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@@Dracopol Yes, you're right. The word for "crescent" comes from the present participle of croître (to grow), though. So there's that less direct connection.
Btw the few first phrase i was thinking you where making the formal sentences xD. Elle prépare le diner -> elle fait la bouffe/le repas Nous avons une réunion à 2 heures -> On as une réunion/call-conference à 14 heures J'ai du mal à comprendre -> je comprend pas/j'pige rien/ (+ some regional sentences) Je crois que tu a raison -> t'as raison/tu dois avoirs raison
As a French native speaker, this is exactly the reason why, even when my English wasn’t that good, English-speaking people were often amazed at my command of “advanced” vocabulary lol
I was gonna say the exact same thing ! It's like an unintentonal trick to sound smart.😅 The better a French person speaks English, the less refined they sound.
Dang this ESL dude is talking about rendezvousing with entrepreneur bachelors to visit a gallery of magnificent silhouette illusions, taking a variety of souvenirs from gastronomy restaurants, and sabotaging champagne connoisseurs... how does he know so many fancy English words?
Yeah it's also why, often, Americans think Frenchs are pretentious when they speak English. For French, using phrasal verbs is complicated, their more "educated" forms will come to them more naturally while they don't necessarily mean to show off. I remember in one of my first experiences in a US restaurant, a waitress got a bit upset when I was not understanding something, I asked her to repeat with other words, she tried to "dumbify" her explanations by using more phrasal verbs which was even more confusing to me ;) (but at least she tried her best, so thank you to her, 15 years later)
as a french native speaker, I realised that I sometime sounds "posh" when I speak english because words of french origin are more familiar to a french person, therefore easier to memorise. For exemple as a teenager I told to an english family that hosted me "that's a marvellous information" instead of "that's a great news".
Native English speaker here. Just in case you want to know, we wouldn't use 'a' in either of those sentances. They'd be 'That's marvolous information' (which, like you said sounds very formal, and also a bit odd), and 'That's great news.' In grammar terms, 'news' and 'information. are both uncountable nowns
@@camembertdalembert6323 You'll get there don't worry :). As a bilingual Canadian person whose first language is French, I have to admit that it took me around 3 years and a half to become fluent in English. And it wasn't easy to get there but it's well worth it once you've mastered most of the complicated grammar rules that exist in English.
As a native English speaker learning French, I soon noticed that, if I don't know the French word, I simply pick an alternative word in English that means the same but is longer. So: great => marvellous News => Information Watch => Regard Room => Chamber Child => Infant That's life => C'est la vie 😁 Practically any word you can think of in English, there's another English word that means the same but comes from French. And the French one is usually longer.
Hello ! I love your videos Paul ! I'm a french speaker, I just would like to say, croissant (the pastry) is called like that because it has the shape of the crescent moon, the "growing" moon :)
Yes, some people have been saying that. I knew it was a form of croître, but didn't know it came via the crescent moon. In that part of the video I was just making an impulsive comment, but thought it would interesting to put in the video.
@@Langfocus I learned something though that I never paid attention to saying it in French : "croissant de lune" comes from the growing moon, "la lune qui CROÎT". Never paid attention to that simple and evident truth while speaking. Feeling a little dumb in my own language. Loll
@@Langfocus IIRC, the most commonly cited origin of the croissant is that it was invented in Vienna (this kind of pastry is also called a Viennoiserie in French) to commemorate the siege of the town by the Ottomans in the 17th century, recalling the moon crescent displayed on Ottoman flags.
I’m a native English speaker, semi-fluent in Spanish, with some academic exposure to French. Put all these together, and I was able to figure out about 80% of the words in, and meaning of, the sentences. Fun video!
I'm sort of going it the oposite direction! I'm a native Englist speaker who studied French up to A-Level standard (In the UK A-levels are usually taken at age 18). I'm now learning Spanish. I find my French knowlege plus a wide English vocabulary means I can make sense of a lot written Spanish. I'd imagine the main problem for you would be French's tendancy to use a *lot* of silent letters. Is that right?
@@AtanaaTheCurious French does have a lot of silent letters, but they occur in combinations that are quite predictable. Even with only a semester of college French (I decided to return to studying Spanish), I find I can easily identify them.
I am a francophone and I can read Italian although I have never formally studied that language. But I became functional in Spanish and Portuguese in only 5 months of studying.
The origin of "merci" ("merci beaucoup") is interesting. Originally the meaning was exactly the same as the English "mercy". Although a bit outdated, this meaning still exists in French, for example in the expression "sans merci" ("without mercy"). Over time, probably through religious use, this term became an expression of blessing for someone who dispenses a benefit. The current French term for "mercy" is "pitié" ("pity").
Yes, the meaning of a word can drift away through time, so the moment it entered the vocabulary of a language is important. For instance the French word for shower (i.e. douche) was borrowed by several European languages (examples: Dutch douche, Russian dush, Swedish dusch, ...) but English took it before it specifically meant shower apparently and thus has a quite different meaning in this language. :)
Going from merci meaning pitié (mercy) to the modern meaning of thank you is easy to understand. People would thank other people by telling them that they want the mercy of God upon them. Something like "may the mercy of God be upon you", "Puisse la mercy de Dieu être sur vous". Over the centuries, people would just say "mercy", later spelled merci, all the rest being implicit, in the same way "I wish you a good morning" became "good morning". Later of course, the verb remercier (to thank) was invented. Merci originally does mean pitié, miséricorde. The order of the Sisters of Mercy is called Sœurs de la Miséricorde in French. It means miséricorde divine of course. Divine mercy.
Having studied Spanish as a foreign language I can definitely say that you can understand about 80% of written French. That's on average since the percentage would go higher when reading formal sentences. The true kryptonite when trying to understand French is its pronunciation, it just sounds so fast and monolithic you can't distinguish the words and the places where they begin and end
@@Georgeirfx Good luck with the pronunciation! But English has its share of inconsistencies in pronunciation too... But yeah, we French speakers master the art of confusion. Lol
@@flonoiisana4647 I studied French at school and I can't even imagine what a torture it was for the teachers to having their ears bleed almost every day. I started studying Spanish at an older age and was so pleased with its much simpler phonetics. English is also messed up a lot but I guess you get used to it faster due to the level of its ubiquity
@@Georgeirfx Agree. I thought learning English was pretty smooth. I as a French speaker understand the apparent nonsense of French when it comes to pronunciation. It's just that they kind of kept the old spelling for words that are pronounced completely differently centuries later.
The fact that French, my language, had a lot of similar words helped me a lot when I learned English. And in a funny way, learning English helped me improve my own capacity in French by linking the history of the two languages and their links with other European languages. ...by the way, the croissance is close to croissant because croissant is short for croissant de lune (crescent moon, "growing of moon") because the pastry looks like it. It's from the word croître (to grow) and literally means growing. And in English, crescent comes from it. The growing moon.
@@AceKing-h3j I hadn't made that connection. In English, the word crescent has lost the meaning of growing and relates to the shape alone. We use the archaic words waxing and waning for growing and shrinking respectively (for the moon specifically).
Hem. Mothertongue here is français . I read all 3 replies from a place where it is increasingly difficult to guess what happens next , as local inhabitants (ceux con-cernés se reconnaitront) have a queer way of coming back on what they already burned to have it twice burnt & fool police and firemen . So increasing means croissant too ! To end jokes now I checked my freezer where I have "chocolatines/petits pains au chocolat" , no worry : sur l'emballage imprimé multilingue pas de trad. en anglais ...
In the early 2000s, the Internet was not yet easily accessible in the Philippines. I love French so much that I made a list of vocabulary by reading inserts with French to English translation found in bottles of perfume and packs of chocolate. It was laborious but I enjoyed copying the French words and finding out what could be their equivalent in the English translation provided which also gives me a clue about the French grammar. Because of my lack of resources, I coined French words from English words which lead me to accidentally creating a French-inspired conlang: 1. English: :The boy with a red hat is running." 2. Real French: "Le garçon au chapeau rouge court." 3. My French: "Le bouy avec hat rouge ronnet." 😄
Sir, as a French, that is THE CLEVEREST language learning curve I've ever seen from a French-studying person. Do you realise you've single-handedly invented a new form of 'creole' *... ? Thats is A DARN FEAT. PRAISE YOURSELF 👏👏👏
16:18 He's not wrong! French "grippe (noun) / gripper (verb)" and English "grip (verb)" actually share a common Germanic origin. In French, "gripper" means "grab, catch" or "block, stop due to friction", so it's not so far from its English cognate. Then, "grippe" meaning "flu" developed from this because of how the disease suddenly "grips" you like claws.
@@flonoiisana4647you guys are both right : "agripper" means "to grab" though "gripper" does mean "to block due to friction" (usually used in the past tense "grippé" to describe a botched mechanism for instance).
It's also called „die Grippe“ in German. „Die“ (pronounced "dee") is the German word "the" for feminine nouns. So it even has the same grammatical gender as the French, "la grippe". Hmm… makes me wonder if both don't derive from a common Latin source word.
I'm french and use my knowledge in english to understand german better. I love that this one man used his knowledge of spanish to understand the word "comprendre"
In America, I occasionally hear "comprende?" at the end of a sentence to mean "you got it?" or "you understand?" Usually when an English speaker is interacting with a Spanish speaker and there's a language barrier, though sometimes just in informal contexts like bantering with friends and family.
Also, in Latin the waxing moon (luna crescens) originally referred to the stage of the moon's apparent growth, but later was conflated as the shape instead of the stage.
@@slycordinator - Of course: your typical "crescent" 🌘 is actually what in Spanish at least is called "Luna menguante" (shrinking or waning Moon) 🌘, as oppossed to "Luna creciente" (growing, i.e. crescent, or waxing Moon) 🌒. A mnemotechnique in Spanish (and probably also in other Romances like French, unsure) is to remember that the Moon is always "lying": it looks like a "C" when it should be a D rather ("decreciente", "de-growing") and vice-versa.
Very nice video Paul, as a native french speaker I'm surprised to see how much of french english speakers can understand when written, by the way your level in french is really impressive ! Just one little thing, the pastry named "croissant" is not called this way because of the fact that it grows while being cooked, actually it's called this way because of its shape which looks like a crescent moon, which is called "croissant de lune" in french, that's why this pastry's called "croissant" :)
@@Langfocus But it is related to how the moon "raises" every day more and more. In astronomy there is a moon crescent and decrescent. Croître et décroître. So it is has the same meaning, but for an entirely different reason. That dates back to time immemorial, way before the pastry was invented. :)
One interesting question is whether French speakers can liaisonize English effortlessly, whether they can switch on and off liaison at will? English speakers do liaisonize certain words: eg, "thank you" is pronounced as "thank kiew", but if we were to apply liaison consistently, then "love you" would be "love view", "for example" would be "for rex-xample", etc. I wonder if French people can liaisonize all English words fluently and whether they can turn off liaison and speak French without liaison fluently.
