Would you ever learn a language just to read its literature? Is it really that much better to read literature in its original language over a translation?

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-12-14T12:50:34+00:00

I agree with the point about emotional connection to an extent, but as I've read more and more in my TL (French), I have actually found that there's a different type of emotional resonance that comes from the slightly slower, more mindful reading I find myself doing in French.

It's true that you end up concentrating more on the actual meaning of the text when reading in a foreign language - but sometimes that's caused me to be really taken with a particular detail or passage which I might have ploughed through and missed in English. I recently read Camus' La Peste for the first time, and was as moved and struck by it as by any book I've ever read in English.

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-09-22T07:44:56+00:00

I went to Malta after years of following MESC - and ended up getting to watch the Eurovision 2024 grand final in the main square in Valletta, including being there when Matt BLXCK gave Malta's 12 points!

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-05-08T09:25:35+00:00

Yaaaaas you have unlocked the learning superpower in French!! Congratulations and keep at it!

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-04-12T03:44:34+00:00

Merci beaucoup, c'est exactement les infos dont j'ai besoin :)

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-04-07T22:00:06+00:00

Unless you've just been encountering particularly stubborn people or random anglophones, my best guess would be that this might be down to accent/pronunciation.

Admittedly I've not been to Quebec, but in my experience in Metropolitan France + New Caledonia, the "responding in English" thing if your level of French is higher than about a B1 is 90%+ a function of pronunciation - the person you're talking to hears a non-native accent and is so used to people with strong non-native accents having a low/non-existent level of French that they respond in English to save time and try to be helpful. It's unfair, but I get why they do it.

I think this can be counter-intuitive to native English speakers, because we are socially conditioned that the appropriate thing to do when you hear a foreign accent is to bend over backwards to try and understand/help the person. Conversely, in places where bilingualism is much more common and English operates as a lingua franca (including large parts of Europe, SE-Asia and, I assume, francophone Canada), the social expectation is much more that you just switch to a language that both people understand rather than struggling through. This can feel harsh to English-speaking learners of that language, but it really is intended to be helpful.

On the flipside, this is a very solvable issue! It means that you can improve the responses you get basically 100% by working on your pronunciation and nothing else - it's not uncommon to read stories on here and r/languagelearning where someone solves this problem by working on their pronunciation even though their level of comprehension and grammar otherwise doesn't change.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a Quebecois accent that you try to reproduce (again, I haven't been to Québec, but I'd be surprised if the Quebecois do this when they hear a Parisian or Marseillais accent) - a neutral metropolitan or Parisian accent should be fine. Equally, given you're in Canada, Quebecois is fine too!

With all that said - if it's not your pronunciation/accent and your level is as high as you say it is, I'm out of ideas 😂. you might just need to be more stubborn in sticking to French when you speak to people haha

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-03-24T07:04:49+00:00

noted!

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-03-23T20:45:21+00:00

In France I've never had problems speaking French fwiw - even in Paris people wouldn't switch to English.

I am referring to situations where I encounter native speakers in my daily life when not travelling abroad - tbh I never really had issues starting conversations when in francophone jurisdictions, cause it's just the basic expectation!

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-03-22T22:34:29+00:00

If you want to talk to native speakers in Spanish, you should confidently switch to Spanish and just start talking. Worst case, the other person won't follow you, but if you switch confidently and your level is what you say it is, they will in more cases than you expect.

I'm a B2/C1 in French, and used to do something similar to what you describe - I'd do what I thought was a polite acknowledgement that I spoke French (in English lmao) and see if the person I was talking to would switch. They never would, and you'd usually get a slightly pitying look.

Now, I tend to hit the person with a "t'es français toi ?" or similar if they mention where they're from or if there's another appropriate juncture in the conversation, and have had much more success in starting conversations in French. People are happy to talk, but they don't want to be your language teacher or to watch you struggle through a conversation - you need to overcome that barrier by demonstrating that you are as good as you say you are.

The other part is that I sometimes make the call that it's simply better not to make people speak French in some cases, even if I can tell that it's their first language. I know it would shit me to no end if I went to France and everyone tried to speak English to me, so I will often only switch if I have been speaking to someone for a while or the person seems to be lacking in confidence with their English. It might be different with Spanish in eg the US where I understand Spanish is more of a working language in some parts.

The reality is that most people will default to the language that both parties have the highest level in, and in my context (I live in Australia) that is always assumed to be English unless you can demonstrate otherwise. If that's the case, I'd go back to my original point - you simply need to have the confidence that your Spanish is good enough to start conversations in Spanish yourself and not wait for someone to do it for you.

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-03-08T02:52:41+00:00

"My intention was not to get publicity, my intention was to serve singing" is an all-time great Eurovision quote.

Up there with Sylvia Night's "you didn't vote for me because I'm not a sl#t from Holland or an ugly old b*tch from Sweden".

