relativo que introduce una cláusula relativa. Equivale al "what" en inglés en frases como "what I need".
• sea: Es el subjuntivo presente del verbo "ser". Aquí se usa para expresar una idea de incertidumbre o algo hipotético relacionado con "lo que". El uso del subjuntivo en este caso señala que no se está hablando de una realidad específica, sino de una posibilidad o suposición.
• que tenga que hacer: Otra cláusula con el subjuntivo, esta vez con el verbo "tener". "Tenga que" es una forma de expresar obligación o necesidad, y el uso del subjuntivo aquí también indica que se trata de algo hipotético o no confirmado. Es equivalente a decir "that I have to do" en inglés.

[...]

It turns out that after maybe 1,000 sentence cards, most of them over half a decade ago, I can read most of that text. I don't get everything, but if you give me 15 minutes, then I could probably BS my way through a multiple choice test.

Now, let's compare this with Egyptian. Here's a fantastic annotated PDF of the Westcar Papyrus. This contains tales of Egyptian magicians (you know, the folks Moses threw down with in the book of Exodus). And I did a bunch of Anki sentence cards for Egyptian, too, so this is a semi-fair comparison.

And it's really no contest: Something like Este tipo de frase es muy rica en estructuras gramaticales y expresiones idiomáticas is pretty trivial if you know the 100 most common words of Spanish. But mnH r-sA=f r mw aHa.n xpr.n=f m is a lot harder, and will require a lot more rote memorization to reach a similar reading level.

[tastyonions]

Take a random headline I just grabbed off of LeMonde: Les écrans à l'école ou le règne des injonctions contradictoires. I consider 'school' and 'screen' pretty basic vocabulary, whereas 'contradictory', 'reign', and 'injunction' are not. However, all three of the latter are cognates, so a well-educated beginner anglophone French student should have no trouble with that sentence (and vice versa).

Whereas the German equivalents for the last three are "widersprüchlich", "Herrschaft," and "Aufforderung."

Dang, being a native English speaker is sooo helpful there.



(Ok, if you've got some basic German down you can probably guess that "widersprüchlich" means something like "against-speaking" and "Herrschaft" could be "mister/master-ship." But that's another level deeper than simply looking at a word and going, "Huh, that looks like an English word spelled a little differently.")

I do take Le Baron's point that dialogue-focused French low on conceptual or abstract vocabulary is likely to be pretty opaque to English speakers, though.

[Le Baron]

1. Between French and English, I would say that there is a somewhat low vocabulary transparency for core words of extremely high frequency (pronouns and prepositions are good examples, as Le Baron pointed out) but an impressively high transparency with more advanced words of lower frequency. Le Baron presents this as undermining the argument for transparency, but I disagree. This arragement is, in my view, much easier for learners than the inverse (lots of cognates for common basic words, fewer cognates for advanced words).

It can't possibly be easier. The core words are what you need to even operate and there is a huge number of them. It's no good having a load of free-floating cognates (many of which only look the same, but don't mean the same) when the words to stick them altogether and support them aren't there for the taking. And there's also a matter of the completely different grammar/syntax.

The unfortunate news is that all this has to be learned, the hard way. Luckily all those other words don't so much.

However, since it's good Friday, I have stopped taking my Cainntear pills and will be less argumentative.

[tastyonions]

Once you've gone through a good beginner textbook (thoroughly!) in French, meaning you've got the core stuff like all the "function words" and most common nouns and the verb system and the syntax, you're in a far easier position to move on to more advanced reading like newspapers or simple novels than you are when you do the same with German.

I did this experiment myself -- with French as my first foreign language and German my fourth! -- and the difference was stark. The "true friends" in French easily outweigh the (much overrated, in my experience) false ones.

[Cainntear]

The cognate discount is much more useful for rarer words, because once you know basic vocabulary and some grammar, those cognates provide enormous momentum and spare you a lot of work. Take a random headline I just grabbed off of LeMonde: Les écrans à l'école ou le règne des injonctions contradictoires. I consider 'school' and 'screen' pretty basic vocabulary, whereas 'contradictory', 'reign', and 'injunction' are not. However, all three of the latter are cognates, so a well-educated beginner anglophone French student should have no trouble with that sentence (and vice versa).

I'm not quite clear as to whether you're trying to claim that école and écran are not cognate with the English school and screen respectively, or if you're throwing them in anyway and disregarding them in order to focus only on the higher register cognates.