It definitely works the other way around too! Speaking a Romance language is such a cheatcode when learning English. Being a native French speaker gives me tons of advanced vocabulary almost without work - except for the pronunciation though, which even afters years remains tricky to me. Basic vocabulary is much harder though: I struggle with everyday Germanic words, which look really diverse and random to me since they are often unrelated to French and thus much harder to retain - even if they are the most useful ones! As a result, I'm better at naming ideas and concepts than habits and items, and I'm worse at talking with a child than writing an essay... But overall, Romance languages speakers still have a big, unfair advantage for being able to already know or easily guess half of English vocabulary with little to no effort nor memorisation... That's why I truly pay an immense respect to all non-Romance and non-European students who _really_ have to learn English, _from zero!_
Yeah, with Spanish it's indirectly through the similarities with French, but I had a similar experience. Another related thing: I often rely more on specific verbs than on phrasal verbs , and that is often perceived as "good". But that's just what's easier for me.
@@mikedaniel1771 Yeah, the basic stuff is alright, but then you have to be aware of things that change the meaning just by changing the place of the preposition, or stuff like that. I can never think of good examples to explain what the issue is, but let me see: "put it up with that thing" and "put up with that thing" have very different meanings, right? Or "Go off" is one thing if it's an alarm, a different one if it's a bomb or a fire (and why does it go "off"?? it should go "on", "up", "boom", anything but "off"), and "to go off on (someone)" yet another thing. And there are worse cases than those, lol.
@@mikedaniel1771 As an Italian native with a C1 certificate, I still try to desperately avoid them. Idc if I'm gonna sound formal, I'm not using too much of them. Recognizing them is an entirely different story though, I've gotten to the point where I associate meaning and form on the basis of "eh, it's a feeling", and that feeling's right. But feeling's not enough to nail the context, the right verb and its tiny word which the whole meaning depends on
With MAL there's also malediction, malware, malevolent, for instance. As for CONTRE, there's indeed contrary (from contraire), but also counter (to counter comes from contrer) as in counterattack (contre-attaque, sometimes spelled contrattaque) and counterargumentation (contre-argumentation). There's also CONTRadiction.
Well done guys! "Croissant" is about the shape of a moon crescent, not because it grows. It's the moon that grows. The French have the same difficulty as the English speakers: many words are very similar or the same but they have a very different meaning. A french person would simply pronounce french sentences with an English accent 😂 "Hello, I'm very content to encounter you. I adore to regard football, especially when they put the ball in the but." (Just kidding, nobody's that bad -- right?)
@@TheLifeHeLives-HeLivesToGod it's the moon.. "croissant" was a phase of the moon with this shape long before the pastry.. in english it's a "crescent"
@@oneeyejack2 Yes you are correct, that's the point the moon was growing and so they called the shape "the growing moon", Then the pastry was made in the same shape as the growing moon. The meaning does not change but the association in the mind of the language user has failed to recognize the ancient origin of the word. The moon grows and so does the dough of the pastry, the pastry can be shaped like a brick and it will still be called a croissant. Search: Etymology Crescent and see where the word came from.
Knowing French helps to learn new English vocabulary, but also it makes us no longer at ease with how to write French correctly. For instance, we have 'rempart' in French for 'rampart' in English with the same meaning. I used to write this word correctly as a kid, but now I feel like I need to check which one is French and which one is English whenever I come across the word.
There is also the word example in French and example in English. It's very annoying to see French people writing the English form through too much exposure on the internet.
Native English speaker, who learnt French at school here. I can relate, thought to be fair my spelling has always been terrible. Is is carot or carrot or carott or carrote or carrotte or ....
German also uses Grippe and I would not be surprised if some other languages too. I would suspect flu being just an abbreviation of in"flu"enza. Also like Story probably beeing and abbreviation of HiStory?
@@smallwisdom8819 From Wiktionary... In Old French, historie was also called estoire and meant both a tale and history. And in Anglo-Norman, this became "estorie". Then we got story (originally storie) from the first syllable of estorie being dropped. So, in a roundabout way, it's kind of an abbreviation of history.
@@smallwisdom8819 1. us Romanians also loaned in „gripă” for the flu. (I speak Romanian as my mother tongue, as an idea of why I am saying this.) 2. Flu is indeed an abbreviation of influenza. 3. "Story" came through Anglo-Norman, where it was spelled as "estorie", and the initial "e" got cut off, so to speak, and there was "storie", and through years of sound changes and such, it came to the current form of story. "History" comes from the same source, and in Middle English, there was zero distinction between story and history semantically, but one was borrowed from "historie" in the Medieval times and the other was borrowed during the Norman times as "estorie", basically. The distinction was most likely drawn around the time the term was reborrowed.
@@smallwisdom8819 English uses way more scientific language (often Latin or Greek based) in everyday speech when talking about matters of medicine than any other language I know.
13:47 while "croissant" and "croissance" are related, your derivation is still false. The "croissant" is actually named after its shape, the (rising) half-moon, aka "crescent" in English (another cognate). The "Red Crescent", the Muslim counterpart of the Red Cross, is called "Croissant-Rouge" in French.
As a native French speaker this video was enlightening. So close to other languages and yet at the same time sounding so foreign. Keep up the good work. Your channel is amazing.
i m a native french and Arabic speaker... i learned English all by myself by watching TV...it was very easy for me since there are a lot of shared words (even if the pronunciation is different) and i learned Spanish too (since Spanish resemble french a lot and have also words from Arabic origin). thank you for this video :) it was quiet interesting
As a near-native (maybe L2) English speaker (I am Indian, so English isn't really a foreign language) - when I learnt French some years ago, the shared vocabulary definitely helped. It also helped me with learning Spanish more recently. It definitely made reading French a lot easier when starting off. Of course, in practice much of the shared vocabulary has a somewhat different meaning in French (I can think of platform and quay in both languages), but that's half the fun - figuring out what meaning the word is used to convey (in other words, nuance).
As a Filipino who grew up learning English and then Spanish during my teens, learning French today is easy because it has many similarities with both English and Spanish. I’ve been able to advance to an A2 level in French in less than 3 months. I really love the language and enjoy learning it every day.
As a French speaker, especially in formal context and when I don't find my words, I often make a bold attempt to say the word I know in French with an English accent. Then 3 cases: 1 - It works and it's a real English word and everyone understands -> WIN!!! "Connaisseur" (ok with an o, I had to repeat for pronunciation that day!), "flamboyant"... 2 - It kinda works, it's a real English word but can be very formal or old fashioned and not everyone understands -> (very) PARTIAL WIN ! "Louche"... 3 - It just doesn't work, and the response is 'whaaat?" -> LOSE! "Bricoleur" was a total failure 😅
@@AtanaaTheCurious elbentos responded I believe well 👍, like someone who likes/is competent in doing home painting/building, but I was quite in trouble explaining in a 15 word sentence 🤣
@@elbentos7803 bric = brick, bricoleur is someone who build home with brick , even it's can a people who build anything , not it's just a term for a non proffesional worker '' is more or less '' amateur worker '' or hobby people
My first language is Spanish so I was able to determine far easier a lot of words from this video, there were a couple, like lutter that was difficult to decipher at first but then with the explanation made so much sense, because of the different spelling it has compared to Spanish "luchar" which means to fight but overall I found it really easy to decipher the majority of words by just looking at them
I'm a Polish with good knowledge of English and German. I've never studied Romance languages but I've been to many Romance language countries (Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Moldova, Latin America). For me English is an 'open door' to the world of Romance languages.
People from Louisiana would've instantly noticed beaucoup. We never stopped using it to mean "alot/many" even after English became our main language. We'll say things like "It's beacoup hot ouside" or "They have beaucoup money." We even have a yearly music festival called "Buku Music Fest."
@@KenFullman nope, but there are a seemingly random assortment of words we kept around, or at least if not used, many people would know what they mean if heard. Some are: bon, chaud/froid, temps, honte, envie, do do (dormir), viens
@@KenFullman Yeah the way we use it can mean "alot/many" as with regular French or "really" like "it's really hot outside." & no we don't use tres but we do use a random assortment of other words like "parrain" for godfather and we say "making groceries" which comes from the direct French translation "faire son marche." Faire meaning to make or do so when it was directly translated to English, it left us saying making groceries instead of going grocery shopping lol.
@@CreoleLadyMarmalade that seems like a pattern with diaspora communities, they keep the older words of saying things but mixed with English or the local languages they migrated to
I understood "the grippe" only because I know it was used in English a long time ago - "the grip/grippe" - it was mentioned in a song in Guys and Dolls, the musical ^_^
I was quite surprised that no one knew what "elle" meant, but I'm a native english speaker who took spanish in k-12 and then french in college. I currently live in an area where around 40% of the population speaks Spanish natively. It was interesting to see how english speakers with little exposure to a latin language understood things without being able to use prior knowledge
I actually laughed out loud when that guy thought it was talking about someone called Elle. I also found it surprising that someone could be familiar with Merci Beaucoup, without knowing what the "Beaucoup" means.
For the question of the day, I'm a native English speaker who learned French and while learning I definitely noticed that I started to see more and more familiar words as I continued to study. Once i reached a certain point, a pretty large amount of the words i learned either had an English equivalent or looked a lot like an English word, in fact, I ended up learning a lot of words in french that had the same spelling and meaning in english that i didn't know in either. So yeah, English helped a lot with the later segments of learning and with learning formal speech a lot more than it did with basic words, just as the video suggests.
In the court, the noble guests admired the procession. The chef observed the musicians and was preparing the feast. The air was filled with the aroma of cuisine, while the performance continued, with the dancers moving gracefully across the palace. The atmosphere was one of elegance and grandeur, a true celebration of refinement.
Hey Paul! As a native French speaker, I learned how to speak English later in my life and now consider myself bilingual (easy language to learn the basics, much harder to speak it). However, I still sometimes don't know the exact word to use in English, so my trick in those moment is to say the French word with an english accent, hoping the word also exists in English.. it usually works at least 50% of the time!
