Shit Foreign Language Majors Say

[Carly Rae Jepsen]

Inspired by Shit English Majors Say, what are some things that Spanish, French, Italian, German, Slavic etc. majors say? 

[madamoiselle]

Just off the top of my head... (French) 

"I will never understand québécois French in my entire life" 

"Do you wanna go to a café this afternoon? I know a place, super cool, like... actual French coffee, not our American jus de chausettes."

"Yeah, I saw the Mona Lisa. Total letdown. To really know Paris, you need to avoid the tourist areas. I hate the Eiffel Tower"

"Are you applying to TAPIF?" 

"Wait, you haven't read Sartre?" 

"So what exactly is the difference in sound between ou and u?????" 

"Oh no, we don't have to pronounce any of those letters at the end.... or the ones in the middle. Oh, sometimes, you also don't have to pronounce that first letter." 

"Ok, so it's like... you have 20, right? And then multiply it by four, and then you have 80, and then you just add how much you would need to get the end number. So 98 would be 20 times 4 plus 18. Is that clear?" 

"So they're older than me, but they're super cool, but they're also a teacher in a different department, but I've also met them before... Should I use tu or vous?"

 

Edited January 28, 2018 by madamoiselle

[frenchlover]

To English majors: "You can't translate Madame Bovary!!!"

"Well, you know what Derrida said, you don't master a language, language masters you!"

*reads 20 pages of Proust* "Wait, what happened?"

Edited January 28, 2018 by frenchlover

[madamoiselle]

6 minutes ago, frenchlover said:

To English majors: "You can't translate Madame Bovary!!!"

"Well, you know what Derrida said, you don't master a language, language masters you!"

*reads 20 pages of Proust* "Wait, what happened?"

I can fully say that there have been many times where I've read one page of Proust and retained none of it haha

[Monsieur Vénus]

"I thought we didn't pronounce the letter e in French? You're telling me the rule changes for poetry?"

This was the bane of my freshman year literature course.

Edited January 29, 2018 by Monsieur Vénus

[Carly Rae Jepsen]

Yes to so many of these! Especially about visiting Paris and French food (coffee, bread and cheese--and for some wine! I like cheap wine myself though), and lecturing people about geography and dialects. Québecois is so nasal, I find it ok to understand but I couldn't imitate their accent haha.

Also:

-Introducing your friends to Stromae

-Being asked to translate something in French only for that person to pronounce it wrong and forget it immediately

-Knowing that you NEED to study abroad from the moment you declared your major

-As a tutor I would get irritated when people asked me "Why are there masculine and feminine genders???" or "Do people even use the subjonctif?"

 

 

 

 

[khigh]

“No, Dutch isn’t misspelled German”

”French is just lazy Italian” -said to the French prof as I decided to go a different (Germanic) route. She made me bitter  

”You’re from Quebec. That’s not French!”

”Frisian and Afrikaans are different than Dutch. Here, let me give you a couple hundred year lesson on colonialism!”

[madamoiselle]

12 hours ago, Carly Rae Jepsen said:

Yes to so many of these! Especially about visiting Paris and French food (coffee, bread and cheese--and for some wine! I like cheap wine myself though), and lecturing people about geography and dialects. Québecois is so nasal, I find it ok to understand but I couldn't imitate their accent haha.

Also:

-Introducing your friends to Stromae

-Being asked to translate something in French only for that person to pronounce it wrong and forget it immediately

-Knowing that you NEED to study abroad from the moment you declared your major

-As a tutor I would get irritated when people asked me "Why are there masculine and feminine genders???" or "Do people even use the subjonctif?"

 

 

 

 

On a similar note, 

"So... when does anybody really use inversion?"

and a French person once responded to me, "Quand l'interloc, c'est Elizabeth II!" (When the interlocutor is Elizabeth II )

[wheresmysnow]

"Oh there's such a better word for [insert every day concept] in [insert target language] but it's just too difficult to explain to you if you don't know the language" 

"The conjunctive can go suck a big fat one" 

[Eternal debate on what "fluency" really means, or if it exists at all] 

"If you know one [insert major language family] language, then you really know them all" (I'm guilty of this) 

"One day I really want to learn [insert obscure language with less than 500k speakers], it just seems so cool"

[palabra45]

I had to answer these questions more than once:

"Why would you study [foreign language] in [place where it's not main language]?"

"Can't you already speak [random language]?"

[KatVW]

 

Someone who only knows German from watching Indiana Jones movies: “Ew why would you learn German, it sounds so ugly.”

me: *kill bill sirens* “oh haha no its not that bad, it depends on the accent.”

alternatively:

me, internally: Hullo yes i can speak in this language mhmhmh

native speaker: “Morgen!”

me, internally:  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[ThousandsHardships]

Our department is the department of French AND Italian, so I got into this conversation with our department chair (who's Italian and speaks French):

Him: "I just think of French as a dialect of Italian."
Me: "That's funny. I think of Italian as a dialect of French."