French students unable to cope with tricky question - Polidicks

When I visited France as an exchange student with the highschool, I had to sit through a French English class. It was a few years ago but the English they were using was still leagues above the French we could speak. The teacher though was trying really hard to put on his best BBC London English accent, but he just ended up sounding like a robot.

[QUOTE=Niklas;48034530]Silly french, we get german-english dictionaries in our exams[/QUOTE] But that's [B][I]CHEATING![/I][/B] No seriously though, expecting 16yo students to know every bit of vocabulary in a given language off the top of their heads is retarded at best. If you were to go into a language exam knowing fuck all except having the dictionary available isn't going to get you far because your grammar would be terrible, that and you probably wouldn't get half-way through because of time constraints.

[QUOTE=Trumple;48034743]English is such a weird language I feel bad for the people who have to learn it as a second language[/QUOTE] Maybe it's just me but I enjoyed learning English and didn't find it nearly as difficult as something like French, or god forbid, Welsh.

[QUOTE=Kommodore;48033969]tbf french is the official international/diplomatic language but most english speakers remain monoglot their entire life and completely take for granted that it's the global lingua franca (no pun intended) so there's a bit of hypocrisy and grounds for general forgiveness afaic[/QUOTE] Idk, from my point of view, language becomes international when most people speak on it, let it be english, french in the past or chinese in future perhaps, so those are, IMO, grounds for learning it. And at this point French is spoken in.... France and a bit of Canada?

[QUOTE=Grimhound;48035825]If my experience with Spanish is anything to go off of? Oh hell yes. And it would go in reverse, as well. I was taught that Spanish has a very rigid structure to it. English is extremely fluid. Where Spanish goes 1, 2, 3 you can have English go 2, 1, 3 or 3, 4, 2 and generally make sense. Where did the 4 come from? Nobody knows, but it still makes general sense. I could be completely wrong, though. I took one semester of Spanish and ended up failing because I had a nervous breakdown and effectively locked myself in a room for many years of living as a recluse starting on the day of the final exam.[/QUOTE] Personally, I live in the Southwest and I still only know just enough Spanish to tell when somebody is really, really upset.

While it's hard for me to gauge how easy the English Bac is since I speak fluent English, I remember the test being beyond easy when I took it. I thought to myself "is that really what they are being taught?"

Coping isn't exactly a common verb, but I find it weird that Bac students don't know what "to cope" means. However I have to wonder, did they try asking the teacher what it meant? I don't see why teachers wouldn't explain the question. Either way, the article makes it sound like it was only 1 question in a bigger exam, not some kind of essay question where it's the only question and you have to write 2000 words about it. 12k students signing a petition because they lost a few points. What the hell?

I've been a native English speaker all my life and there's still times where I don't know what a word means. Look on those dictionary websites' word of the day things and they'll give you some word that you've literally never heard in your life and it's an English word. Stuff like otiose. You also have to remember this is high schooler equivalent stuff here, and with any language if you don't use it you lose it. How often do you use the word cope in a day to day situation? When I'm learning a language it's usually in a classroom and there's not much coping going on there apart from coping with being bored or coping with terrible teachers/administrators. I took two years worth of Russian courses at Uni and there's plenty of nouns and verbs in English I have no knowledge of in Russian.

[QUOTE=Croix;48033923]thats really dumb honestly. subtitles are so great for learning, i speak fluent english largely thanks to them[/QUOTE] Thank god that Finnish dubs sound so fucking horrifying. Our voiceover actors are so "motivated" to do it right.

english is quickly becoming a world language and its also close to becoming necessary in this day and age simply because of how widespread it is. Except in France, of course. Because they're the french.

[QUOTE=Kommodore;48033969]tbf french is the official international/diplomatic language but most english speakers remain monoglot their entire life and completely take for granted that it's the global lingua franca (no pun intended) so there's a bit of hypocrisy and grounds for general forgiveness afaic[/QUOTE] Unless you yourself learnt Spanish, French, German or whatever fluently, yeah you shouldn't be judging these guys too hard. Though I must say that it's pretty annoying how bad many German and many, many French are at English.

[QUOTE=Dark RaveN;48036749]Idk, from my point of view, language becomes international when most people speak on it, let it be english, french in the past or chinese in future perhaps, so those are, IMO, grounds for learning it. And at this point French is spoken in.... France and a bit of Canada?[/QUOTE] French is also spoken in West Africa, the Pacific French colonies, Equatorial Africa, Madagascar, Wallonia, Haiti, Switzerland, and it's not uncommon to hear it in the Caribbean, parts of Italy, the Levant, and Louisiana. It literally is a world language

Don't forget Belgium!

[QUOTE=Trumple;48034743]English is such a weird language I feel bad for the people who have to learn it as a second language[/QUOTE] Why? It was incredibly easy to learn.

[QUOTE=_Axel;48040655]Don't forget Belgium![/QUOTE] That why I said Wallonia.

[QUOTE=WolvesSoulZ;48034412]Then you realize that most* people of Quebec are bilingual, unlike the rest of Canada. :v:[/QUOTE] It seems to vary in city/rural. Cities like montreal (especially) and quebec city tend to be more bilingual and/or english speaking Much of my family is from rimouski, a small town way the fuck up the saint lawrence, and my aunt who still lives there she says it's about 60%, and as high as 80%, who speak french only. Bilingualism has colloquially failed in most* of english-speaking Canada so TBH I don't exactly see why people way back east in Quebec should need to bust their balls if they don't have an imminent need to speak english.