As a French native speaker, basic English was not made easy by knowing French, but as I became more and more comfortable with the language, I can say the similarities with French did help for a lot of words, especially technical ones (watching science videos in English actually helped with my learning, because so many scientific words are similar in both languages; shout-out to SciShow and Veritasium for that). But there are also cases where I would misunderstand the meaning of an English word because it's actually a false friend, and it would take me longer to learn the actual meaning of the word in English because I didn't realize at first that I was misunderstanding the meaning based on what the cognate means in French. I don't remember any specific example, but I know it happened a few times. Even for words that weren't totally false friends, the specific contexts one would use them would be different, which meant that I had to adjust my initial assumptions about those words.
@@palupalu5647 "actually" does not mean "couramment". "couramment" means "commonly" or "frequently". We would translate "actually" as "en réalité" or "en fait", or "vraiment" or "réellement" in some contexts.
Keep the content Paul, John McWhorter is proud of you to show the full Romanicity of English in pratical, strong way. Continues the logic of video testing english speakers to decode, comprehend and translate normand, picard, walloon, interlingua, spanish, portuguese, catalan, romansh and romanian. Keep the real experiment. Put native speakers to test english speakers in a basic, pratical and intermediate level. Continues your precious work. Hugs 🫂
My mother tongue is spanish (mexican spanish) and I know a bit of english, I think french could be easier to learn now! I was amazed to know that in french they use the verb "believe" as in "I believe you're right" just like I would use it "Yo creo que tienes la razón"
As a french, during the first years of English learning at school, I found it very easy to learn because many words were just the same, especially every word in terminating by "tion". Also the grammar is pretty similar compared to other germanic root languages.
I grew up bilingual with German and French as my parents' languages. Learning English vocab was a piece of cake for me, as I could find a French or German cognate for almost every word I encountered.
My bf and I think you should do this next with English speakers trying to read Dutch. (FTR, I was able to figure out most of the sentences but that's because I speak some Spanish. The only sentence that tripped me up was the one about the rain.)
I am actually from Reunion Island, and it's so far for people that aren't french, and even most french people doesnt know the existence of Reunion Island, an iam very happy that atleast someobe acknowledge us
"Croissant" is an adjective meaning "growing". It comes from the verb "Croître" which understandably means "to grow". Connecting the dots and moving on to the nouns, it leads to "Croissance" and therefore "growth".
I learned French living in Belgium during middle school, and my teachers were all native speakers. I don't remember finding much similarity between the English vocabulary I knew as an 11-, 12, and 13-year-old and the French I learned, but knowing French certainly helped me later when I started reading and hearing more formal English to be able to understand it.
As a Quebecers who have been following you for years, I’m very glad you made this one !! Our relationship with English is extremely complex as you probably know and your video is a blessing ! Excellent as always but this one is more personal to me.
as a native speaker in french and english due to my english family living in france since before i was born, i find it fascinating how similar some words are that i never thought twice about. it also explains why i accidently use some french words when speaking english and vice versa
I'm a native speaker of English and learned Spanish in high school. Later at university, I studied linguistics and learned both French and German. Knowing English helped with learning French vocabulary, but sometimes my Spanish interfered with it. Knowing Spanish grammar helped me learn the French grammar more easily, and funnily enough, knowing some French vocabulary helped with some German vocabulary as well.
@@terioze9 Actually, I'm trying to speak as much French as possible. For example, "Regarde ce champ-là tout vert. Ça a l'air du paradis. J'crois ben qu'mes enfants à venir vont aimer ça."
I don't know if anyone pointed this out in the comments, but there is a mistake at 03:10 There is a huge difference between: "C'est une longue histoire" And: "C'est une longue Histoire" The right translation is: "It's a long story" And: "It's a long history" For the same word in French, we use a capital letter as the first letter to mark the difference between a story and a historical fact.
As a German, I was most surprised by the word "grippe". Because in German it is the same word, so I thought it would be Germanic but of course not recognized in English because there it's called "flu". It turns out, "grippe" is actually a French word, and pretty young (from the 18th century) and the Germans got it from the French.
i personally would love to see a similar video of folks that are spanish/english bilingual or semi bilingual. there are millions of folk that speak english and spanish in the united states alone and they would perceive french quite differently. keep up the great content !
I liked so much the effort of 3 participants they dont speak french but can understand, basic, intermediate and pratical French without confusions. Only true advanced french is harder for all them, the basic level of french or other french regionals idioms for them all aren't difficult in concret case. Love your test and linguistical experiment Paul. Love ya. 💙💙💙💙💙💙💙🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻
As someone whose first language was Armenian, then had English become their native language, as well as having taken 3 years of Latin in high school; most of this was fairly straightforward to me. One interesting thing to me was "grippe", in Armenian we have the word "Գրիպ" (g'reep) which means sick, so there's some connection there I didn't know about. 😂
Excellent video .as Mexican I realized that. why English has a lot french words?. So I bought a English-french dictionary I live in Mexico . It was a surprise to watch how many words are the same or almost.
Salut Paul ! As a native French speaker, I believe loan words from Latin and Old French helped me quite considerably to learn English. It's a double edged sword though as there are plenty of false friends and it doesn't help for casual speak and the myriad of prepositional verbs. But my case is unusual because I started to learn German almost 5 years before having my first English course so even though I've lost most of it, German helped me to get a grip on vocab and grammar on English as well as it occasionally helps me to read Flemish or even some Swedish.
I'm french Canadian and I found that exercice really intersting and your guests were really good for person who don't know french. Intersting experience! Thanks
The overlap in the French and English vocabularies is so great that if you spent like a day familiarizing yourself with the basics of French grammar - the articles, pronouns, how the tenses are generally formed, common forms of have and be, - that's enough to enable you to read most text in French on the basic level. Sequel video idea?
Not true. All 4 of the "big" verbs (Etre, avoir, faire and aller) are different. throw in the conjugations and all the grammatical complexity and the only thing one could understand after a day are cognates. I doubt anyone with no training could even make a stab at understanding.
@@DonaldMains Additionally stuff like false friends will throw people off. Looking solely at reading, in basic informal texts the vocab is too different from English to understand. And at an advanced level, the level of vocabulary is very similar to English, but is much harder to understand due to a higher level of comprehension needed to understand a formal text. Additionally, false friends make up probably like 1/4 to 1/2 of similar words between the languages which will further throw people off. Furthermore, in the video they are given the text read out to them which you wouldn't have if you were actually reading. Also the sentences in this video are very much cherry picked to give people a high chance of guessing right. A fairer analysis would be to give a news article as a formal text, and a story written by a child as an informal text.
@@DELottProductions the point was to see if they could figure out the sentence, a French person wouldn't fully understand a scientific or news article in English either, they only get the basic idea, obviously you wouldn't get everything that it is talking about
@@danielzhang1916 I know what the point of the video is, and like I said it is not a fair analysis of genuine comprehension because the sentences are cherry picked to include an easily translatable word. If someone gave me (a french and english speaker), an Italian sentence with mangiare and pizza, I would probably understand it. But that would be 0 indication of my comprehension of the language. Like I said, you need an actual text from the real world for this to be a fair analysis, because understanding a sentence which is cherry picked to make it easy means absolutely nothing at all in the grand scheme of things.
That is such a great observation about French being the language of the upper classes. I know that when I was taking French in high school, it definitely did help when taking the SATs. My favorite $10 word is ameliorate which is very common in French but sounds very snobby in English.
If you're struggling to think of the French word, usually if you just think of a longer English word that means the same thing, that's probably close to what you need.
It's very funny to find random french words in complicated english books, like "milieu" or "ennui" or even compounds like "en masse" As a french student, using those words in english class would seem ridiculous and lazy, but not only do they exist, they sound very classy and formal!
Entertaining video. Some clarification if I may, as a Frenchman: 13:44: the word "croissance" has nothing to do with the pastry. Indeed "croissant" has 2 meanings in French: - either derived from the verb "croître" (to grow) and in this case it's the past participle (croissant = growing). It's the meaning of your example (to stimulate economic growth) - or "croissant" as a name. In this case it has nothing to do with the verb "croître" and it is related to a shape: the "shape of a celestial body in the solar system, whose the illuminated surface is less than half of the disc", according to the Larousse dictionnary. The most usual example: le "croissant de Lune" (moon crescent). This is the origin of the name of the famous pastry: its shape evoking a crescent moon but not at all its cooking or puffing out or anything like that😂. By the way, just for the record: the "croissant" is not really French but Austrian... It's part of what we call "viennoiserie" instead of "patisserie" (pastry), viennoiserie standing for "product from Vienne" (Vienna, the Austrian capital). Your last question: "how much did the French vocabulary in English help you when you were first learning it?". My answer: a lot and to some extent even in speaking later on (or at least trying to). Looking for words sometimes in my first international meetings in English language (in a previous life since I'm an old man now...), I just used to say when I was stuck: " I don't know the right word in English, in French we would say this or that", asking for help, and surprinsingly most of the people were very often understanding me and giving me the corresponding English word which was ... the same🤭, except the pronunciation obviously. This reminded me what Clemenceau (who was leading France during WWI) used to say: "L'Anglais, ce n'est jamais que du Français mal prononcé" ("English is nothing else than mispronounced French"...) I'm kidding of course. Well ... maybe 😉 Regards
I can't really speak or understand French, but I know quite a bit of Spanish, and I've had a good deal of unintentional French immersion. If I see French text online, I don't even bother using an online translator because I end up understanding most of it anyways...
As a french person, I feel back to my first years at school learning english, and being able to recognise some words and trying to get them together to get something right out of it
As a French who learned English, it was really helpful to be able to use formal french issued vicabulary when I didn't know the proper geroanic term for a word
@@Langfocus maybe a video about how much english speakers can understand german, that would be interesting, i assume the results could be a reversal of this video
French here, I really liked this video because as an English learner for professionnal purposes I was pleasantly surprised by the similarities between French and English! But of course, and because it wouldn't be funny *sigh*, the pronunciation sends me off most of the time. Even if I KNOW how it's pronounced in English, during a conversation, my brain would just go back to French on its own. Takes lots and lots of practise! ^^
tips for English here : If you want to know that's "history" or "story", normally, the clean french will make caps on the H for history, and nothing for story. example: "Quelle histoire !" --> "What a story !" "Quelle Histoire !" --> "What History !" And while speaking, sometimes, when the context isn't clear, we will say "l'Histoire avec un grand H" (--> "History with a big H") then we all know what we are talking about. That's totally the same for "Le Mal" : "the evil" and "j'ai mal" --> "i'm in pain", or "j'ai du mal" --> "'im having trouble". Caps is important when you wanna know if we are talking about the evil or not. "Merci beaucoup" isn't the most usual, and it means "thank you so much". Idk why you are loving this word so much xD "beaucoup" is just there to mean "a lot" in the sentence. Example "j'ai beaucoup de mal" --> "I have a lot of trouble". or "c'est beaucoup trop cher pour moi" --> "that's too much expansive for me"
This was a fun episode to watch. I am from the US and I grew up with French in the home. Both parents and all grandparents are francophones. One grandmother only knew French. Fun to see how they navigated the sentences. I recommend the book, Kill the French” by Vincent Serrano-Guerra. Each day is a new story to read starting from very easy and each day gets a little harder. The stories are filled with French words that are understandable to English readers. It’s a good tool for learners of French to help build up their ability to read French and build up their confidence.
