Is Russian easier to UNDERSTAND than French?

[garyb]

I believe that French comprehension is objectively considered harder than that of similar languages like Spanish and Italian because of its particular stress system where words are joined into groups that sound like one big word with a single stress at the end. I've heard this referred to as "syllable grouping", and I suppose it's the same thing Kraut is referring to with "chaine parlée". Hence "être une" to "êtrune", "chances sont bons" to "chansons bons", etc.: these words are being joined together into one group.

Those other languages, and Russian too, have lexical (per-word) stress which makes it far easier to pick out individual words even if you don't actually understand all of these words. In practice, I've found that this means you need to have a better knowledge of the language used in itself in order to understand French, as it's harder to fill in gaps from an incomplete understanding of a phrase than with a language where word boundaries are clearer. At a more advanced level, one will know that "êtrune" isn't a word while "être une" is a possible combination of words (especially if preceded by "en", which would be a big clue that the verb will be followed by a quantifier or numeral) and "bons" (masculine) doesn't agree with "chansons" (feminine). (EDIT provoked by reinekes's reply: "chances" is also feminine, so "chances sont bons" must also be a mishearing!)

[reineke]

The other day, someone said: "Les chance sont bons," and I heard: "Les chansons bons." Clearly nobody was talking about songs, but that is what I heard, despite me clearly knowing that "chance" and "chanson" are two different words in the language.

So, those are some of the slipups I'm having in French.

I'm curious to know if this sort of thing happens in Russian. (Again, I'm trying to figure out if Russian might be easier to UNDERSTAND, not speak!)

I'm dying to learn the language anyway, and it just seems easier to hang on to, sort of like German or Polish. The problem with French is the enormous amount of homonyms and I would say even where the "stress" falls in the sentence create this obstacle, causing one to NOT understand words they ALREADY know.

Let me know what you think.

Ok. But what did they do that helped them improve?

Bon chance!

"Bon chance" has become an Internet meme. I just heard bonne chance watching Dr Who....

I think it's critical to get certain things right early on in one's learning effort. Apologies if this is too direct. I am also aware of a recent bon/bonne error correction that had unfortunate consequences.

There's a good chance that nobody learned nuthin' here.

[Iversen]

If we limit the question to: in which language is it easiest to guess the pronunciation, then I would say that Russian just has one general problem, namely the lack of marking for the stress in the writing (apart from "ë", which isn't marked by everybody). The reason is that the position of the stress has dire consequences for the pronunciation of vowels both before and after it, The palatization could have been a problem, but as far as I can see it has generally been dealt with in the relevant situations.

French has the problem that the end of words quite often isn't pronounced at all, but if your starting point is the writing system then that problem is not relevant. However the tendency of the French to cut corners and drop certain elements is a nuisance because it is harder to guess where it happens. Issemiyaki has given a couple of good examples above. However in theory you can choose to pronounce those elements, although you then will sound like you are reading a text aloud. French stress isn't a problem since it is tied to the first syllable.

For me Russian is harder to understand than French, but I have heard very little spoken Russian so that's not a good criterium. Based on the tendency to downplay unstressed elements (Russian) versus dropping endings and parts of certain fixed expressions I would say that both languages are equally irritating.

[rdearman]

The other day, someone said: "Les chance sont bons," and I heard: "Les chansons bons." Clearly nobody was talking about songs, but that is what I heard, despite me clearly knowing that "chance" and "chanson" are two different words in the language.

So, those are some of the slipups I'm having in French.

I'm curious to know if this sort of thing happens in Russian. (Again, I'm trying to figure out if Russian might be easier to UNDERSTAND, not speak!)

I'm dying to learn the language anyway, and it just seems easier to hang on to, sort of like German or Polish. The problem with French is the enormous amount of homonyms and I would say even where the "stress" falls in the sentence create this obstacle, causing one to NOT understand words they ALREADY know.

Let me know what you think.

Ok. But what did they do that helped them improve?

Bon chance!

"Bon chance" has become an Internet meme. I just heard bonne chance watching Dr Who....

I think it's critical to get certain things right early on in one's learning effort. Apologies if this is too direct. I am also aware of a recent bon/bonne error correction that had unfortunate consequences.

There's a good chance that nobody learned nuthin' here.

If there was an answer in there it escaped me. You quoted a couple of different studies and one had a summation I quoted, but you hadn't included the portion where they said what they did differently than the control group.

[reineke]

Is this the Way of the Lazy Fist? The idea was to get people to use the search function, try to understand the problem and eventually contribute. You can easily find this yourself.