I guess I can't blame!e them, if it is honestly an unfamiliar word in a largely monolingual country. I wouldn't expect to know what a random French word or phrase meant if it were thrown into a sentence, at least not without heavy contextual clues. But then, America is almost entirely monolingual. Though we do generally take foreign language classes during highschool, the credit requirement only amounts to a semester or two of class, and isn't taken very seriously. My German Class mostly just docked around and watched movies. Even if you do learn a lot, it's very easy to forget if you don't have the opportunity to practice it often. I think the only way that I could permanently and fluently learn a foreign language is an extended period of total immersion in it. I learned more than my month in Germany is an exchange student than I did in a full year of German class.

My highschool Japanese teacher taught us terribly. I'd say a good half of the words she taught us were just their engrish equivalents. She was once going through the colours once and said "[I]buraku[/I] is black, [I]pinku[/I] is pink, [I]waito[/I] is white". I called her out on her shit so she sent me out the room for disrupting the lesson =| [editline]25th June 2015[/editline] She was also the kind of teacher that just dumped loads and loads of examples on us. We had a hundred phrases under our belts but if you asked us the meaning of individual words we wouldn't have a clue about what they meant

I guess it's a bit of unusual phrase so the confussion may be right placed but I am still surprised how many people didn't know that word or didn't logically figure out what it meant. Thank god for 12 year old me being too lazy to ask his friend how the hell was I supposed to install that Czech subs pack into Half-Life 2 at the day. So instead of simply asking, I rather went and learned the whole bloody languange instead. Food for thought :v:

[QUOTE=ScottyWired;48042026]My highschool Japanese teacher taught us terribly. I'd say a good half of the words she taught us were just their engrish equivalents. She was once going through the colours once and said "[I]buraku[/I] is black, [I]pinku[/I] is pink, [I]waito[/I] is white". I called her out on her shit so she sent me out the room for disrupting the lesson =| [editline]25th June 2015[/editline] She was also the kind of teacher that just dumped loads and loads of examples on us. We had a hundred phrases under our belts but if you asked us the meaning of individual words we wouldn't have a clue about what they meant[/QUOTE] Christ that must have been awful. I had a similar equivalent to this in french during my second to last year of high school, he would spend all day focusing on meaningless shit and uncommon intricacies when he wasn't being a dick to us and calling us useless. Not an experience I would care to repeat, but we got an actual french dude (Monsieur Nicolai) to take our classes for us in my last year, he was awesome and one of my favorite teachers.

I learned english way before it even started in school and thus english was like the only number that was the highest possible grade through all my school-life. I was also forced to learn swedish (I did not want to and I have never needed it) and I failed horribly causing it to be the only failed grade ever in school. I also tried learning russian out of free will but the course got cancelled after a year or so because there was like me and one other dude in it. And I was pretty good at it too. :(

I'm pretty sure that hardly any Polish teenager knows the meaning of that word, so I don't see why wouldn't that be a common occurrence in other countries.

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;48033835]Honestly, learning English in France is a fucking mess because most of the pedagogy is outdated. You're basically taught the most simplistic grammar possible and nothing else, with no regard for the actual vocabulary. Like most people who learn English essentially only know words used in formalities (hello/goodbye/fuck off/etc), body parts and spatial directions. Last year I was quite surprised when I learned that nearly everyone in my class (meaning everyone but me and two other dudes) didn't know what [I]scaffolding[/I] fucking meant.[/QUOTE] This is very interesting from a native speakers perspective

[QUOTE=Kommodore;48033969]tbf french is the official international/diplomatic language but most english speakers remain monoglot their entire life and completely take for granted that it's the global lingua franca (no pun intended) so there's a bit of hypocrisy and grounds for general forgiveness afaic[/QUOTE] except that most states have mandatory foreign language programs so uh, put a little fucking effort in France

[QUOTE=FFStudios;48043640]except that most states have mandatory foreign language programs so uh, put a little fucking effort in France[/QUOTE] France does too, though? More so than the US, most people have had to study English since they're 12.

[video=youtube;M2wyG8Kt3fA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2wyG8Kt3fA[/video] "You can be do what we want to do" Nice.

[QUOTE=ExtReMLapin;48044862] "You can be do what we want to do" Nice.[/QUOTE] [video=youtube;B0KJZEH2jn8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0KJZEH2jn8[/video]

I remember a lecture in my first year of college where we were using some foreign concept that got named in English, which had to do something with rocks. Suddenly this girl interrupts the professor and asks him what "rocks" meant. Fucking. Rocks.

[QUOTE=ScottyWired;48042026]My highschool Japanese teacher taught us terribly. I'd say a good half of the words she taught us were just their engrish equivalents. She was once going through the colours once and said "[I]buraku[/I] is black, [I]pinku[/I] is pink, [I]waito[/I] is white". I called her out on her shit so she sent me out the room for disrupting the lesson =| [editline]25th June 2015[/editline] She was also the kind of teacher that just dumped loads and loads of examples on us. We had a hundred phrases under our belts but if you asked us the meaning of individual words we wouldn't have a clue about what they meant[/QUOTE] Same here. We learned like 300 useless words but 30 useful ones

[QUOTE=RockmanYoshi;48047421]Same here. We learned like 300 useless words but 30 useful ones[/QUOTE] Learning languages is always like that. You get to learn how to say "elbow" before you learn how to say "help". I get that learning body parts can be important if you're injured, but it's too specific for someone who just started studying that language. Especially when you can just point at any of your body parts and not use any vocabulary.