"pleut" originates from the Latin word pluvia, meaning rain 🌧. Spanish 🇪🇸 took the middle to the suffix, hence, lluvia. Similar. "clavem" = key 🔑 in Latin. "cle" in French. "llave" in Spanish.
As a French speaker, I can say that the french vocabulary helps us like it helps English speakers. There are obviously some trap like library (not librairie) and actually (not actuellement) but it can help to understand a unknown word. It also gives the sensation that every french word has an equivalent in english, so we invented this equivalent (and sometimes it's works!). The word order is also different so it can be difficult to use "our words" but in a order that make no sense in french. So yes, it helps but we have to be careful!
Came to comment that in the US south (currently living in southern Virginia), "dinner" is the common term for "lunch". And "supper" is "dinner" (evening meal)
Native English speaker, strong Spanish abilities, can reverse engineer some Portuguese, limited exposure to French. French vocabulary is pretty straight forward either because similar words exist in English or Spanish. BUT my grip on french grammar is awful. Complex verb conjugations will absolutely wreck me. Nouns and adjectives are usually pretty easy to decipher. Spoken french is still largely incomprehensible to me. Fun exercise. Great video
Thanks for your little cœur Paul :) Huge fan of the channel. I've said that before but gladly say it again. On a more serious note than "oh wait, my mom is French..." : I do agree though with Gideon from the "Let Them Talk TV" channel. It's not only formal English, it's also a lot of everyday words, syntax and even grammar. When you are a native speaker of another Germanic language, like me, that's very "clear and obvious". Even though, for a very long time, I struggled with English. It took me waaaay to long before I realised that all these difficult words were actually words that I already knew from French! :)
As a French this was very interesting and informative, especially to notice the vocabulary similarities in French and more formal English. I had never considered things from that angle! I was surprised to realize how easily English speakers could understand very formal French sentences (indeed vocabulary is almost the same!), but had much more trouble with simple everyday-life sentences. 😮 About the question at the end of the video, I couldn't answer it unfortunately. My first touch with English was in kindergarten, I was VERY young; all I remember is child assistants playing with stuffed animals with us to make us learn their names in English. 🤣 Anyway thank you Paul for your work, keep making those amazing videos. 🙏
because we don't use those simple words like in French, we only used the formal words alongside Germanic words over time, that's why we have cow and beef, pig and pork, etc, we didn't take all the words
At my college in the US, they asked us (chemistry majors) to gain reading proficiency in another language to expand our ability to read more journal articles. I picked French because (besides that there is a lot of scientific research in France), as this video reveals, I didn't actually have to learn much at all!
I was always told knowing Spanish made romance languages more understandable, but once I learned English, French became a LOT easier to understand. Now with German, the sentence structure seems more similar and I can also understand SOME words, but that's about it.
As a native Australian English speaker, I knew that roughly half of words in English language were originally French. It is a matter of finding root words to figure out as well as some basic French words. It makes more sense for both English and French speakers to learn from each others like both English and Dutch/German speakers. Interesting!!
I’ll never forget the very start of very preliminary language lessons in grade school, and it was around the 2nd or 3rd lesson where my friend said “Horse Divorce”. Hors d’oeuvres.
There's also the dreaded false friends. An example on the top of my head is "libraire" not meaning library --- it's actually a bookstore. A library is a "bibliothèque". And the grammar. I've never really been one for grammar, but French grammar is SO damn difficult! Especially the tenses and all the irregulars!
As a native French speaker, I’ve noticed something strange: every time I came across a French word while learning English, I’d skip it, thinking I already knew it. But later, in conversations, I’d freeze because I couldn’t remember the word in English. Eventually, I realized that if I don’t know the word in English, there’s a good chance it’s the same in French.
As a French native speaker, I am more at ease reading scientific articles for my job than in an everyday basic conversation. And as a learner of Russian, I can understand a bit of Polish or Bulgarian when I read these languages (but surprisingly not Ukrainian, even if the language is closer to Russian than the two I mentioned previously). Maybe a good subject for a new video?
As a french speaker, learning English was definitely easier in the latter phase of language learning where you already know the pronunciation and grammar but just need to gather up a bunch of vocabulary. In other languages like Chinese, this phase is very very very long and sometimes it just seems you don't really make any progress. Whereas in English, a lot of vocabulary I already could understand, but sometimes I'd say wrong endings like "determinated" for determined, or just make up a word from french that actually doesn't exist in English. Also, a lot of times even now I can understand a new word which comes from french but since English spelling isn't consistent, I can't tell where to put the stress on and how to pronounce the vowels.
As a Frenchman, when I was in high school and a bit later I read a few English novels in my free time, and I think having some passive knowledge of English words of French or Latin origin helped me a lot with going through them and acquire more vocabulary. Sci-fi was certainly easier than Tolkien.
I learnt french as my fifth language, it took me 2 years to be able to communicate (not fluently, but descently. Having known english definitely helped a lot at formal languages. So if your goal is business language and education, it's quite helpful. BUTTTT, if you wanna talk french daily, you'd need to learn new words. Specifically, one thing i had trouble understanding is verlans.
I speak English and can understand B1 level Spanish. I was able to get the basic meaning of all the sentences in this video except the "raining a lot” one because I didn't get the word for rain. When I traveled to France last year, I went to a lot of lesser known places where the museums only had displays/introductions in French. Surprisingly, I was able to understand maybe 60% or even more of them.
Quand on apprend l'anglais à l'école, il y a beaucoup de mots qu'on comprend spontanément, mais on ne sait pas les prononcer correctement. Et assez souvent, les mots qui se ressemblent n'ont pas le même sens en français et en anglais (faux amis).
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13:40 "Croissant", the bread is not so-named because it rises like bread. It's also the word "crescent", because they have a slight crescent shape.
@@Dracopol Yes, you're right. The word for "crescent" comes from the present participle of croître (to grow), though. So there's that less direct connection.
Btw the few first phrase i was thinking you where making the formal sentences xD.
Elle prépare le diner -> elle fait la bouffe/le repas
Nous avons une réunion à 2 heures -> On as une réunion/call-conference à 14 heures
J'ai du mal à comprendre -> je comprend pas/j'pige rien/ (+ some regional sentences)
Je crois que tu a raison -> t'as raison/tu dois avoirs raison
As a French native speaker, this is exactly the reason why, even when my English wasn’t that good, English-speaking people were often amazed at my command of “advanced” vocabulary lol
I was gonna say the exact same thing ! It's like an unintentonal trick to sound smart.😅 The better a French person speaks English, the less refined they sound.
Haha same here
one of my medicine student friends was surprised i knew the fancy term daltonism when in fact that's just how we call colour-blindness in french
Dang this ESL dude is talking about rendezvousing with entrepreneur bachelors to visit a gallery of magnificent silhouette illusions, taking a variety of souvenirs from gastronomy restaurants, and sabotaging champagne connoisseurs... how does he know so many fancy English words?
Yeah it's also why, often, Americans think Frenchs are pretentious when they speak English. For French, using phrasal verbs is complicated, their more "educated" forms will come to them more naturally while they don't necessarily mean to show off. I remember in one of my first experiences in a US restaurant, a waitress got a bit upset when I was not understanding something, I asked her to repeat with other words, she tried to "dumbify" her explanations by using more phrasal verbs which was even more confusing to me ;) (but at least she tried her best, so thank you to her, 15 years later)
as a french native speaker, I realised that I sometime sounds "posh" when I speak english because words of french origin are more familiar to a french person, therefore easier to memorise. For exemple as a teenager I told to an english family that hosted me "that's a marvellous information" instead of "that's a great news".
Native English speaker here. Just in case you want to know, we wouldn't use 'a' in either of those sentances. They'd be 'That's marvolous information' (which, like you said sounds very formal, and also a bit odd), and 'That's great news.' In grammar terms, 'news' and 'information. are both uncountable nowns
@@AtanaaTheCurious I still have to learn those details, thanks. English is so weird...
@@camembertdalembert6323 You'll get there don't worry :). As a bilingual Canadian person whose first language is French, I have to admit that it took me around 3 years and a half to become fluent in English. And it wasn't easy to get there but it's well worth it once you've mastered most of the complicated grammar rules that exist in English.
@@AtanaaTheCurious Marvelous one L only.
As a native English speaker learning French, I soon noticed that, if I don't know the French word, I simply pick an alternative word in English that means the same but is longer. So:
great => marvellous
News => Information
Watch => Regard
Room => Chamber
Child => Infant
That's life => C'est la vie 😁
Practically any word you can think of in English, there's another English word that means the same but comes from French. And the French one is usually longer.
Hello ! I love your videos Paul !
I'm a french speaker, I just would like to say, croissant (the pastry) is called like that because it has the shape of the crescent moon, the "growing" moon :)
I'm a French speaker myself and he got me confused with that one. Lol I always knew it to be "croissant de lune" the shape of the moon crescent.
Yes, some people have been saying that. I knew it was a form of croître, but didn't know it came via the crescent moon. In that part of the video I was just making an impulsive comment, but thought it would interesting to put in the video.
No problem ^^ Thank you for your videos !
@@Langfocus I learned something though that I never paid attention to saying it in French : "croissant de lune" comes from the growing moon, "la lune qui CROÎT". Never paid attention to that simple and evident truth while speaking. Feeling a little dumb in my own language. Loll
@@Langfocus IIRC, the most commonly cited origin of the croissant is that it was invented in Vienna (this kind of pastry is also called a Viennoiserie in French) to commemorate the siege of the town by the Ottomans in the 17th century, recalling the moon crescent displayed on Ottoman flags.
