I should probably clarify: I had only a year's worth of classroom French before going overseas. I had some basic comprehension of how things were spelled, and the rudimentary understanding of the most common vocabulary, irregular verbs, and things like that. What I didn't have was practice stringing it all together, let alone in dealing with unfamiliar words added in.
What I basically figured out once there, on a sort of unconscious level, was that if you knew whether you were talking plural or singular, and what person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) then spelling aside, the sound is often very similar. A lot of the verbs end in either a long-a sound, a long-e sound, and sometimes an eu-sound, from what I recall. Something like that. If you could narrow it down by knowing it's masculine and singular, then chances were pretty good the ending sound would be such-and-such. Written, the ending might be -e, -eau, et, es. Like the last sound of 'travailler' and 'des' is the same, though spelled completely differently.
And, too, if you can get out the first half of any word, the rest can trail off. There is nothing that sounds like a native quite so much as slurring, but I didn't do it to sound native, I did it to avoid being definitive about which sound-ending I had guessed would work (and thus revealing for a fact how ignorant I really was). So a lot of my speech probably sounded sort of like, "I work... yester... an' the bi(ke)" with barest hints of the final sound. Speak fast, and slur, and you sound like everyone around you, anyway -- people really only require the first sound to know where you're going with something, and the rest they gather from context.
I guess what I'm saying is that I only had the basics of a formal phonetic system, in that I knew the fundamental sound-patterns that would form words, and I knew the sounds I could expect to hear. If that's a phonetic system (if very informal), then that's what I latched onto, but I didn't have spelling to go with it. Or maybe I should say, I rapidly cast aside the issue of spelling in favor of just keeping up with the conversations.
Strangely, similar happens to me when I read Mandarin: I can't read the characters and think, "two dogs played in the park" -- I see each character and 'hear' the character-name in my head: er ge gou... and then I translate the sound into the English meaning. Perhaps that comes from my first major second language also working in that way -- because I've noticed in reading over the French translation of the survey, it only makes sense to me if I read it out loud. Then suddenly I can understand what's being said, and I can sense when something's off -- not because I know the word to replace it, but because the sounds, or the pattern of them, are still buried in my neurons somewhere.
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Date: 19 Feb 2011 11:00 pm (UTC)What I basically figured out once there, on a sort of unconscious level, was that if you knew whether you were talking plural or singular, and what person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) then spelling aside, the sound is often very similar. A lot of the verbs end in either a long-a sound, a long-e sound, and sometimes an eu-sound, from what I recall. Something like that. If you could narrow it down by knowing it's masculine and singular, then chances were pretty good the ending sound would be such-and-such. Written, the ending might be -e, -eau, et, es. Like the last sound of 'travailler' and 'des' is the same, though spelled completely differently.
And, too, if you can get out the first half of any word, the rest can trail off. There is nothing that sounds like a native quite so much as slurring, but I didn't do it to sound native, I did it to avoid being definitive about which sound-ending I had guessed would work (and thus revealing for a fact how ignorant I really was). So a lot of my speech probably sounded sort of like, "I work... yester... an' the bi(ke)" with barest hints of the final sound. Speak fast, and slur, and you sound like everyone around you, anyway -- people really only require the first sound to know where you're going with something, and the rest they gather from context.
I guess what I'm saying is that I only had the basics of a formal phonetic system, in that I knew the fundamental sound-patterns that would form words, and I knew the sounds I could expect to hear. If that's a phonetic system (if very informal), then that's what I latched onto, but I didn't have spelling to go with it. Or maybe I should say, I rapidly cast aside the issue of spelling in favor of just keeping up with the conversations.
Strangely, similar happens to me when I read Mandarin: I can't read the characters and think, "two dogs played in the park" -- I see each character and 'hear' the character-name in my head: er ge gou... and then I translate the sound into the English meaning. Perhaps that comes from my first major second language also working in that way -- because I've noticed in reading over the French translation of the survey, it only makes sense to me if I read it out loud. Then suddenly I can understand what's being said, and I can sense when something's off -- not because I know the word to replace it, but because the sounds, or the pattern of them, are still buried in my neurons somewhere.