My francophone wife practiced saying squirrel for like 7 years before she was able to get it kinda right, so that’s very impressive if true. It doesn’t help that in my accent, it’s pronounced as one syllable. Even good approximations of the pronunciation that I’ve heard by French speakers are usually done in two syllables.

Does DE count?

It’s crazy that new expansions are still dropping, and the ranked community is thriving.

They’re just so ubiquitous in English. In my experience, people coming from the Romance languages have a very hard time with them, because most of the actions they describe are a single verb in their mother tongues. Imagine having to remember what two words mean, but then also having to remember that when you use the two words together, they form a distinct, sometimes even unrelated, meaning.

And there’s thousands.

Typical.

La richesse de la langue ne cesse jamais de m’étonner.

It sounds ridiculous to us, but that’s just how they talk. It also works in reverse for them; I sometimes have to remind my spouse when we’re among English speakers that she sounds like she doesn’t have enough mash potatoes in her mouth.

Pure poetry.

In French, it’s ‘le pénis,’ but nobody says that. ‘Dick,’ is feminine (la bite.)

Also, ‘vagina’ is masculine, but ‘pussy’ is feminine, because if you were to say ‘le chat’ it would mean a cat, but by feminising the word, it becomes ‘la chatte,’ meaning pussy.

As someone who grew up Anglophone, I actually find gendered languages much more precise. On the other hand, in order to make yourself understood one must have a rich vocabulary, because the definitions of words are often more narrow than in English.

And don’t even get me started on phrasal verbs… English is messy.

Exactly.

After a while, most words (with exceptions) just ‘feel’ like one gender or the other, but nobody ever thinks about it in terms of ‘sex’. I barely even think about it at all, and I’ve only been speaking French daily for a couple years at this point.

Although it still bothers me that ‘silicone’ is feminine. It’s just not logical.

Henriette Walter. Her works on French linguistics are both fascinating and informative.

Iris Murdoch. I’ve only read The Sea, The Sea, but it’s one of the books that got me into literature when I was a teenager. I really need to get around to exploring more of her work.

Ouch, I wasn’t privy to the particulars, nor am I a resident of Switzerland, merely an admirer of how things are run there (usually). I guess the people’s notions of liberty aren’t as strong there as I had thought!

Luckily, thanks to Switzerland’s direct democracy model, Proton and co. will likely garner enough signatures to challenge this with a referendum. What makes me worry is how they’ve tried to introduce this without consulting parliament.

The saving grace with French is that when you read a word, you can (almost always) divine its pronunciation immediately. I’m not saying a reform isn’t in order, as not pronouncing half the letters in a word seems kinda stupid, but in my opinion English is several orders of magnitude worse. My spouse, who practically learned English through me while we lived in an Anglophone country for almost a decade and is quite fluent, still can’t spell worth a shit.

And even us native speakers have to guess the correct pronunciation of words we haven’t heard before, which is insane. When l was young I was a voracious reader, but having never heard many of the more uncommon words spoken before, I often internalised the wrong way of saying them.

Fuck it, I’m on board. Let’s gut this thing and start fresh.

In this case, how far do we go through? Do we basically eliminate the letter ‘c’? Do we re-add thorn and eth? So many possibilities, but I doubt we will ever see it come to fruition in our lifetimes. There are too many people who are obsessed with tradition in the world.

Fair enough, I only said that cause it was the case for me aha.

Not necessarily, could be a Bluetooth driver issue.

This. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I like this one, yet I mildly disagree. In my opinion, being that English spelling is already a complete disaster, standardized orthography is important in order for the widest range of persons to maintain comprehension.

However, I do believe that correcting people’s spoken English is ridiculous, especially if it’s their mother tongue. Language evolves, not everyone is meant to sound like some asshole from Cambridge.

In my experience, my French relatives are even worse for this, correcting their young children to always say oui instead of ouias, or asking us to say fais attention ! (written form) instead of fais gaffe ! (Informal, how people talk in familiar settings) when in the presence of their child. Nah bro I’m not going to pretend to be bourgeois just so you can feel superior.

Yeah speaking the language is essential. The Swiss are very protective of their culture, without a doubt, but I live very close to them so I’m pretty used to their way of thinking.

And I’m an early riser to boot, so no problems there!

That’s interesting because in my limited experience, Berlin and Frankfurt are verrry different cities within the context of Germany. Personally, as a foreigner looking to integrate, I would pick Berlin 100%, but maybe that’s just me.

Politically the area leans pretty left, as opposed to the majority of Switzerland which is rather right-leaning. I’ve never lived there of course, so maybe I’d end up hating it, but with how things are going in Europe generally, the list of places where people share the same general ideas is getting smaller and smaller. Also, I speak French, so there’s that aha.