I’m a native English speaker, semi-fluent in Spanish, with some academic exposure to French. Put all these together, and I was able to figure out about 80% of the words in, and meaning of, the sentences. Fun video!
I speak only English (In the Indo-European family) and understood 70% at least.
I'm sort of going it the oposite direction! I'm a native Englist speaker who studied French up to A-Level standard (In the UK A-levels are usually taken at age 18). I'm now learning Spanish. I find my French knowlege plus a wide English vocabulary means I can make sense of a lot written Spanish.
I'd imagine the main problem for you would be French's tendancy to use a *lot* of silent letters. Is that right?
@@AtanaaTheCurious French does have a lot of silent letters, but they occur in combinations that are quite predictable. Even with only a semester of college French (I decided to return to studying Spanish), I find I can easily identify them.
I am a francophone and I can read Italian although I have never formally studied that language. But I became functional in Spanish and Portuguese in only 5 months of studying.
The easy sentences were harder for me, whereas the more complicated sentences were way easier to understand.
The origin of "merci" ("merci beaucoup") is interesting. Originally the meaning was exactly the same as the English "mercy". Although a bit outdated, this meaning still exists in French, for example in the expression "sans merci" ("without mercy"). Over time, probably through religious use, this term became an expression of blessing for someone who dispenses a benefit. The current French term for "mercy" is "pitié" ("pity").
I would add that "merci" as in "mercy" is feminine while "merci" as in "thank you" is masculine.
Yes, the meaning of a word can drift away through time, so the moment it entered the vocabulary of a language is important.
For instance the French word for shower (i.e. douche) was borrowed by several European languages (examples: Dutch douche, Russian dush, Swedish dusch, ...) but English took it before it specifically meant shower apparently and thus has a quite different meaning in this language. :)
« La merci » as a noun meaning mercy still exists, but it's poetic
In French, we also have the term "miséricorde" closer to "mercy" than "pitié".
Going from merci meaning pitié (mercy) to the modern meaning of thank you is easy to understand. People would thank other people by telling them that they want the mercy of God upon them. Something like "may the mercy of God be upon you", "Puisse la mercy de Dieu être sur vous". Over the centuries, people would just say "mercy", later spelled merci, all the rest being implicit, in the same way "I wish you a good morning" became "good morning". Later of course, the verb remercier (to thank) was invented.
Merci originally does mean pitié, miséricorde. The order of the Sisters of Mercy is called Sœurs de la Miséricorde in French. It means miséricorde divine of course. Divine mercy.
Having studied Spanish as a foreign language I can definitely say that you can understand about 80% of written French. That's on average since the percentage would go higher when reading formal sentences. The true kryptonite when trying to understand French is its pronunciation, it just sounds so fast and monolithic you can't distinguish the words and the places where they begin and end
@@Georgeirfx Good luck with the pronunciation! But English has its share of inconsistencies in pronunciation too... But yeah, we French speakers master the art of confusion. Lol
@@flonoiisana4647 I studied French at school and I can't even imagine what a torture it was for the teachers to having their ears bleed almost every day. I started studying Spanish at an older age and was so pleased with its much simpler phonetics. English is also messed up a lot but I guess you get used to it faster due to the level of its ubiquity
Qu'est-ce qu'on va faire pour resoudre ce problème? (Keskong vafair pohaysoudrãs problem?) 😅
@@RogerRamos1993 loll
@@Georgeirfx Agree. I thought learning English was pretty smooth. I as a French speaker understand the apparent nonsense of French when it comes to pronunciation. It's just that they kind of kept the old spelling for words that are pronounced completely differently centuries later.
The fact that French, my language, had a lot of similar words helped me a lot when I learned English. And in a funny way, learning English helped me improve my own capacity in French by linking the history of the two languages and their links with other European languages.
...by the way, the croissance is close to croissant because croissant is short for croissant de lune (crescent moon, "growing of moon") because the pastry looks like it. It's from the word croître (to grow) and literally means growing. And in English, crescent comes from it. The growing moon.
That is interesting. I never before connected croissant and crescent. Tomorrow I shall ask for almond crescents at my local artisan bakery.
@@rob876You can also connect it to crescendo, a gradual increase in volume too, in music.
@@AceKing-h3j I hadn't made that connection. In English, the word crescent has lost the meaning of growing and relates to the shape alone. We use the archaic words waxing and waning for growing and shrinking respectively (for the moon specifically).
Hem. Mothertongue here is français . I read all 3 replies from a place where it is increasingly difficult to guess what happens next , as local inhabitants (ceux con-cernés se reconnaitront) have a queer way of coming back on what they already burned to have it twice burnt & fool police and firemen .
So increasing means croissant too ! To end jokes now I checked my freezer where I have "chocolatines/petits pains au chocolat" , no worry : sur l'emballage imprimé multilingue pas de trad. en anglais ...
@@williamdargelas5585 Pains au chocolat in the freezer! Sacrilege!!! 😂😂😂
In the early 2000s, the Internet was not yet easily accessible in the Philippines. I love French so much that I made a list of vocabulary by reading inserts with French to English translation found in bottles of perfume and packs of chocolate. It was laborious but I enjoyed copying the French words and finding out what could be their equivalent in the English translation provided which also gives me a clue about the French grammar.
Because of my lack of resources, I coined French words from English words which lead me to accidentally creating a French-inspired conlang:
1. English: :The boy with a red hat is running."
2. Real French: "Le garçon au chapeau rouge court."
3. My French: "Le bouy avec hat rouge ronnet." 😄
Sir, as a French, that is THE CLEVEREST language learning curve I've ever seen from a French-studying person.
Do you realise you've single-handedly invented a new form of 'creole' *... ?
Thats is A DARN FEAT.
PRAISE YOURSELF 👏👏👏
seems u hv created a new european language :)
What do I answer? I think I will praise you. And above all, you used your curiosity to improve your French. 🥳👏👏👏
it's like English words in a French sentence, great job
16:18 He's not wrong! French "grippe (noun) / gripper (verb)" and English "grip (verb)" actually share a common Germanic origin. In French, "gripper" means "grab, catch" or "block, stop due to friction", so it's not so far from its English cognate. Then, "grippe" meaning "flu" developed from this because of how the disease suddenly "grips" you like claws.
My school taught me to use ague for flu.
@@prenomnom2812 it's "agripper" in French that means close to the same thing as "grip" in English.
I have seen "la grippe" in written English.
@@flonoiisana4647you guys are both right : "agripper" means "to grab" though "gripper" does mean "to block due to friction" (usually used in the past tense "grippé" to describe a botched mechanism for instance).
It's also called „die Grippe“ in German. „Die“ (pronounced "dee") is the German word "the" for feminine nouns. So it even has the same grammatical gender as the French, "la grippe".
Hmm… makes me wonder if both don't derive from a common Latin source word.
I'm french and use my knowledge in english to understand german better. I love that this one man used his knowledge of spanish to understand the word "comprendre"
It's interesting he thought about that before thinking about comprehend. Even if the others did.
In America, I occasionally hear "comprende?" at the end of a sentence to mean "you got it?" or "you understand?" Usually when an English speaker is interacting with a Spanish speaker and there's a language barrier, though sometimes just in informal contexts like bantering with friends and family.
that's why he didn't understand the French looking words, most people can guess comprehend
@@danielzhang1916 comprenhension , = undertansting
Croissant is called that way because it resembles a waxing Moon, which is calling "crescent" ("growing") for a reason.
Also, in Latin the waxing moon (luna crescens) originally referred to the stage of the moon's apparent growth, but later was conflated as the shape instead of the stage.
@@slycordinator - Of course: your typical "crescent" 🌘 is actually what in Spanish at least is called "Luna menguante" (shrinking or waning Moon) 🌘, as oppossed to "Luna creciente" (growing, i.e. crescent, or waxing Moon) 🌒. A mnemotechnique in Spanish (and probably also in other Romances like French, unsure) is to remember that the Moon is always "lying": it looks like a "C" when it should be a D rather ("decreciente", "de-growing") and vice-versa.
I believe it was invented in Vienna after the Turks were defeated, to mock the Turkish flag, though I am not sure how it ended with a French name.
@@LuisAldamiz That's funny. In German the moon is honest. We liken it to an a or a (cursive) z (abnehmend, zunehmend)
@@HotelPapa100 - Curious. Seems a bit more forced than D and C but fair enough: I'd also prefer the Moon to be honest, but she isn't. XD
Very nice video Paul, as a native french speaker I'm surprised to see how much of french english speakers can understand when written, by the way your level in french is really impressive ! Just one little thing, the pastry named "croissant" is not called this way because of the fact that it grows while being cooked, actually it's called this way because of its shape which looks like a crescent moon, which is called "croissant de lune" in french, that's why this pastry's called "croissant" :)
Yeah, I knew it was related to croître in some way, but didn't know about the "croissant de lune" route.
@@Langfocus But it is related to how the moon "raises" every day more and more. In astronomy there is a moon crescent and decrescent. Croître et décroître. So it is has the same meaning, but for an entirely different reason. That dates back to time immemorial, way before the pastry was invented. :)
He’s Canadian, he’s legally required to know some French ;)
In Argentina they call the crossaint a medioluna, literally meaning half moon. So the association with the moon checks out.
One interesting question is whether French speakers can liaisonize English effortlessly, whether they can switch on and off liaison at will? English speakers do liaisonize certain words: eg, "thank you" is pronounced as "thank kiew", but if we were to apply liaison consistently, then "love you" would be "love view", "for example" would be "for rex-xample", etc. I wonder if French people can liaisonize all English words fluently and whether they can turn off liaison and speak French without liaison fluently.
It definitely works the other way around too! Speaking a Romance language is such a cheatcode when learning English. Being a native French speaker gives me tons of advanced vocabulary almost without work - except for the pronunciation though, which even afters years remains tricky to me. Basic vocabulary is much harder though: I struggle with everyday Germanic words, which look really diverse and random to me since they are often unrelated to French and thus much harder to retain - even if they are the most useful ones! As a result, I'm better at naming ideas and concepts than habits and items, and I'm worse at talking with a child than writing an essay... But overall, Romance languages speakers still have a big, unfair advantage for being able to already know or easily guess half of English vocabulary with little to no effort nor memorisation... That's why I truly pay an immense respect to all non-Romance and non-European students who _really_ have to learn English, _from zero!_
I get you! lol Fancy words in English are just common regurlary used French words to me. lol
Yeah, with Spanish it's indirectly through the similarities with French, but I had a similar experience.