I will instead post a couple of related things that will provide some additional information hopefully address some of the other comments.

Stress-timed languages: English, Swedish, German, Russian, Arabic, European Portuguese.

Some syllable-timed languages: Spanish, French, Cantonese, Italian, Japanese, Finnish, Brazilian Portuguese.

"Stress timed and syllable timed

The same debates as mentioned above exists on whether languages really can be divided into stress and syllable timed ones, but again we can at least say without any doubt that for teaching purposes this is a useful concept. For example, Brazilian Portuguese is traditionally put into the syllable timed category of ratatat ratatat ratatat languages along with Italian, whereas in Portugal the rhythm is more like the daDA dadiDAdaDAdadidadiDA rap-like rhythm of English, and this is reflected in the greater problems Brazilian students have with listening comprehension and pronunciation in English..."

https://www.tefl.net/elt/articles/teach ... ss-rhythm/

Can simultaneous reading and listening improve speech perception and production? An examination of recent feedback on the SWANS authoring system

Abstract
Recent CNRS-financed CALL research in Toulouse offers hope for improving L2 listening perception and spoken production through new on-screen, simultaneous reading and listening techniques and an emphasis on lexical stress visual annotation as a neglected key to acquiring basic spoken intelligibility. Although the research has concentrated principally on the French/English language pair its implications are potentially important for the study of all languages and the SMIL-based authoring system developed is language independent and has been used for producing prototype learning activities in German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, Finnish, Russian and Arabic. The authoring system SWANS (Synchronised Web Authoring Notation System) uses metaguiding via highlighted annotated text together with synchronised sound to inhibit L1 interference during the reading process.

1. Introduction

Alphabets are generally invented in a monolingual, monocultural context. The complex, not to say contradictory, needs of the multilingual community are ignored. Consequently, pedagogical engineers and designers of activities for foreign language learning must strive to destabilize the effects of early conditioning.

– ‘fossilised’, intractable L1 sound / symbol associations – and prepare the human brain for a host of new, unfamiliar L2 cognitive activities. Some learning problems associated with technology defy ‘quick-fix’ solutions. Inertia and a certain feeling of helplessness may explain pedagogical indifference to the permanently obsolete QWERTY computer keyboard but how can language engineers remain indifferent to the greatest problem in human communication: the intelligibility of the spoken word? If the Latin alphabet is a problem for foreign language learning then it deserves to be redesigned and adapted to the needs of the multilingual community.
....

A notorious problem for francophone speakers of English Students who study a foreign language must acquire knowledge about the stress patterns employed. For French students of English such learning is marked by a particular difficulty: as detecting lexical accent is less important in their own language even the perception of this accent in L2 is badly managed. Peperkamp who has studied stress contrasts across several languages speaks of the “stress deafness” in the French who, contrary to the speakers of more irregularly stressed languages, have little need to store information on generally predictable stress patterns in L1. Other empirical studies, see (Hawkins and Wartren 94), (Gupta and Mermelstein 82), (Dupoux et al. 97) suggest that francophones have: a) difficulties in perceiving stress patterns, b) difficulties in memorising them, which leads to c) problems of oral reproduction or production, which in turn has a negative effect on the comprehension of their discourse by English speakers. We have called this last problem the “tolerance threshold” and it is clearly related to individual experience and exposure to the L1 and L2 in question. Empirical research among an audience of English language teachers outside France suggests that, when fairly close together, even as few as 5 misplaced stress patterns (“necessary”) can lead to a serious breakdown of communication. Listeners simply stop making the effort to understand, though perfidiously they may continue to smile.

The SWANS authoring system uses typographical techniques, changes of letter size and colour, and line-by-line synchronisation, to help students notice and memorise the target lexical stress patterns.

What was striking, in France, during initial pre-course testing, was the omnipresent nature of L1 interference. The term ‘stress deafness’ is by no means excessive even if it does not refer to a real physical impediment. Low scores in textual annotation, listening and spoken production were common among students across the spectrum of previously tested levels, that is to say even relatively fluent students were regularly judged unintelligible owing to an accumulation of lexical stress errors.

Among annotation errors in keywords chosen by the students themselves for their presentations (level B2) we noticed:

• Offence, infringement, analysis, linguistics (from a doctoral student studying ‘linguistics’) economics (from an economist), enigmatic, distressed, paranormal, understanding, incomprehensible, accident, sequence, realisation, development...

