I found that really confusing until I remembered standard English for "I don't know" is "iunno" Edit: or just an intoned grunt
I think I picked up the j' in front of consonants from online? I am not entirely sure. MMO chat is its own brand of weird in any language, let alone two at once. "Vous needez pas?" "Si, moi je need."
Oddly enough, French tabletop RPG slang is almost completely different from the English one. It's only with video games that gratuitous English started to show up.
and then there's the thing I've seen sometimes where people leave out the "ne" in negative sentences, eg "je sais pas" instead of "je ne sais pas".
it's interesting to me that I find colloquial French (for instance, no "ne" but still "plus") to be completely understandable when spoken, and I can parse it well enough reading not-in-depth, but if I have to actually pay attention then it's "wait what? i don't-- oh they just dropped the thing..."
I've never really understood what google informs me is the "ne explétif". (The page I just found says "Don't mix up the ne explétif and the ne littéraire - they are used with completely different verbs." Oh yeah, that'd be terrible. Come on, French grammar. Be less...the way you are.)
And people get pissed off when you try to simplify it (which is kinda stupid anyway, a bunch of old people don't get to decide proper grammar and spelling for a language). What the fuck.
I took a French linguistics course that was quite a lot of fun. It's too bad my notes are on my dead computer, because there was an excellent section on how to pronounce everything. It made text->speech much less intimidating. Converting whole paragraphs into IPA was annoying at the time, mind, but it's hard to forget your liaison after that. In Canadian French, at least, you drop alternate schwas. So for je ne te manque pas you wind up with "jen te manque pas" ETA: Oh hey, Dr Kliffer left all the lecture slides online. If you're not familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, read the Oct 1 slides first; if you are, Oct 2 is a handy-dandy guide to pronouncing vowels in unfamiliar words.
I am also super familiar with IPA if anyone needs more explanation! (I would bet @EulersBidentity is too for that matter...)
Unfortunately not, I've only got passing familiarity with it. I should def put some time into learning it better soon.
Salut tout le monde! J'ai apprit le francais en école primare au Maroc. Quand j'étai petite je lisait beaucoup de BD francobelge - j'avait méme un abbonement à Spirou pour deux ans. (Ils devraient être encore a la maison de ma mère, si elle ne les a pas encore recyclée.) Alors bon, je me souvient comment on parle mais mon ortographe est super suspecte. Correctez-moi SVP.
I had French in high school for 4 year, and the grammar nearly did me in. I have retained very little of the French I was taught, which is a damn shame really.