Another related thing: I often rely more on specific verbs than on phrasal verbs , and that is often perceived as "good". But that's just what's easier for me.
I never realized until recently how difficult phrasal verbs can be for a non-native English speaker. I saw a friend's ESL homework on the subject.
@@mikedaniel1771 Yeah, the basic stuff is alright, but then you have to be aware of things that change the meaning just by changing the place of the preposition, or stuff like that.
I can never think of good examples to explain what the issue is, but let me see: "put it up with that thing" and "put up with that thing" have very different meanings, right? Or "Go off" is one thing if it's an alarm, a different one if it's a bomb or a fire (and why does it go "off"?? it should go "on", "up", "boom", anything but "off"), and "to go off on (someone)" yet another thing. And there are worse cases than those, lol.
@@mikedaniel1771 As an Italian native with a C1 certificate, I still try to desperately avoid them. Idc if I'm gonna sound formal, I'm not using too much of them. Recognizing them is an entirely different story though, I've gotten to the point where I associate meaning and form on the basis of "eh, it's a feeling", and that feeling's right. But feeling's not enough to nail the context, the right verb and its tiny word which the whole meaning depends on
With MAL there's also malediction, malware, malevolent, for instance.
As for CONTRE, there's indeed contrary (from contraire), but also counter (to counter comes from contrer) as in counterattack (contre-attaque, sometimes spelled contrattaque) and counterargumentation (contre-argumentation). There's also CONTRadiction.
Well done guys!
"Croissant" is about the shape of a moon crescent, not because it grows. It's the moon that grows.
The French have the same difficulty as the English speakers: many words are very similar or the same but they have a very different meaning. A french person would simply pronounce french sentences with an English accent 😂
"Hello, I'm very content to encounter you. I adore to regard football, especially when they put the ball in the but." (Just kidding, nobody's that bad -- right?)
What came first the growing moon or the growing dough. We may never know!
faux amis are a bitch. both within french itself, and then with english-french.
@@TheLifeHeLives-HeLivesToGod it's the moon.. "croissant" was a phase of the moon with this shape long before the pastry.. in english it's a "crescent"
@@oneeyejack2 Yes you are correct, that's the point the moon was growing and so they called the shape "the growing moon", Then the pastry was made in the same shape as the growing moon. The meaning does not change but the association in the mind of the language user has failed to recognize the ancient origin of the word. The moon grows and so does the dough of the pastry, the pastry can be shaped like a brick and it will still be called a croissant. Search: Etymology Crescent and see where the word came from.
Nobody's that bad? Mais si, malheureusement, ça fait grincer les dents
Knowing French helps to learn new English vocabulary, but also it makes us no longer at ease with how to write French correctly. For instance, we have 'rempart' in French for 'rampart' in English with the same meaning. I used to write this word correctly as a kid, but now I feel like I need to check which one is French and which one is English whenever I come across the word.
You're lucky you're not Brazilian and haven't learned Spanish.😅😂
There is also the word example in French and example in English. It's very annoying to see French people writing the English form through too much exposure on the internet.
@@palupalu5647 You did exactly that. 😂
Sure, it was your corrector, but funny anyway.
Native English speaker, who learnt French at school here. I can relate, thought to be fair my spelling has always been terrible. Is is carot or carrot or carott or carrote or carrotte or ....
generally, if it doesn't look quite French, it's probably English, like couleur vs color, honor, etc
Interestingly, Grippe used to be used in English as well for flu in the early 1900's and before.
It's actually the German word for flu.
German also uses Grippe and I would not be surprised if some other languages too. I would suspect flu being just an abbreviation of in"flu"enza. Also like Story probably beeing and abbreviation of HiStory?
@@smallwisdom8819 From Wiktionary...
In Old French, historie was also called estoire and meant both a tale and history. And in Anglo-Norman, this became "estorie".
Then we got story (originally storie) from the first syllable of estorie being dropped.
So, in a roundabout way, it's kind of an abbreviation of history.
@@smallwisdom8819 1. us Romanians also loaned in „gripă” for the flu. (I speak Romanian as my mother tongue, as an idea of why I am saying this.)
2. Flu is indeed an abbreviation of influenza.
3. "Story" came through Anglo-Norman, where it was spelled as "estorie", and the initial "e" got cut off, so to speak, and there was "storie", and through years of sound changes and such, it came to the current form of story. "History" comes from the same source, and in Middle English, there was zero distinction between story and history semantically, but one was borrowed from "historie" in the Medieval times and the other was borrowed during the Norman times as "estorie", basically. The distinction was most likely drawn around the time the term was reborrowed.
@@smallwisdom8819 English uses way more scientific language (often Latin or Greek based) in everyday speech when talking about matters of medicine than any other language I know.
13:47 while "croissant" and "croissance" are related, your derivation is still false. The "croissant" is actually named after its shape, the (rising) half-moon, aka "crescent" in English (another cognate). The "Red Crescent", the Muslim counterpart of the Red Cross, is called "Croissant-Rouge" in French.
I was about to jump into the comments and yours appeared 👏🏻 👏🏻👏🏻
Same! @@anicetcastel9393
I was about to write this.
I was screaming against this false explanation 😂
Well, at the end something grows, so I d say he was half right.
As a native French speaker this video was enlightening. So close to other languages and yet at the same time sounding so foreign. Keep up the good work. Your channel is amazing.
i m a native french and Arabic speaker... i learned English all by myself by watching TV...it was very easy for me since there are a lot of shared words (even if the pronunciation is different) and i learned Spanish too (since Spanish resemble french a lot and have also words from Arabic origin). thank you for this video :) it was quiet interesting
As a near-native (maybe L2) English speaker (I am Indian, so English isn't really a foreign language) - when I learnt French some years ago, the shared vocabulary definitely helped. It also helped me with learning Spanish more recently. It definitely made reading French a lot easier when starting off.
Of course, in practice much of the shared vocabulary has a somewhat different meaning in French (I can think of platform and quay in both languages), but that's half the fun - figuring out what meaning the word is used to convey (in other words, nuance).
Studying Spanish helped me immensely with the French. My guesses weren't all correct but because of Spanish cognates I was close!
Same
As a Filipino who grew up learning English and then Spanish during my teens, learning French today is easy because it has many similarities with both English and Spanish. I’ve been able to advance to an A2 level in French in less than 3 months. I really love the language and enjoy learning it every day.
As a French speaker, especially in formal context and when I don't find my words, I often make a bold attempt to say the word I know in French with an English accent. Then 3 cases:
1 - It works and it's a real English word and everyone understands -> WIN!!! "Connaisseur" (ok with an o, I had to repeat for pronunciation that day!), "flamboyant"...
2 - It kinda works, it's a real English word but can be very formal or old fashioned and not everyone understands -> (very) PARTIAL WIN ! "Louche"...
3 - It just doesn't work, and the response is 'whaaat?" -> LOSE! "Bricoleur" was a total failure 😅
You can't leave it there! How did you transalate bricolour?
@@AtanaaTheCurious
Bricoleur = Tinkerer
@@AtanaaTheCurious elbentos responded I believe well 👍, like someone who likes/is competent in doing home painting/building, but I was quite in trouble explaining in a 15 word sentence 🤣
@@elbentos7803 bric = brick, bricoleur is someone who build home with brick , even it's can a people who build anything , not it's just a term for a non proffesional worker '' is more or less '' amateur worker '' or hobby people
Bric oleur bric = brick ( ( a bricoleur ) is a worker non proffesional ( hobby ) but it's come for people who build with brick
My first language is Spanish so I was able to determine far easier a lot of words from this video, there were a couple, like lutter that was difficult to decipher at first but then with the explanation made so much sense, because of the different spelling it has compared to Spanish "luchar" which means to fight but overall I found it really easy to decipher the majority of words by just looking at them
I'm a Polish with good knowledge of English and German. I've never studied Romance languages but I've been to many Romance language countries (Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Moldova, Latin America). For me English is an 'open door' to the world of Romance languages.
People from Louisiana would've instantly noticed beaucoup. We never stopped using it to mean "alot/many" even after English became our main language. We'll say things like "It's beacoup hot ouside" or "They have beaucoup money." We even have a yearly music festival called "Buku Music Fest."
That's a really random word to keep. I don't even think the French would use Beaucoup in that context. Do you still have "Tres" in common use there?
@@KenFullman nope, but there are a seemingly random assortment of words we kept around, or at least if not used, many people would know what they mean if heard.
Some are: bon, chaud/froid, temps, honte, envie, do do (dormir), viens
@@KenFullman Yeah the way we use it can mean "alot/many" as with regular French or "really" like "it's really hot outside." & no we don't use tres but we do use a random assortment of other words like "parrain" for godfather and we say "making groceries" which comes from the direct French translation "faire son marche." Faire meaning to make or do so when it was directly translated to English, it left us saying making groceries instead of going grocery shopping lol.
@@CreoleLadyMarmalade that seems like a pattern with diaspora communities, they keep the older words of saying things but mixed with English or the local languages they migrated to
@ Yep!
I understood "the grippe" only because I know it was used in English a long time ago - "the grip/grippe" - it was mentioned in a song in Guys and Dolls, the musical ^_^
Canadians when watching this video: "Is that even worth asking?"
😂😂😂
Paul's Canadian BTW
@@Samy-bu1ze Ah, c'est excellent, mon ami.
Yeah, I can read every cereal box in French, no problem!
Most Canadians don’t speak French. Aside from the native Francophones it’s really only a minority of Anglophones that live in or near Quebec.
I was quite surprised that no one knew what "elle" meant, but I'm a native english speaker who took spanish in k-12 and then french in college. I currently live in an area where around 40% of the population speaks Spanish natively. It was interesting to see how english speakers with little exposure to a latin language understood things without being able to use prior knowledge
I actually laughed out loud when that guy thought it was talking about someone called Elle. I also found it surprising that someone could be familiar with Merci Beaucoup, without knowing what the "Beaucoup" means.
For the question of the day, I'm a native English speaker who learned French and while learning I definitely noticed that I started to see more and more familiar words as I continued to study. Once i reached a certain point, a pretty large amount of the words i learned either had an English equivalent or looked a lot like an English word, in fact, I ended up learning a lot of words in french that had the same spelling and meaning in english that i didn't know in either. So yeah, English helped a lot with the later segments of learning and with learning formal speech a lot more than it did with basic words, just as the video suggests.
