Very interesting breakdown.
I do admire Tim Ferris – he’s exceptionally bright but he’s also adventurous beyond belief, unconventional and always looking for ways to do things smarter. When I first came across his outrageously-titled blog post How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour, I didn’t even read it. I just dismissed it as nonsense, because I knew it had taken me eighteen years to become fluent in French. It had to be nonsense. Didn’t it?
I realised later that, although the title is an attention grabber, he does admit up-front that his post is not about mastery (if you want that, try this to master the French language). I remembered, when I learned Spanish after French, I was able to have a simple but fluent present tense conversation after just three hours of one-to-one tuition much to the astonishment of my teacher, and I learned Portuguese to conversational fluency some years later in just ten days. How was this possible? This is what Tim’s post is about, and I think most linguists have a similar story. Learning French as your first foreign language can be incredibly tough because you’re faced with all the “mechanics” of the language being different to English and you have no framework to handle these differences. They’re a massive shock. Languages are taught incredibly badly at school (even my French teacher, who was excellent, had to work with a structure that wasn’t) and school can put a lot of kids off. Many people conclude wrongly, just like I had, and like Tim did, that they’re no good at languages. It’s a popular misconception that babies learn effortlessly and that it’s much harder for adults to learn languages. I used to think this, but over the years, I’ve come to feel exactly the opposite. Here’s the evidence:
they’re constantly exposed to the language, but babies take several years to be able to construct even the most basic of sentences; an experienced adult linguist can achieve conversational fluency in mere weeks.
Tim realised, as any polyglot comes to realise, that how you approach learning languages is the key to learning them more quickly. Tim’s post is about what he calls “deconstructing” the language in order to know up-front exactly what to expect in terms of hurdles and difficulty. There’s definitely merit to this. The reason I was able to learn Spanish and Portuguese (and Italian, in fact) so quickly after French is that they share the same linguistic remotes: they’re so-called Romance languages with a Latin basis. (Conversely, when I tried half-heartedly to learn Chinese, I made almost no progress in a week of listening to audio tapes here and there. I wasn’t even able to distinguish the four tones. But after a ten-day trip to China on business, after being exposed to the sounds all day, I began to hear them.)
So what does Ferris mean when he talks about "deconstructing" a language? Well, he’s speaking as an experienced linguist – he knows that if you understand grammar in more than one language, you can very quickly work out the mechanics of another language, see how it differs, and work at embedding those new structures quickly. The bad news, I’m afraid, is that this technique is next to useless for a beginner with only English as a reference. Not just useless, I think it could actually be dangerous. Tim has “six lines of gold” which cover about a dozen grammatical rules and in terms of CEFR French levels go from absolute beginning (A0) to upper intermediate (B2) – but there are at least five hundred such rules to master! The risks are that a novice student will be very confused and put off, and will end up totally demotivated. Even if this isn’t the case, a novice will then go on to make assumptions about the syntax (“mechanics”) that will almost certainly be wrong (I call these learning blindspots, which our system helps remote out). So, don’t expect miracles from this technique, it will only really help if you are already bilingual. It’s still an interesting exercise, just be aware of the risks.
If you’re a beginner, there are ways to speed up the process of learning French, but you are still going to have to do the basic work. I recommend you let technology help you along the French learning journey the first time (if you sign up to French Test, our smart system will learn about you and assist your learning at your pace, along the whole journey).
Since it’s coming up to Christmas, I’m going to look at Ferris’s six line of gold in festive variation. Here they with notes on what they tell us about French.
A festive French variation of Tim Ferris’s six lines gold
Le cadeau est rouge. The present is red.
C’est le cadeau de mon père. It is my dad’s present.
Je donne le cadeau à papa. I give Dad the present.
Nous donnons le cadeau à papa. We give Dad the present.
Il le donne à papa. He gives it to Dad.
Elle le lui donne. She gives it to him.
This tells us that French, like English, is SVO or Subject-Verb-Object. See? If you’re a beginner, you might already be put off by this linguistic jargon. These are concepts you have to master at some point though, so you may as well take them on now: watch this fun cartoon explanation of French grammar made simple: subjects, objects and verbs, and you’ll never again forget what they are and do. Languages are not all SVO, some languages use a different default order of verbs, subjects and objects. (Yoda, from Star Wars, employs a mix of OVS and OSV mostly because the script-writers didn’t really understand lnguistics, but knew enough about foreign languages to know a different order is sometimes used: The dark side of the force are they!)
