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Old 03-07-20, 04:11 PM
  #82  
axolotl
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Originally Posted by Stadjer
Me too. I find it very difficult to pick up irony and whit, and the French themselves seriously lack staccato in the sense that they make every word flow into the next one. I noticed that Canadian French or West-African is much easier to follow because they speak in seperate words more. But I usually struggle more with simple conversations because of all the different words for daily stuff, while the 'academic' words are easy to recognize and translate.
My French is fluent, but I find Quebecois French and some African French much harder to understand than European French. It's true, however, that the French language has a "liason" between words which results in one word often flowing into the next. The difficulty I sometimes have with Quebecois French is a combination of accent and vocabulary. Quebecois French has a lot of words which now have a different meaning there versus Europe. There is also quite a bit of slang, much of it from American English. And then there's Acadian French. I first encountered that in a few francophone pockets of Nova Scotia. It was virtually incomprehensible to me. I have also known several folks who came from French-speaking countries in Africa. Those who grew up speaking French in their own homes I find easy to understand. But those who only spoke French at school and spoke an African language at home, were much harder for me to understand because they typically had thick African accents.

I'm fascinated by accents and imitating sounds. I think I have a pretty good ear & tongue for hearing and imitating foreign sounds, but I also benefited from a college phonetics class which forced me to listen carefully to foreign sounds and to my own efforts to imitate them. I was recently in Mexico and every single American or Canadian I heard speaking Spanish had a thick North American accent, even those who were quite fluent in Spanish.

I've never had someone in France respond to me in English. I'm told that I have a slight accent which is unidentifiable. On recent trips, when French people have asked me my nationality (they routinely do this in tourist information offices, because they keep statistics), I've started asking them to guess. The most frequent guess is "Belgian", and I assume they think I'm a native Flemish speaker, though next time I'll ask.
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