Same but in reverse for me learning English
In the court, the noble guests admired the procession. The chef observed the musicians and was preparing the feast. The air was filled with the aroma of cuisine, while the performance continued, with the dancers moving gracefully across the palace. The atmosphere was one of elegance and grandeur, a true celebration of refinement.
Hey Paul! As a native French speaker, I learned how to speak English later in my life and now consider myself bilingual (easy language to learn the basics, much harder to speak it). However, I still sometimes don't know the exact word to use in English, so my trick in those moment is to say the French word with an english accent, hoping the word also exists in English.. it usually works at least 50% of the time!
As a French native speaker, basic English was not made easy by knowing French, but as I became more and more comfortable with the language, I can say the similarities with French did help for a lot of words, especially technical ones (watching science videos in English actually helped with my learning, because so many scientific words are similar in both languages; shout-out to SciShow and Veritasium for that). But there are also cases where I would misunderstand the meaning of an English word because it's actually a false friend, and it would take me longer to learn the actual meaning of the word in English because I didn't realize at first that I was misunderstanding the meaning based on what the cognate means in French. I don't remember any specific example, but I know it happened a few times. Even for words that weren't totally false friends, the specific contexts one would use them would be different, which meant that I had to adjust my initial assumptions about those words.
currently, actually, are symetric false friends, currently meaning actuellement, and actually couramment
@@palupalu5647 "actually" does not mean "couramment".
"couramment" means "commonly" or "frequently". We would translate "actually" as "en réalité" or "en fait", or "vraiment" or "réellement" in some contexts.
Keep the content Paul, John McWhorter is proud of you to show the full Romanicity of English in pratical, strong way.
Continues the logic of video testing english speakers to decode, comprehend and translate normand, picard, walloon, interlingua, spanish, portuguese, catalan, romansh and romanian.
Keep the real experiment.
Put native speakers to test english speakers in a basic, pratical and intermediate level.
Continues your precious work.
Hugs 🫂
My mother tongue is spanish (mexican spanish) and I know a bit of english, I think french could be easier to learn now!
I was amazed to know that in french they use the verb "believe" as in "I believe you're right" just like I would use it "Yo creo que tienes la razón"
You can speak good English!!
As a french, during the first years of English learning at school, I found it very easy to learn because many words were just the same, especially every word in terminating by "tion". Also the grammar is pretty similar compared to other germanic root languages.
I grew up bilingual with German and French as my parents' languages. Learning English vocab was a piece of cake for me, as I could find a French or German cognate for almost every word I encountered.
Interesting. Did the grammar give you any major problems?
@Ruthavecflute Not really.
I know several people who grew up in both French and German, and just like you, they say that learning English was a piece of cake!
@@terioze9 It makes sense, I supose. English is a Germanic language with a ston of French vocab, after all.
pleasantly surprised to hear a Singaporean here :) 🇸🇬
Yeah, some people don't know there are Singaporeans who speak English as their first language.
Grippe is also grippe in German, griep in Dutch, gripp in Russian and grip in Bulgarian.
Spanish gripe too
Grippe is also an old-fashioned way to say flu in English.
My bf and I think you should do this next with English speakers trying to read Dutch. (FTR, I was able to figure out most of the sentences but that's because I speak some Spanish. The only sentence that tripped me up was the one about the rain.)
I am actually from Reunion Island, and it's so far for people that aren't french, and even most french people doesnt know the existence of Reunion Island, an iam very happy that atleast someobe acknowledge us
"Croissant" is an adjective meaning "growing". It comes from the verb "Croître" which understandably means "to grow".
Connecting the dots and moving on to the nouns, it leads to "Croissance" and therefore "growth".
I learned French living in Belgium during middle school, and my teachers were all native speakers. I don't remember finding much similarity between the English vocabulary I knew as an 11-, 12, and 13-year-old and the French I learned, but knowing French certainly helped me later when I started reading and hearing more formal English to be able to understand it.
17:48 nouvelle also means a novel in french
Oui sauf que le mot roman est plus courant 😭
@rip_ninjax2182 c'est vrai
As a Quebecers who have been following you for years, I’m very glad you made this one !! Our relationship with English is extremely complex as you probably know and your video is a blessing ! Excellent as always but this one is more personal to me.
as a native speaker in french and english due to my english family living in france since before i was born, i find it fascinating how similar some words are that i never thought twice about. it also explains why i accidently use some french words when speaking english and vice versa
As an FSL instructor (the best in Paris!), I LOVE watching these videos! I teach things like that all year long! :)
17:26 "Nouvelle" also means "Novel", but it's a specific kind of story so it's not used so much. It's more like a 10ish pages story
I'm a native speaker of English and learned Spanish in high school. Later at university, I studied linguistics and learned both French and German. Knowing English helped with learning French vocabulary, but sometimes my Spanish interfered with it. Knowing Spanish grammar helped me learn the French grammar more easily, and funnily enough, knowing some French vocabulary helped with some German vocabulary as well.
As a Cajun who only speaks English, I'm surprised at how much French I actually know 😛 Didn’t realize how much stuck with me!
Time to learn it my guy
@@sa..9780 learn French language, it's never too late😉
Un Cajun qui ne parle pas français a perdu sa culture.
@@terioze9 Actually, I'm trying to speak as much French as possible. For example, "Regarde ce champ-là tout vert. Ça a l'air du paradis. J'crois ben qu'mes enfants à venir vont aimer ça."
I don't know if anyone pointed this out in the comments, but there is a mistake at 03:10
There is a huge difference between:
"C'est une longue histoire"
And:
"C'est une longue Histoire"
The right translation is:
"It's a long story"
And:
"It's a long history"
For the same word in French, we use a capital letter as the first letter to mark the difference between a story and a historical fact.
As a German, I was most surprised by the word "grippe". Because in German it is the same word, so I thought it would be Germanic but of course not recognized in English because there it's called "flu". It turns out, "grippe" is actually a French word, and pretty young (from the 18th century) and the Germans got it from the French.
@@bernhardkrickl3567 there are a lot if germanic wards in French . Frank people gave us a lot.
i personally would love to see a similar video of folks that are spanish/english bilingual or semi bilingual. there are millions of folk that speak english and spanish in the united states alone and they would perceive french quite differently. keep up the great content !
I liked so much the effort of 3 participants they dont speak french but can understand, basic, intermediate and pratical French without confusions.
Only true advanced french is harder for all them, the basic level of french or other french regionals idioms for them all aren't difficult in concret case.
Love your test and linguistical experiment Paul.
Love ya.
💙💙💙💙💙💙💙🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻
As someone who's studied both english and french, it fills me with joy to see both languages collide for once ❤
As someone whose first language was Armenian, then had English become their native language, as well as having taken 3 years of Latin in high school; most of this was fairly straightforward to me. One interesting thing to me was "grippe", in Armenian we have the word "Գրիպ" (g'reep) which means sick, so there's some connection there I didn't know about. 😂
Excellent video .as Mexican I realized that. why English has a lot french words?. So I bought a English-french dictionary I live in Mexico . It was a surprise to watch how many words are the same or almost.
Salut Paul !
As a native French speaker, I believe loan words from Latin and Old French helped me quite considerably to learn English. It's a double edged sword though as there are plenty of false friends and it doesn't help for casual speak and the myriad of prepositional verbs.
But my case is unusual because I started to learn German almost 5 years before having my first English course so even though I've lost most of it, German helped me to get a grip on vocab and grammar on English as well as it occasionally helps me to read Flemish or even some Swedish.
I'm french Canadian and I found that exercice really intersting and your guests were really good for person who don't know french. Intersting experience! Thanks
Thanks! I’m glad you liked it!
The overlap in the French and English vocabularies is so great that if you spent like a day familiarizing yourself with the basics of French grammar - the articles, pronouns, how the tenses are generally formed, common forms of have and be, - that's enough to enable you to read most text in French on the basic level. Sequel video idea?
Not true. All 4 of the "big" verbs (Etre, avoir, faire and aller) are different. throw in the conjugations and all the grammatical complexity and the only thing one could understand after a day are cognates. I doubt anyone with no training could even make a stab at understanding.
@@DonaldMains Additionally stuff like false friends will throw people off. Looking solely at reading, in basic informal texts the vocab is too different from English to understand. And at an advanced level, the level of vocabulary is very similar to English, but is much harder to understand due to a higher level of comprehension needed to understand a formal text. Additionally, false friends make up probably like 1/4 to 1/2 of similar words between the languages which will further throw people off. Furthermore, in the video they are given the text read out to them which you wouldn't have if you were actually reading.
Also the sentences in this video are very much cherry picked to give people a high chance of guessing right. A fairer analysis would be to give a news article as a formal text, and a story written by a child as an informal text.
It helps but it also comes with nuances.
@@DELottProductions the point was to see if they could figure out the sentence, a French person wouldn't fully understand a scientific or news article in English either, they only get the basic idea, obviously you wouldn't get everything that it is talking about
@@danielzhang1916 I know what the point of the video is, and like I said it is not a fair analysis of genuine comprehension because the sentences are cherry picked to include an easily translatable word.
If someone gave me (a french and english speaker), an Italian sentence with mangiare and pizza, I would probably understand it. But that would be 0 indication of my comprehension of the language. Like I said, you need an actual text from the real world for this to be a fair analysis, because understanding a sentence which is cherry picked to make it easy means absolutely nothing at all in the grand scheme of things.
That is such a great observation about French being the language of the upper classes. I know that when I was taking French in high school, it definitely did help when taking the SATs. My favorite $10 word is ameliorate which is very common in French but sounds very snobby in English.
If you're struggling to think of the French word, usually if you just think of a longer English word that means the same thing, that's probably close to what you need.
It's very funny to find random french words in complicated english books, like "milieu" or "ennui" or even compounds like "en masse"
As a french student, using those words in english class would seem ridiculous and lazy, but not only do they exist, they sound very classy and formal!
Entertaining video. Some clarification if I may, as a Frenchman:
13:44: the word "croissance" has nothing to do with the pastry. Indeed "croissant" has 2 meanings in French:
- either derived from the verb "croître" (to grow) and in this case it's the past participle (croissant = growing). It's the meaning of your example (to stimulate economic growth)
- or "croissant" as a name. In this case it has nothing to do with the verb "croître" and it is related to a shape: the "shape of a celestial body in the solar system, whose the illuminated surface is less than half of the disc", according to the Larousse dictionnary. The most usual example: le "croissant de Lune" (moon crescent). This is the origin of the name of the famous pastry: its shape evoking a crescent moon but not at all its cooking or puffing out or anything like that😂.
