Do you speak French?

[CoffeeCat]

I'd like to get a feel for how many people on this board speak French. It doesn't matter if you learned it in any particular country/province... just want to know, generally. My overall desire would be to find out if there are enough people here who DO speak it (either fluently or just a bit of it), because perhaps (with moderator permission) a conversation group would be fun if there's any desire/call for it. I've recently wanted to learn more French, and improve my conversational skills, especially spelling and grammar.... so, here goes!

[TRL1957]

I'm able to say, thank you, How are you? and can no longer count all the way to 10 anymore. I'd like to speak both French and Spanish.

[RebeccaG]

I understand a lot of French but in terms of actually speaking it, I am very slow. I do much better at writing or reading it because I can slow down.

[twotickets59]

oui, je parle francais comme une vache espagnole

[CoffeeCat]

oui, je parle francais comme une vache espagnole

That well, eh? Didn't know cows COULD be Spanish.

[Literalist-Luke]

Je ne parle pas francais!

[Kaninchen]

I consider myself conversational or fluent in my spoken French, and I can read anything in French, but my writing isn't all that great yet. My classes have been primarily in conversational spoken French, but it served me really well in Paris this summer!

[Bethany67]

Fluent French here - count me in.

[historyb]

Oui I speak a bit.

[daughter]

Quand j'étais plus jeune j'ai travaillé en France - j'étais une interprète à Lourdes, et j'ai enseigné aux enfants français l'anglais. Je le parle raisonnablement bien, mais avec un accent. Mon fils a un meilleur accent français que j'ai! La seule langue que je peux orthographier dedans est l'anglais.
Do you want a translation, or can someone correct my grammar? Should I have said "Mon fils a un meilleur accent français que j'ai!" Somehow that feels odd. I wanted to say "que moi", but that also feels odd.
My French is okay when I speak, and I read it well - I can translate a newspaper article from French into English, but I feel very awkward writing it, because of course my mistakes are permanently recorded then! I could do with learning some accuracy.
Bethany graduated Oxford with French and German... I'm sure she can correct our various mistakes. Would that be okay Bethany? I read French better than I write it.

[Pilgrimtozion]

Je parle un petit peux français aussi, mais pas beaucoup. C'est plus difficile pour moi parce que je parle Suedois aussi; souvent, je commence en suedois et pas en français.

Ok c'est ça! Merci et au revoir!

[Sherrie]

ummmmm...only said hello one time in french at the custom booth in Windsor, and will never do so again. It cost me a day and a load, due to them doing a serious custom check on me, and snooping in my truck, and x-raying my truck. I mean never again will I ever do that. Sorry, but french is no longer my desire to speak, or know.

[daughter]

Which Windsor, where? Do they not like French people?

I always found French very useful when I was up against officialdom. I spent two years as a hunt sab speaking French, or Irish, or Russian, very fast (probably very ungrammatically) and refusing to stop when threatened with arrest... they simply assumed I couldn't speak English.

Then, one awful day, a French speaking hunter cottoned onto my little game. He overheard me telling a police man that I was very sorry, but I couldn't help him, because it was absolutely imperative that I run after my friends, because I had lost my map, and I had no idea how to find the local swimming pool.

Thank goodness I could run in those days.

[Bethany67]

Quand j'étais plus jeune j'ai travaillé en France - j'étais une interprète à Lourdes, et j'ai enseigné aux enfants français l'anglais. Je le parle raisonnablement bien, mais avec un accent. Mon fils a un meilleur accent français que j'ai! La seule langue que je peux orthographier dedans est l'anglais.

Quand j'étais plus jeune j'ai travaillé en France - I pondered using the imperfect tense here because it was for a continuous period of time ie. I didn't just work once, although the perfect tense would stress that it's a completed event in the past.

j'étais interprète à Lourdes - a job or career doesn't use the indefinite article. Imperfect is correct here.

et j'enseignais (yup I'd go with imperfect in this case, as it's activity within the completed time period) l'anglais aux enfants français - I'd swop the word order: subject, verb, object, preposition, indirect object. But if you were using an adjective eg. l'anglais moderne, you could go either way on the word order, and your original choice sounds better.

Je le parle raisonnablement [suggest assez - raisonnablement isn't incorrect as an adverb but a little anglicized] bien, mais avec un accent. Yup. You might want to add something like 'perceptible'as an adjective.

Mon fils a un meilleur accent français que je ne l'ai! You need a negative in here as a comparison - it's just one of those things that sounds right. You could also go with 'que moi.'

La seule langue dans laquelle [in which, instead of dedans = inside] je peux orthographier [or ecrire] est l'anglais. Or change the phrase around and start with 'L'anglais est la seule langue dans laquelle ...'

Pretty good though I'm certainly up for suggestions of improvement myself - I don't get to use it as much as I'd like and I'm aware there are areas where I'm a bit rusty. My degree focussed on 11th - 18th century literature, so I'm better on the more classical vocabulary rather than contemporary language and slang.

I must admit, I'm really lazy when it comes to typing French; it's such a faff working out the keystrokes for accents or inserting characters as symbols. If I'm writing by hand, I'm meticulous with the diacritical marks like accents, cedillas and circumflexes.

[CoffeeCat]

ummmmm...only said hello one time in french at the custom booth in Windsor, and will never do so again. It cost me a day and a load, due to them doing a serious custom check on me, and snooping in my truck, and x-raying my truck. I mean never again will I ever do that. Sorry, but french is no longer my desire to speak, or know.

Ooooh, do you mean Windsor Ontario (right across the border from Detroit, MI)? You poor thing. Yeah.... at border crossings, they don't generally like that. *cringe* You couldn't possibly have known either. I'm sorry you had the bad experience. Yikes. When you get to Eastern Ontario (rather than Southern Ontario) you'll find a LOT more French speakers. I'm only a few hours away from Ottawa, where I'm living now -- and Ottawa isn't far from Quebec.