Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

--- Trebor Jung <treborjung@...> wrote:
>
> If the answer to my question is 'yes', your
> statement above is just stupid
> (to put it bluntly). How am I supposed to know which
> French you mean? And if
> it is 'no', you should be r'ly thankful we're not
> discussing Spanish.
>
This seems to be kind of an obsession here: French
does not exist, Spanish does not exist, there are only
a myriad a dialects and people find it hard to
understand each other. This is not at all the way I
feel it. I'm pretty sure that if you learn French any
usual way (ex: Alliance Française, or any language
method with records, or any school) you'll have no
trouble to get understood in any francophone country.
Sure, in Haiti, for ex, you may find it hard to use
Paris French, but is Haitian French yet ? I would say
no, or rather, there exist 2 languages there, French
and Haitian. But in Ivory Coast for ex, you'll have no
problem, at least among educated people (but that's
true for every language in the world, isn't it ?)

And I'm pretty sure that if you learned Spanish in
Madrid, you'll manage with it in Argentina or Ecuador,
even if the accent and the pronunciation of some
letters is different (and some vocabulary too, of
course).

So let's stop to be obsessed by local variations. I
never heard anybody answer to somebody wanting to
learn French, "oh, WHICH French do you want to learn
?" And even if somebody would learn Australian
English, I'm pretty sure he could learn Oxford English
to start with, and then adapt it to local usage. I
know that because I already talked with Australian
people, and I had absolutely no particular problem,
even having never learned anything about Australian
English. When I happened to have trouble, I would have
exactly the same trouble with English people.

I live in France and my neighboor next door doesn't
talk exactly the same French as I do. Yet we are both
French and we understand each other perfectly. If you
go that way, you'll get to about 150 millions of
variants for French language, and then, for sure,
you'll have touble choosing the one you want to learn.


=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Vote for the stars of Yahoo!'s next ad campaign!
http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/yahoo/votelifeengine/