By the way, just for the record: the "croissant" is not really French but Austrian... It's part of what we call "viennoiserie" instead of "patisserie" (pastry), viennoiserie standing for "product from Vienne" (Vienna, the Austrian capital).
Your last question: "how much did the French vocabulary in English help you when you were first learning it?". My answer: a lot and to some extent even in speaking later on (or at least trying to).
Looking for words sometimes in my first international meetings in English language (in a previous life since I'm an old man now...), I just used to say when I was stuck: " I don't know the right word in English, in French we would say this or that", asking for help, and surprinsingly most of the people were very often understanding me and giving me the corresponding English word which was ... the same🤭, except the pronunciation obviously.
This reminded me what Clemenceau (who was leading France during WWI) used to say: "L'Anglais, ce n'est jamais que du Français mal prononcé" ("English is nothing else than mispronounced French"...)
I'm kidding of course. Well ... maybe 😉
Regards
I can't really speak or understand French, but I know quite a bit of Spanish, and I've had a good deal of unintentional French immersion. If I see French text online, I don't even bother using an online translator because I end up understanding most of it anyways...
As a french person, I feel back to my first years at school learning english, and being able to recognise some words and trying to get them together to get something right out of it
Also, we also use the word junior in french as junior in English, whereas we use jeune where in English you'd use young.
Yes, and we also have "juvenile" in English, which is related.
Oh right!
As a French who learned English, it was really helpful to be able to use formal french issued vicabulary when I didn't know the proper geroanic term for a word
This was so much fun to follow along, hope there's a part 2 and 3 😊
I don't know about English speakers reading French, but I will probably make more videos with this kind of format.
@@Langfocus a portuguese and spanish one could be fun 😁
@@Langfocus maybe a video about how much english speakers can understand german, that would be interesting, i assume the results could be a reversal of this video
First time I fully understand both languages! It was fun to watch! Maybe do somekind of French & Spanish or Italian video!
French here, I really liked this video because as an English learner for professionnal purposes I was pleasantly surprised by the similarities between French and English!
But of course, and because it wouldn't be funny *sigh*, the pronunciation sends me off most of the time. Even if I KNOW how it's pronounced in English, during a conversation, my brain would just go back to French on its own. Takes lots and lots of practise! ^^
tips for English here : If you want to know that's "history" or "story", normally, the clean french will make caps on the H for history, and nothing for story.
example:
"Quelle histoire !" --> "What a story !"
"Quelle Histoire !" --> "What History !"
And while speaking, sometimes, when the context isn't clear, we will say "l'Histoire avec un grand H" (--> "History with a big H") then we all know what we are talking about.
That's totally the same for "Le Mal" : "the evil" and "j'ai mal" --> "i'm in pain", or "j'ai du mal" --> "'im having trouble". Caps is important when you wanna know if we are talking about the evil or not.
"Merci beaucoup" isn't the most usual, and it means "thank you so much". Idk why you are loving this word so much xD "beaucoup" is just there to mean "a lot" in the sentence. Example "j'ai beaucoup de mal" --> "I have a lot of trouble". or "c'est beaucoup trop cher pour moi" --> "that's too much expansive for me"
I'd like to see a similar video with some English-speakers attempting to read Dutch for the first time.
This was a fun episode to watch. I am from the US and I grew up with French in the home. Both parents and all grandparents are francophones. One grandmother only knew French. Fun to see how they navigated the sentences. I recommend the book, Kill the French” by Vincent Serrano-Guerra. Each day is a new story to read starting from very easy and each day gets a little harder. The stories are filled with French words that are understandable to English readers. It’s a good tool for learners of French to help build up their ability to read French and build up their confidence.
"pleut" originates from the Latin word pluvia, meaning rain 🌧. Spanish 🇪🇸 took the middle to the suffix, hence, lluvia.
Similar. "clavem" = key 🔑 in Latin. "cle" in French. "llave" in Spanish.
As a French speaker, I can say that the french vocabulary helps us like it helps English speakers. There are obviously some trap like library (not librairie) and actually (not actuellement) but it can help to understand a unknown word. It also gives the sensation that every french word has an equivalent in english, so we invented this equivalent (and sometimes it's works!).
The word order is also different so it can be difficult to use "our words" but in a order that make no sense in french.
So yes, it helps but we have to be careful!
For the first one "elle prépare le dîner" can also be a false friend depending where you're from it can be "she's making lunch"
Haha. Yes. In Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, dîner is lunch. In some parts of England, they also say dinner for lunch.
Came to comment that in the US south (currently living in southern Virginia), "dinner" is the common term for "lunch". And "supper" is "dinner" (evening meal)
@@devinstewart2973 In french from our grand parents the last meal also was the souper (supper), but everyone uses dinner now
May I correct, croissant is not about puffing but the shape of it ; a moon-shaped pastry; "croissant" is related to "crescent"
Native English speaker, strong Spanish abilities, can reverse engineer some Portuguese, limited exposure to French.
French vocabulary is pretty straight forward either because similar words exist in English or Spanish.
BUT my grip on french grammar is awful. Complex verb conjugations will absolutely wreck me. Nouns and adjectives are usually pretty easy to decipher.
Spoken french is still largely incomprehensible to me.
Fun exercise. Great video
Thanks for your little cœur Paul :)
Huge fan of the channel. I've said that before but gladly say it again.
On a more serious note than "oh wait, my mom is French..." :
I do agree though with Gideon from the "Let Them Talk TV" channel. It's not only formal English, it's also a lot of everyday words, syntax and even grammar.
When you are a native speaker of another Germanic language, like me, that's very "clear and obvious".
Even though, for a very long time, I struggled with English. It took me waaaay to long before I realised that all these difficult words were actually words that I already knew from French! :)
As a French this was very interesting and informative, especially to notice the vocabulary similarities in French and more formal English. I had never considered things from that angle! I was surprised to realize how easily English speakers could understand very formal French sentences (indeed vocabulary is almost the same!), but had much more trouble with simple everyday-life sentences. 😮
About the question at the end of the video, I couldn't answer it unfortunately. My first touch with English was in kindergarten, I was VERY young; all I remember is child assistants playing with stuffed animals with us to make us learn their names in English. 🤣
Anyway thank you Paul for your work, keep making those amazing videos. 🙏
because we don't use those simple words like in French, we only used the formal words alongside Germanic words over time, that's why we have cow and beef, pig and pork, etc, we didn't take all the words
At my college in the US, they asked us (chemistry majors) to gain reading proficiency in another language to expand our ability to read more journal articles. I picked French because (besides that there is a lot of scientific research in France), as this video reveals, I didn't actually have to learn much at all!
I was always told knowing Spanish made romance languages more understandable, but once I learned English, French became a LOT easier to understand. Now with German, the sentence structure seems more similar and I can also understand SOME words, but that's about it.
As a native Australian English speaker, I knew that roughly half of words in English language were originally French. It is a matter of finding root words to figure out as well as some basic French words. It makes more sense for both English and French speakers to learn from each others like both English and Dutch/German speakers. Interesting!!
13:40
I am sure the word comes from the growing moon as it shapes
I’ll never forget the very start of very preliminary language lessons in grade school, and it was around the 2nd or 3rd lesson where my friend said “Horse Divorce”. Hors d’oeuvres.
There's also the dreaded false friends.
An example on the top of my head is "libraire" not meaning library --- it's actually a bookstore. A library is a "bibliothèque".
And the grammar. I've never really been one for grammar, but French grammar is SO damn difficult! Especially the tenses and all the irregulars!
As a native French speaker, I’ve noticed something strange: every time I came across a French word while learning English, I’d skip it, thinking I already knew it. But later, in conversations, I’d freeze because I couldn’t remember the word in English. Eventually, I realized that if I don’t know the word in English, there’s a good chance it’s the same in French.
Even hospital is written the same way when you remember that the circonflexe stands for a missed out *s*
As a French native speaker, I am more at ease reading scientific articles for my job than in an everyday basic conversation. And as a learner of Russian, I can understand a bit of Polish or Bulgarian when I read these languages (but surprisingly not Ukrainian, even if the language is closer to Russian than the two I mentioned previously). Maybe a good subject for a new video?
Oui, très facile de deviner quelle mot correspond à l’anglais dans plusieurs situations.
Illusion, imagination, sector, major, silence, etc.
As a French native speaker I think those similarities mainly contributes to why our accent is pretty "French", a classy way to say shitty
As a french speaker, learning English was definitely easier in the latter phase of language learning where you already know the pronunciation and grammar but just need to gather up a bunch of vocabulary. In other languages like Chinese, this phase is very very very long and sometimes it just seems you don't really make any progress. Whereas in English, a lot of vocabulary I already could understand, but sometimes I'd say wrong endings like "determinated" for determined, or just make up a word from french that actually doesn't exist in English. Also, a lot of times even now I can understand a new word which comes from french but since English spelling isn't consistent, I can't tell where to put the stress on and how to pronounce the vowels.
I feel like I should apologise for the English spelling system!
As a Frenchman, when I was in high school and a bit later I read a few English novels in my free time, and I think having some passive knowledge of English words of French or Latin origin helped me a lot with going through them and acquire more vocabulary. Sci-fi was certainly easier than Tolkien.
French native speaker here. I read somewhere that old English prononciation was actually much closer to French.
Middle English maybe, but not old English that was fully Germanic (other than a tiny bit of Latin for priests and kings)
I learnt french as my fifth language, it took me 2 years to be able to communicate (not fluently, but descently. Having known english definitely helped a lot at formal languages. So if your goal is business language and education, it's quite helpful. BUTTTT, if you wanna talk french daily, you'd need to learn new words. Specifically, one thing i had trouble understanding is verlans.
Grippe actually used to be used for the flu in English as recently as the middle of the 20th century.
I speak English and can understand B1 level Spanish. I was able to get the basic meaning of all the sentences in this video except the "raining a lot” one because I didn't get the word for rain.
When I traveled to France last year, I went to a lot of lesser known places where the museums only had displays/introductions in French. Surprisingly, I was able to understand maybe 60% or even more of them.
Quand on apprend l'anglais à l'école, il y a beaucoup de mots qu'on comprend spontanément, mais on ne sait pas les prononcer correctement. Et assez souvent, les mots qui se ressemblent n'ont pas le même sens en français et en anglais (faux amis).