Yes you are correct, I would say. RP isn’t necessarily identical with a posh pronunciation but posh might be considered a subset of RP. The late queen, for example, is considered to have spoken “conservative RP.” There are of course words and turns of phrase and phonetic quirks that posh speakers of RP will have that actors or upper middle class people might not.
French
- Thread starter Serenus
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So I'm using a new curriculum this year based on the principles of comprehensible input, which are that rather than organizing the curriculum around specific grammatical points and explaining the minutiae thereof, students are simply exposed to the language and various tools and techniques are used to keep it just outside their comfort zone but still within their ability to figure out or guess (such as using gestures, a lot of cognates, using stock phrases and words over and over, repetitive narration, asking five or six different questions about the same fact, etc.). In principle, I think it's a good approach and the students are much more responsive to it. On the other hand, I find that the materials used often lean a little too heavily on cognates and comprehensibility (to English speakers) to the point where the French is unidiomatic or unnatural (much like some of my own utterances here). For example:
Thoughts?
- —ignoring a word like marron in favor of brun because it's more accessible to English speakers.
- —using cognates that aren't quite appropriate simply because they're easier for English speakers to understand (such as using politicien instead of politique, or docteur instead of médecin).
- —what seems to me to be forcing the French syntax/idiom to conform to English (such as saying prendre un cours instead of suivre un cours, or using marcher where aller à pied or se promener might be more appropriate).
Thoughts?
As a first thought, rather than using approximative words, I would rather try to explain the exact word with a the cognate. E.g.: marron est brun-roux; un homme politique est un politicien; un médecin qui a achevé ses études est docteur.
That specific example is probably no big deal because (I believe) "brun" is more common in everyday speech anyway. Of course, it's good to know "marron" too but if the aim is for your students to get by colloquially, "marron" isn't a priotity.
But, on the general principle, I share your concern. If you systematically avoid words that don't sound like English, that's a problem.
Same as above, more or less. Those precise examples don't seem a big problem to me (at least in the case of "docteur"; again, I think it's a bit more common in colloquial speech than "médecin").
But, on the general principle... well, see above.
Hmm... yeah, I think "suivre un cours" really is better. Regarding "marcher", it would depend on context, but if you say they use it where other phrases would work better, that's probably true.
All in all, I think you usually have to make some concessions with beginners so as not to overwhelm them with loads of unfamiliar constructions at once, but too much compromise is bad. Maybe the best way to go (when possible) is to start with things that aren't too different from English but are also idiomatic in French (or whatever language you're teaching; I have more experience of these things with Latin) but you still have to introduce more "alien" stuff at some point.
Comment vas-tu à l'école ? Je marche.
Does that seem natural to you? I'm genuinely asking. I would have thought it was more natural to say Je vais à pied.
Brun and docteur are definitely the only terms used in Québec. No one says marron there, to my knowledge, but the curriculum isn't consistently using Canadian usages. Maybe it doesn't matter with beginners.
It isn't shocking, but it's true that most of the time the answer would be "à pied".
Something I wouldn't accept would be:
Chaque matin, je me lève à six heures. Je me lave, je m'habille, je prends le petit-déjeuner, puis je marche vers (à?) l'école (= I walk to school). (Correct French: je vais à pied à l'école.)
I hope they don't have anything like that!
Chaque matin, je me lève à six heures. Je me lave, je m'habille, je prends le petit-déjeuner, puis je marche vers (à?) l'école (= I walk to school). (Correct French: je vais à pied à l'école.)
I hope they don't have anything like that!
That is exactly what they have. It's used wherever "walk" would make sense in English. Ex: Guillaume voit son professeur de maths. Il marche vers elle. [..] Il court à la classe.
Just to be clear, what I do appreciate about this curriculum is that it puts the emphasis on acquiring familiarity and the very beginnings of fluency over grammatical knowledge. So, for example, if a student writes or says something like *un fille or *je veut, you let it pass without comment unless the mistake is so egregious that it changes the meaning or makes it incomprehensible.
Another one that I just thought of: Qu'est-ce que tu veux être à l'avenir ? I've only ever heard something like Tu veux faire quoi plus tard ? or Qu'est-ce que tu veux faire plus tard ?
Another one that I just thought of: Qu'est-ce que tu veux être à l'avenir ? I've only ever heard something like Tu veux faire quoi plus tard ? or Qu'est-ce que tu veux faire plus tard ?
... I don't like that. They'll learn more quickly if you correct their mistakes.
Those indeed aren't the most natural sentences ever.
A better idea, in my view, would be to reassure the student on the understandability of their speech or writing, while still pointing out those little mistakes.
Well actually, research has shown that this is not the case. Correcting mistakes actually slows down beginners, because they shift their focus to correctness and not language acquisition. What makes language acquisition stick for beginners is when you put the focus on what is being said, rather than how it's being said (which is still important, but it's on the back burner, so to speak). For especially motivated or linguistically gifted students, correcting errors can be useful, but for the majority of learners, error correction has to be very curated. Most learners are incredibly inhibited and need to be coaxed into uttering anything.
I may have mentioned this before, but when I was in Saudi I worked with British and American people who were converts (reverts) to Islam and were very interested in learning Arabic, and it shocked me how difficult they found it. One guy in particular, from London, told me that he just couldn't make the vocabulary stick, nor could he learn to recognize written words other than by sounding them out letter by letter. He had been in Saudi for years and was praying in Arabic five times a day! Meanwhile, I wasn't as motivated as he but within six months I was reading street signs and menus at a glance.
Maybe because all medecins are docteurs in Québec? In France, with the centres hospitaliers universitaires, i.e. the hôpitaux, where most of the physicians are actually still students, the medecin one would meet will most probably not be a docteur (but rather an interne). Because in France too, as far as I can perceive it, médecins who are docteurs are quasi only called by their academic title: docteur.
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Maybe? If Canada has a similar system to the U.S., then that's the case.
I really like the comprehensive input approach, but this curriculum is a little concerning indeed. I don't think convenience should come at the expense of sounding unnatural.
Overall I agree with what's been said about which words or sentences sound natural or not, except for marron vs. brun. I'm an almost exclusive marron user, and I feel like most people around me are so too.
The reverse is true for me. Probably a regional thing.
I think marron instead of brun is very much a France thing. Brun is the older usage. Sometimes the metropolitan usage has changed and the outliers are more conservative. This is true in English and Spanish as well.