From a French point of view, this unconscious attempt to reinstate lexis (originally ‘borrowed’ by the English?) into its ‘rightful’ acoustic orbit may seem very natural. Notice that many of the above annotation errors were not always present in the listening perception tests or in the oral production of the students in question.

High performance in all activities was relatively rare suggesting that dealing with fossilised problems of pronunciation after 8 to 10 years of deviant acoustic reinforcement probably requires more than the 10 weeks or 30 hours available.

Results

Globally dual coding improves performance. 75% of students exposed to dual coding over 10 weeks scored at least 10% higher than in initial lexical stress recognition tests. 25% showed no change. Student feedback showed the synchronised multimodal experience in SWANS documents was appreciated and given the choice between monomodal techniques (text and sound separated) or multimodal techniques (SWANS), students preferred to use SWANS. This was a potentially important finding as the multimodal synchronised experience is theoretically more demanding. Annotations appear to improve short-term memorisation in most cases. Perception of reduced vowels in listening tests and in written tests was often more difficult for students than the perception of stressed syllables suggesting neglect in early training. Oral testing based on a 3-minute presentation showed significant improvement in controlled conditions for certain individual students and a small global improvement after preparation via keyword annotations.

On the other hand, the results of oral testing in the context of subsequent spontaneous conversation did not confirm the idea of improved oral production. ‘Fossils’ returned to the L2 oral performance perhaps because concentrated filtering efforts were reduced and the language content moved away from the controlled area of the presentation.

8. Conclusion

Although initial testing of the SWANS authoring system permits a modest ‘yes’ to the question ‘can dual coded texts improve perception and production?’, we are convinced that the battle for the eyes and ears of 21st century students will remain an arduous one. Modifying L1 reading practice when tackling an L2 text means fighting deeply engrained habits that have taken years to put in place. The brain’s resistance to novelty is not a sign of conservatism but simply a sign of natural mental health. As Ong puts it, “Freeing ourselves from typographic bias is probably more difficult than any of us can imagine” (Ong, 1982: 77). Fortunately, new technology holds out increasingly powerful and increasingly nomadic devices to face up to this very real 21st century challenge. As the publishing world prepares to swamp educational markets with e-Readers (22 million in 2012) it is time to for the CALL community to lend a hand to transform such devices into genuinely useful tools for reading foreign language texts. Electronic readers for European citizens should offer automatic annotation of stressed syllables and weak vowels for texts in all European languages just as word processing programmes offer spelling correctors. The technology and know-how exist, the finances deserve to be found."

The links were posted in the "Learning to listen" thread

[AML]

This question reminds me of the cute scene in the movie Amelie where her mother is teaching her the sentence: "Les poules couvent souvent au couvent." At 00:27 here.

[Neurotip]

Disclaimer: I don't speak Russian. However I think there's something else in OP's question which the answers so far haven't directly addressed.
If I'm watching a movie with audio and subtitles in Spanish, most of the sounds that I'd expect to hear in a slow, careful pronunciation of the words are there in the actors' speech. In Icelandic, on the other hand, even in clear connected speech such as scripted news broadcasts, the words are often radically different from the 'dictionary pronunciation' form - whole chunks get missed out, indeed whole 2-3 word phrases can be reduced to a phoneme or two, depending very much on what part of the sentence the speaker is emphasising.
Of course this can happen in colloquial or very fast speech in any language, but it seems to happen much more readily in some languages than others, and for a beginner who's only learned a careful pronunciation, it can be very disorientating.
I've chosen this pair of languages as examples since my competence in each is roughly similar. I don't know about Russian though...

[reineke]

Vowel reduction in Russian

"There are five vowel phonemes in Standard Russian. Vowels tend to merge when they are unstressed...

Other types of reduction are phonetic...

Russian orthography does not reflect vowel reduction, which can confuse foreign-language learners..."

Wikip.

[issemiyaki]

Thank you all for such a robust discussion. Clearly, others have had similar frustrations with French. I feel like you all really understand my frustration.

@David1917 - thank you for articulating my question better than I could.

@garyb - you hit the nail on the head. My knowledge of French grammar isn't all that great, and some of the things I miss-hear may only be because I'm not as sharp on a particular grammar pattern, and as a result, what I'm hearing doesn't trigger my logic correctly. So, I'll keep a sharper eye out to see if grammar is an underlying factor as to why I misunderstand something.

[vonPeterhof]

Of course this can happen in colloquial or very fast speech in any language, but it seems to happen much more readily in some languages than others

Getting flashbacks to that old "I Hate Korean" thread..