Carly Rae Jepsen Posted January 28, 2018 Posted January 28, 2018 Inspired by Shit English Majors Say, what are some things that Spanish, French, Italian, German, Slavic etc. majors say? wheresmysnow 1
madamoiselle Posted January 28, 2018 Posted January 28, 2018 (edited) 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, Monsieur Vénus, Carly Rae Jepsen and 1 other 4
frenchlover Posted January 28, 2018 Posted January 28, 2018 (edited) 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 and Monsieur Vénus 2
madamoiselle Posted January 28, 2018 Posted January 28, 2018 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 and frenchlover 2
Monsieur Vénus Posted January 29, 2018 Posted January 29, 2018 (edited) "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 lilting and madamoiselle 1 1
Carly Rae Jepsen Posted January 29, 2018 Author Posted January 29, 2018 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?" madamoiselle 1
khigh Posted January 29, 2018 Posted January 29, 2018 “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 1
madamoiselle Posted January 29, 2018 Posted January 29, 2018 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 ) hats and Carly Rae Jepsen 2
wheresmysnow Posted February 12, 2018 Posted February 12, 2018 "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" Carly Rae Jepsen 1
palabra45 Posted February 20, 2018 Posted February 20, 2018 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]?" ThousandsHardships 1
KatVW Posted February 20, 2018 Posted February 20, 2018 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 Posted March 25, 2018 Posted March 25, 2018 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."
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