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Silliest French word I learnt so far

chartz said:
Accents are absolutely mandatory, just like the apostrophes.
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My email replies never have them. All my customers understand my responses. Therefore they must be unnecessary and so I treat them with the same contempt as your gender obsession. I'm not changing my clavier just for accents
 
richardg said:
My email replies never have them. All my customers understand my responses. Therefore they must be unnecessary and so I treat them with the same contempt as your gender obsession. I'm not changing my clavier just for accents
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I don't know how seriously you've meant this - but while English speakers are often very forgiving about grammary and spelling, French speakers are not. They may not tell you, but to them, bad spelling looks sloppy. If I had my own company, a supplier who sent me an offer full of spelling mistakes would probably get a thumbs-down, the idea being that if you can't even hire a secretary capable of writing properly, your products and services must be of corresponding quality.

Now, many French people know that they speak Ingleesh far worse than you write their language, so they might be forgiving :)
 
Cheese said:
I don't know how seriously you've meant this - but while English speakers are often very forgiving about grammary and spelling, French speakers are not. They may not tell you, but to them, bad spelling looks sloppy. If I had my own company, a supplier who sent me an offer full of spelling mistakes would probably get a thumbs-down, the idea being that if you can't even hire a secretary capable of writing properly, your products and services must be of corresponding quality.

Now, many French people know that they speak Ingleesh far worse than you write their language, so they might be forgiving :)
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It depends on the market and the message format (ours is all email, you can see customers are firing stuff off to us via mobile phone)...here is one today...no punctuation anywhere and no use of upper case letters. That's one of the good ones!

bonjour, j'ai commandé une protection de pot en carbone pour une ktm 1290 superduke gt au nom de ********* mais je n'ai aucune nouvelle du colis merci

Here is another one.

bonjour
je recherche les ecopes de reservoir pour un bking
le faite vous?
merci cdlt jean luc

Regarding B2B communication, we deal with companies in French, German and English but we are the customer in these cases so I don't care what they think of my language skills.


We're all cool in the biking world. 2 fingers (or 1 if you're French) to L'Acadamie Francaise!
 
Merci de m'apprendre l'expression ecope de reservoir. Le mail de Jean Luc est pas terrible -- et pas que les acccents! Mais comme tu dis, dans le bking on s'en branle.
 
Cheese said:
des accents!

But I can sort of understand your mistake, in English you use the indefinite form while in French you use the definite one. Allez savoir pourquoi.
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So is d'accents just horribly wrong -- or is it the sort of mistake a fancophone could make? These things are very hard. I always think that the main thing when you learn a second language as an adult is to understand which sort of mistakes really matter, and which are forgivable. Unfortunately in French I've learned that le/la, de/à -- which are buggers -- really matter!
 
mandryka said:
Unfortunately in French I've learned that le/la really matter!
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Lol...why it matters that you get the correct gender for an inanimate object or concept says more about the listener than it does the person getting it wrong when speaking.

I say we get a petition to L'Acadamie Francaise and demand the removal of genders for nouns where it is not necessary, ie nearly all of them...I'm even prepared to take one for the team to get it through and have everything converted to feminine.
 
It's just that it's instantly visible to a francophone and they can't stop themselves correcting you by a sort of reflex, the error is so blatant. And if you've got an accent it can make it even harder for them to understand you.

I remember, before I had much confidence in French, asking for directions to Église Sainte-Croix in Bordeaux -- except that I didn't know that croix was feminine and I probably didn't say the r in croix very clearly. So I must have said something like "Je cherche l'Église Saint-Croix."

The result was that I just couldn't make myself understood! Total failure.
 
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