<p>So I’m progressing along on teaching myself French, using several of the great resources suggested by posters here on pugmadkate’s thread. The main problem I have is there is no one to ask questions of when they arise. So I’m hoping some of the great Francophiles here will be able to lend some insight :).</p>
<p>The question I have right now is: Sometimes when they say a phrase such as “I don’t know” (Je ne sais pas) it sounds like “zhun say pa” while other times/sources it’s more like “zhu nuh say pa”. What’s up with that?</p>
<p>It’s just a slight difference in the individuals’ pronunciation. The way we might read aloud the words “I don’t know” and either pronounce them clearly and individually as “I don’t know,” or elide them as “I dunno.”</p>
<p>Regionalism. The second one is Parisian French. Not sure where the other one is from, although I could tell you which of my French teachers spoke that way. (I learned French back in the late '60s from French women who had married American GIs after WW2. Mme. Smith was from Paris and spoke extremely well-educated French.)</p>
<p>The pronunciation of “Je ne sais pas” is going to vary according to the formality of the conversational situation. On the street, what you will often hear is "sh</p>
<p>Je + verb starting with s often turns into the “sh” sound UrbanGardener discusses. There’s a silly song “Chuis Bo” which shows this with “je suis.”</p>
<p>I don’t know where everyone else here learned/hears most of their French, but I spend a good deal of time in Paris and its suburbs. The versions of “I don’t know” that I most often hear are “Chais pas” and “Je sais pas.” I very, very rarely hear people use any “ne,” whether with a true vowel or as a syllabic n.</p>
<p>In casual spoken French, the “ne” in negative phrases is rarely used. And in the case of “Je ne sais pas” the “Je” is often dropped as well. So we have the following, which would all take the “ne” when written correctly:</p>
<p>*sais pas * I don’t know
*J’en sais rien * I know nothing (about it)
*Il a rien fait * he did nothing
*J’ai aucune id</p>
<p>People BUTCHER languages through excessive laziness and love for slang. That does, however, not amount to acceptable talk. This is similar to l33t-talk or phone text shortcuts. </p>
<p>You may have heard people dropping the NE but that is the work of the uneducated or the first or second generation immigrants. That it happens in Paris on the streets is not surprising, but look at the speakers! Or it could be heard in countries such as Canada where French has been bastardized. Since someone posted a link to a song by Brel, you could check a similar song by Celine Dion, namely Je sais pas. </p>
<p>So, if you want to sound uneducated, by all means drop the ne and forget that the correct written form DOES require the NE xxx PAS combination. There are three registers in French and the third one, the low-level familiar one should NOT be adopted by non-native speakers.</p>
<p>Amazing what people on cc know! (And thanks xiggi for putting in context which forms the non-native speaker should strive for :). )</p>
<p>Another question: Pimsleur tells us that in the phrase “Parlez-vous l’Anglais?” that the article “l’” should be present and should be spoken, sort of rolled subtly into the other words. But other sources, even Google Translate, simply put “Parlez-vous Anglais?” </p>
<p>Is this another instance of there being more formal and more casual usages?</p>
<p>One usage that I found made a huge difference when I was in France was to say “je voudrais” (voo-dray) instead of “je veus” (“I would like” instead of “I want”). It’s the more-polite and slightly more old-fashioned form, but it seemed to signal that I was educated and not a stupid American… As my daughter put it, “it turns off the neon sign”–we used to joke that Americans walk around with a neon sign over their heads, flashing “American!”, whenever they’re in Europe. The sign will always be there, but the goal is to dim it or turn it off entirely.</p>
<p>Another formality is to always greet the proprietor of any business when you walk in the door. “Bon jour!” when you arrive and “merci!” as you leave.</p>
<p>You can do an amazing amount of language learning via the internet. One way to check on usage is to google a word or phrase in the foreign language itself. An incorrect usage may get you a certain number of hits, but a correct usage will get you many, many more.</p>
<p>When I took French in college, we had explicit instruction - both written and in the weekly A/V presentation - that there is written out French and French as spoken. We were taught to blend the words together. So je ne fume pas became j’n fume pas and then j’fume pas as you become progressively more casual. In English, you don’t say “I do not smoke” out loud. You may say “I don’t smoke”. You are even likelier to say “don’t smoke” because we don’t actually stick the word “I” at the start of all our spoken sentences. So you may say pas fumer instead of ne pas fumer.</p>
<p>The same thing happens in other languages. You are likely to say “Like something?” when you’re asking if a person wants a drink - or rather in French “would like” a drink. </p>
<p>The thing that always gets me about French is the division between need and want. You say je veux une banane - or more politely, je voudrais une banane but to say you need you have to add a verb and say j’ai besoin d’une banane. I find that odd because in learning English young children have a terrible time differentiating between needs and wants - meaning they “need” what they only “want”. To say “I have need of” is like saying need comes after want, that need descends from or inherits from the “have” side of the fundamental is and have divide in French. Need then is something you have versus reflecting a state of existence and that is strange to me because it is that step removed from how we experience it in the earliest forms of language and emotional development.</p>
<p>“Parlez-vous anglais?” is far more standard than “Parlez-vous l’anglais?” However, the use of the article is common when an adverb is present, or when the type of English (or another language) is specified.</p>
<p>For example, Je parle couramment le chinois = I speak Chinese fluently (with adverb)
and Je parle l’anglais de Manchester = I speak Manchester-style English<br>
(specified)
and even Je parle un espagnol impeccable = I speak flawless Spanish
(modified)</p>
<p>This being said, there seems to be an increasing tendency to include the article regardless of circumstances.</p>
<p>Languages evolve, which leads me back to your previous question and Xiggi’s response. Linguistic data do support the assertion that nearly all Canadians (as well as the Swiss) drop the “ne” in informal conversation. However, recent studies likewise show that within the Hexagone (France) itself, native speakers of all classes and origins use “ne” with increasing rarity. Young people in particular are prone to drop it, as demonstrated in van Compernolle’s study of university students in Tours, who, on the average, used “ne” only 5.7% of the time when conversing with their peers.</p>
<p>The lesson in this? Learn what is currently considered “proper” French, but understand that what you hear, even in films, will not necessarily correspond to what you have learned, and what is non-standard now may become standard down the road.</p>
<p>By the way, regardless of context, names of languages are not capitalized in French.</p>
<p>UrbanGardener, I’m very happy to see your post about the use of “ne.” It corresponds to my and my sister’s experiences at universities in Paris and Southern France. Before seeing the numbers, I had wanted to caution against such demonizing of the dialects of the marginalized that xiggi seemed to be engaging in. First and second generation immigrants in France certainly already have enough people telling them they don’t meet some arbitrary definition of what “French” is, they don’t need beginning French learners adopting the practice.</p>
<p>French linguistic purists are really something. There is nothing in English like the official academies of French (and Spanish, and other languages) that at some point established themselves as the arbiters of correctness and persist even today.</p>
<p>When Jonathan Littell (an author who grew up bi-lingual in French and English) published his amazing novel *Les Bienveillantes<a href="%5BI%5DThe%20Kindly%20Ones%5B/I%5D">/I</a> in 2006, the book was a French best seller that won two major literary prizes…yet at the same time was criticized in some quarters for its many “anglicizations.” </p>
<p>When I was working on reading the book in French I came across a <em>whole website</em> where a guy picks apart the text almost line by line, citing Littell’s countless “deviations” from standard traditional usage.</p>