Give Me 10 Mins, I'll Fix How You Hear French in France

Comments · 69

• WH

  @WhiteSpatula · 1 month ago

  I like your restaurant example. I often say I know just enough French to mistakenly order the wrong dish from a menu, but then explain how much I enjoyed it anyway.

  18

• PA

  @pauljjalix7400 · 2 weeks ago

  I always used the 70% rule. In fact I started learning French in a company in a French speaking town where almost no one new English. So I just really was using the 10/15% rule until I got to Paris.<br><br>You&apos;re describing exactly the way I learned. I never took a class and back then we only had cassette tapes. The tapes got me started. However within a few months I had already put the tapes aside. I had never learned grammar but now I&apos;m coming back to it decades later to see if I can put together some of that 30%. 🤔

  1

• PA

  @patriciablakeslee737 · 1 month ago

  Living in France now for over a year. I&apos;ve just started using this concept, and it works! &nbsp;I quickly became used to a person asking if they could sit next to me on a bench where i was sitting. It was pretty obvious. So i would say, bien sûr, or, je vous en prie. Then one day a man approached and I assumed he was asking the same question. When i said yes, he looked surprised. Quickly i recognized one word he spoke, &nbsp;&quot;déranger&quot;. &nbsp;What he had said was &quot;would it bother you if i sat here?&quot; &nbsp;🤭 . Instead of feeling embarassed, now i just laugh.

  11

• MU

  @mufaaaasa · 3 weeks ago

  I ordered a coffees at a kiosk the other day and expected the server to ask me if there was anything else. So I wasn’t really listening to what he said but then I heard just one word “sucre”. I answered “pas de sucre merci” All was good,just what you were talking about!

  1

• JE

  @jeffsherman91 · 1 month ago

  I&apos;ve always just naturally tried to get what I could and extrapolate the rest from context.<br><br>Two of the most notables, though, were in 2022. &nbsp;First was on a TGV from Paris and we were going to a little cow town in Germany to visit my wife&apos;s family (obviously, we had to change trains a couple of times). &nbsp;First change was in Ulm, then in Ingolstadt.<br><br>They made an announcement, which is notoriously difficult to understand over the train&apos;s loudspeakers. &nbsp;At the end of it, I thought to myself, “No, I couldn’t have understood that properly.”<br><br>Sadly, I did, and they repeated - with far fewer details - in English. &nbsp;Trouble with the track up ahead, they had to do repairs, and we were going to be stopped for 45 minutes. &nbsp;Which meant getting into Ulm too late to make our train to Ingolstadt. &nbsp;Good news (in German) was that we were put on a later train from Ulm to Ingolstadt. &nbsp;Bad news is that we&apos;d missed the last train to our final stop. &nbsp;Good news is that DB gave us a taxi voucher to take us by taxi from Ingolstadt to our final destination.<br><br>Other similar experience was in the Air France flight home (LA) from CDG. &nbsp;We&apos;d flown in from Berlin and changed planes at CDG.<br><br>Announcement came over the loudspeakers in the plane. &nbsp;Always hard to understand, especially with everyone talking and moaning about what the pilot was saying.<br><br>Nah, couldn’t be right.<br><br>It was. &nbsp;Engine problem indicator, we were turning around somewhere roughly over London, dumping fuel over the English Channel, and then returning to CDG, where a mechanic would take a look and determine whether it was just a bad sensor or an actual engine problem.<br><br>Turned out to be an engine oil leak, and they delayed our flight until the next day.<br><br>The announcement of where to go was hard to understand because of the generally difficulty understanding an announcement on ANY airplane, and everyone making noise and talking. &nbsp;They did NOT repeat it in English. &nbsp;When my wife asked if I 100% understood it, I couldn’t say I knew 100% for sure I&apos;d gotten everything, and so we followed a group of passengers to the completely wrong place, wound up going through security again (and my wife getting in trouble for carrying a bottle of water from the plane), and then winding up at the absolute last gate which was completely empty.<br><br>A nice AF employee (who spoke perfect English) knew of our plane&apos;s plight and walked us back where we were supposed to go - which, as it turned out, was exactly what I&apos;d understood the pilot to have said.<br><br>The “trick” is you need the gist of what someone is saying, not to be able to translate it word for word.<br><br>BTW, what waiter didn’t know to ask how Robert wanted a burger cooked (and had to return to ask)?

  5

• YU

  @yussis7341 · 1 month ago

  This exact same thing has happened to me multiple times. I have been learning french since february this year and in May I went travelling in Morocco. When I got to one of my hostels there, the owner asked me something really quickly in French. The only thing I caught from the sentence was &quot;d&apos;où?&quot; Based on that word I could keep the conversation going because I kinda assumed that he asked me &quot;Where did you come here?&quot; And finally my guess was right. So what I mean by this is that in French you have to kinda guess that what people are telling you to keep the conversation active. They don&apos;t have time to always repeate all the sentences for you again and again.

  2

• KA

  @KaiOpaka · 2 weeks ago (edited)

  I did this once before I knew any French. I was in Notre Dame, walking around like a tourist during a break from study abroad in London, and I must&apos;ve seemed like a high school student on a field trip. A woman comes up and starts explaining something to me in French, and not wanting to be rude, I tried to follow. Just with physical context, overlapping words, and some memory of European history, I pieced together what she believed I was there to learn about for school. I understood she was asking if I got it (in the context of French &nbsp;adult to French teen, not because I was an English speaker), and nodded trying to give an appropriate facial expression that wouldn&apos;t give me away. She seemed pleased and moved on. One of my prouder moments as a shy young person.

• WV

  @wvivtv-m · 2 days ago

  I smoked a little weed one night and was listening to a French movie and this 70% naturally happened and I better understood. Now, I don’t need the weed to do it- because I experienced this method. It really does work.

• OL

  @Olgasknittinggroup · 2 weeks ago

  oh, so helpful!!! merci!

• KA

  @KamleshVidula · 1 month ago

  Merci beaucoup. C&apos;était super.

  1

• CO

  @corgiowner436 · 1 month ago

  I’m a little hard of hearing so I have real difficulty if it’s noisy even in English.

  23

• LI

  @LisaMoo54 · 1 month ago

  Very good advice!

  1