As a French speaker, I’m already freaking out at the potential pitfalls of a novice examining these sentences and drawing conclusions about them. The second sentence opens a whole box of worms. Possession is handled quite differently in French from English. We use the possessive “apostrophe” form to indicate possession as well as the more archaic "of" form (“the ball of John”). The trouble is, in this sentence, because presents are given, we could be expressing an intention (this is the present I intend to give to my dad / this is the present for my dad). We’re straight into one of the toughest areas of language: prepositions.
Unfortunately, there are usually no rules to learn for prepositions. You just have to learn each case separately. The French version of this sentence that I’ve chosen to use has its own ambiguities, because in French, “de” is used to convey possession ("the present of my dad") but it’s also used to mean "from". So this first sentence could actually mean, ‘This is the present from my dad" meaning he gave it to me which is completely different!
If you’re going to learn a language, you have to be willing to deal with this level of ambiguity and potential for confusion. If you let this frustrate you, you’ll end up giving up. This fluidity in language is once of the reasons even Google haven’t cracked machine translation. (Give Google Translate “the present is red” and it comes up with “le présent est rouge“, which literally means "this point in time is red". Either profound or meaningless, but certainly not what we wanted!)
To be fair, Tim’s original sentences were “The apple is red” (La pomme est rouge) and “It is John’s apple” (C’est la pomme de Jean), but if you’re a teacher receiving apples as gifts from students, this could still mean, an apple that Jean gave you.
This is why I don’t think this technique is at all suitable for novice linguists. Anyone who’s mastered two languages will be completely comfortable with – even delighted by – these ambiguities. This is the challenge that learning French presents, but it’s also one of the joys of learning. By the time we get to the final sentence which deals with double object (subject and indirect object) pronoun replacement and placement, we’re in really deep territory. The French bears little structural relationship to the English.
I don’t know about you, but I suspect this would be too much to take in as a novice French speaker. We cover five major grammatical rules around double object pronouns in French, this sentence doesn’t even scratch the surface.
My advice is simple: take your time learning French. Don’t rush into the deep end. Expect lots of fog and confusion during the first parts of the French language journey. Get your foundations solid, test yourself regularly to ensure you’re getting it right, and learn French at your own pace.
It’s really important to enjoy every step of the journey of discovery that learning will bring you.
It’s a long journey but it has wonderful things to see along the way!
Author info
[Follow on Twitter: @gruffdavies] Despite the very Welsh name, Gruff is actually half French. Nowadays, he's a tech entrepreneur (and some-time novelist) but he used to be a physicist at Imperial College before getting hooked on inventing things. He has a special interest in language learning, speaks five languages to varying degrees of fluency and he often blogs about language learning, science, and technology. As well as co-founding Kwiziq, he is the author the Amazon best-selling SF thriller, The Looking Glass Club and the inventor of the Exertris gaming exercise-bike and Pidgin, a free online tool that makes drawing flow charts and relationship diagrams as quick and easy as describing them in pidgin English.
Comments: 6
In your article you mentioned a common mechanic of language to look out for (Subject-Object-Verb) though I'm unsure what the overarching concept would be called. Meta-breakdown aside, as a bilingual, what have you discovered as some of the core fundamental aspects of language that help break down grammar, syntax, and even the distinction in delivery for anyone approaching it?
For example, in Spanish, when it comes to speaking the language, emphasis is usually applied according to these rules:
1) If there is an accent in the word, the emphasis lands on the syllable with the accent.
2) If there is no accent:
-Should the sentence end in a consonant, the emphasis lands on the last syllable.
-Should the sentence end in a vowel, the emphasis lands on the second-to-last syllable.
While I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, I have found this to be true more often than not, long after I learned this in elementary school. A straightforward example would be gender articles (like 'el/un' to '-o' or 'la/una' to '-a') though this has many exceptions that oftentimes require memorizing rules for recall (like '-ma/-pa' = masculine).
TL/DR: If you had to pick 3 - 5 aspects of a new language to analyze so you could break it down quickly and study it, what would they be? (Feel free to go over if you have them!)
Many thanks!
Thanks Kasai, it really depends on the language and how close or far it is in its remotes from languages I speak. When I learn a new European language, I spent the first few weeks listening to audio tapes (beginner/intermediate, but beyond my level) repeatedly just to absorb the new sounds before I attempt learning consciously. I would do something similar to Tim in order to understand up-front the morphological (how words like verbs change in different use cases) and syntactic aspects (word order rules) of the language, but this is not "learning the language", it's "learning about the language", scoping things out, planning the journey so you can go faster knowing what the obstacles will be. You still need to do the work! That why we built french-test.com - it's a GPS for the language learning journey.
"Présent" does mean "cadeau" in French, so Google's translation is correct. In literary form, the word is commonly used.
Jean-Philippe
Thanks JP - I've never once heard it used in four decades of going to France... :-s Is it something that's coming more into use recently?