Sunday, October 30, 2005

Quoi?

So, if your French is bad, like let’s say mine is, and you use feminine when you mean to use masculine (or vice versa), is it heard femininely? Like, if I said, I have to use le salle de bains, would a Frenchman think I was going to the men’s room? If I said J’adore la chien instead of le would the Frenchman think I had a female dog? Or to get more abstract, if I referred to my inability to speak French more than une petit peu, would the Frenchman understand my little bit of French to be more feminine than his? Or does it all just sound generally clunky and wrong like any other way of speaking a language badly?

2 comments:

Teodoro Callate said...

I am speaking totally out of my a** here, but my guess is that it probably just sounds clunky. I don't speak a lick of French, but if I said, for example, Las Hombres, that doesn't mean "the women" in Spanish, it means "the men" but wrong.

Then again, I've been accused of speaking Merican very wrong before.

Dean said...

It sounds clunky. Just wrong. I have worked with people who only recently learned English, and you learn to read between the lines a lot. Imagine a stereotypical Frenchman saying, 'ze house, she is on fire'. You don't suppose for a minute that he really thinks that the house has breasts. You just think he talks funny.

Dam: that's just plain silly.