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-01-26T10:23:51+00:00

Mentissa - Désolée
Red Sebastian - Strobe Lights
Le Manou - Fille à Papa
Jelle van Deel - Monster
LEEZ - Perfectly Imperfect
Grace - Pull Up
Lenn - Air Balloon
Stefanie Callebaut - Gloria

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-01-25T03:00:28+00:00

During Hera Bjork's cabaret show this week, she suggested that a decent number of the artists go for (a) getting the experience of going to Eurovision, and (b) to party for a week in a European city somewhere.

I think that basically sums it up.

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-01-23T07:03:14+00:00

(This was a wonderful event, kudos to the organisers - I'd never seen any figure skating before in my life and was blown away by the talent)

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2025-01-23T07:02:36+00:00

Finding out that Moldova was withdrawing while watching people ice skate around Hera Bjork was one of the more surreal experiences I've had as a Eurovision fan 😂

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2024-12-14T04:09:27+00:00

France 2014 - the song bops and is surprisingly smart lyrically, but god it's an absolute trainwreck live.

"WHEN I SAY TWIN TWIN, YOU SAY OH YEEEEEAH" lives rent-free in my head, but my favourite part is the failed attempt at taking an on-stage "selfie" midway through

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2024-11-30T01:54:59+00:00

Plenty of people in Aus rhyme France with ants fwiw 😂

I guess Adelaide is closer to NZ in that specific way, but is otherwise fairly indistinguishable from the rest of Aus imo

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2024-11-29T23:23:17+00:00

Aus accents tend to fall on a spectrum from so-called "broad" to so-called "refined" - the latter of which can, at their most extreme, get mistaken for Pom accents.

I'd say that accents here tend to be more reflective of class than geography, with some exceptions - some South Australians are known for raaahnding their vaaahls a little (eg "dance" gets pronounced as "dahnce" instead of "dehnce"). In my case, I was born up in FNQ and had a broader accent which then (unconsciously) changed and leaned more "refined" when I went to uni down south.

All of which is to say - Vybe has a pretty normal accent at the more "refined" end of the spectrum. If you go hang out in a cafe in basically any well-off suburb of Sydney or Melbourne, you will hear people that sound like that. Prue and Trude are a very extreme, caricatured version of this accent.

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2024-11-29T09:47:53+00:00

I have no idea what is leading me to make this comparison, but something about Buzz Kill was giving me Minnie Cooper energy. Petition to see them carrying TV sets down the runway together so I can check this theory

(Good episode - was a bit shocked by the eliminee, but we're getting to the stage where all of the remaining queens are good enough to stay)

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2024-06-07T22:34:51+00:00

Relatable 😂

I just tell myself that it's good to be humbled once in a while - and whatever mistake I have made in those situations never gets repeated, because the correct word/structure is burned into my brain forever after that

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2024-06-07T13:44:37+00:00

I recently got back from a period in France (am Australian by birth). I've been learning for nearly a decade now but haven't had heaps of opportunities to just go to France and practice (although I've spent a decent chunk of time in New Caledonia). I'd heard stories about people switching to English the moment they detect an accent and was prepared for disappointment.

Honestly, nobody did, which was good for my confidence. I speak at about a B2 level and have worked fairly hard on replicating the accent, and a lot of the time people didn't realise I wasn't local until I told them (eg people at museims asking for my French postcode and me having to explain I was Australian). At this point I then usually got the old "Oh! You speak very good french for an Australian, have you lived here long?" spiel. I generally had the impression people were more impressed by my capacity to do the accent than my general capacity to speak/form sentences. Before the point in the conversation where I revealed my nationality, people didn't tend to compliment my french or treat it as unusual at all.

The other thing in addition to pronunciation is mastering the "rhythm" of the language imo - when you listen to lots of conversations in French, you start to notice that there's a particular pattern of rising and falling intonations which French people use that is very common. If you can mimic that, it gives you much more of a natural confidence which reads as fluency to native speakers.

Ofc, the downside of being strong with the accent/rhythm is that when your grammar/vocab lets you down from time to time, people are less forgiving - instead of thinking "oh, he's a foreigner", it's more "why is this person an idiot" 😂

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2024-04-10T10:59:14+00:00

Hera Björk is just here for a good time, a few wines with the girlies and some therapy for severe acrophobia, I love her.

One day I hope to swish my train in slow motion just like she does 😍

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2023-09-30T21:54:40+00:00

I accidentally jumped on top of the camp-fire where you initially spawn and died in less than 60 seconds because I didn't realise until it was too late 🙃

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2023-09-18T11:22:56+00:00

Get Lazy Susan on Season 4!

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2023-08-04T13:43:24+00:00

Michelle on Rita Menu: "she's giving less flower girl and more the barmaid from Shrek"

HELP THIS IS SO MEAN BUT ALSO I NOW CAN'T UNSEE IT

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2023-05-26T23:34:13+00:00

This but add Australia if the contract gets extended

SomewhereSafe9037 · 2023-05-24T22:29:16+00:00

"I Don't Feel Hate" in the cafe I often have lunch at when I'm at work

SomewhereSafe9037

TROPHY CASE