Life

[JonCole]

This recommendation is coming to be a broken record, but maybe try Duolingo?

[osmosisch]

Duolingo works great for building vocabulary, and then you do immersion to become fluent. Learning French is not expensive anymore at all, if it ever was. Courses for languages are terrible value/$ anyway.

[dibs]

Go to Maine and become a shark hunter. Jaws and all that.

[Lu]

That's a really nice, incredibly Dutch looking house, Osmosisch! Congratulations!

[SuperBiasedMan]

Thus may be a point against or in favor, but DuoLingo is a gamified system. So that might help your motivation? I know I have trouble retaining the learning as a continuous habit but gamified stuff helps me.

[osmosisch]

That's a really nice, incredibly Dutch looking house, Osmosisch! Congratulations!

Thanks! Just need to double-glaze everything and replace the bathroom and we're good to go.

Duolingo's gamification worked positively for me until I broke my streak at which point I lost all my motivation. So yeah.

[Justin Leego]

I would love to learn Canadian French.

[JonCole]

My wife swears that Canadian French is awful, as someone who has an American degree in French and studied in southern France.

[Erkki]

Duolingo is great! I've been wanting to learn more languages for years, but stumbling onto duolingo made me finally do it. And after learning ~1h every day for a month, I'm now taking a real Spanish course as well.

[tegan]

I would love to learn Canadian French.

 

My wife swears that Canadian French is awful, as someone who has an American degree in French and studied in southern France.

 

 

 

Chiac is a variety of Acadian French heavily mixed and structured with English. It also has various Aboriginal languages influence as well, mostly being Mi'kmaq (such as the word for porcupine, Matues). It is spoken as the native and dominant language of most[citation needed] Acadians in southeast New Brunswick, especially among youth, near Moncton, Dieppe, Memramcook and Shediac.

 

[...]

 

• "Ej vas tanker mon truck de soir pis ej va le driver. Ça va être right d'la fun." (I'm going to fill up my truck tonight and take it for a drive. That will be lots of fun.)
• "Espère-moi su'l'corner, j'traverse le ch'min pi j'viens right back." (Wait for me on the corner, I'm crossing the road and I'll be right back.)
• "Zeux ils pensont qu'y ownont le car." (Them, they think they own the car.)
• "On va amarrer ça d'même pour faire sûr que ça tchenne." (We will tie it like this to make sure it stays.)
• "Ca t'tente tu d'aller watcher un movie?" (Do you want to go see a movie?)
• "Ej ché pas...so quosse vous faites de soir?" (I don't know. What are you doing tonight?)
• "J'aime ta skirt, j'aime la way qu'a hang." (I like your dress, it fits you well!)
• "Ton car é ti en pretty good shape?" (Does your car look good?)
• "C'é pretty right on man, mon truck handle dans les trails." (It's really fun, my truck handles well in the trails.)
• "Man, c'té nouvelles light-là son complicated, j'aimais mieux le four-way stop!" (Man, these new lights are complicated, I preferred the four-way stop.)
• "Mame, les rules des quads sont tu les mêmes sur les chemins?" (Mom, do the four wheeler regulations apply on the city streets?)
• "T'é pu avec lui anymore, c'é pretty right on ça." (You aren't with him anymore; well that's good news.)
• "Sylvie, ça semble comme si tu work out man, moi chu naturally fit though!" (Sylvie, it looks like you have been working out, I'm lucky enough to be naturally fit.)

[Bjorn]

Not anything particularly new, but a well written and thoughtful piece on the value and purpose of politeness:

https://medium.com/message/how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c

Edited to add: Posting this here both because I find it interesting, and I've been thinking about the relative politeness (most of the time!) of these forums compared to other places on the Internet, and even how my own interactions change depending on the platform I'm on.

[Gormongous]

Duolingo's gamification worked positively for me until I broke my streak at which point I lost all my motivation. So yeah.

 

This has happened to me repeatedly. If it were possible to look at my achievement on a scale larger than a single week, you'd see me doing seven or eight lessons a day for four or five days, then miss a lesson and not touch it for four or five days, until guilt and the urgent need to learn Italian for my dissertation brings me back. I'm sure a computer somewhere in the database is having a good laugh.

 

 

• "J'aime ta skirt, j'aime la way qu'a hang." (I like your dress, it fits you well!)
• "Ton car é ti en pretty good shape?" (Does your car look good?)
• "C'é pretty right on man, mon truck handle dans les trails." (It's really fun, my truck handles well in the trails.)
• "Man, c'té nouvelles light-là son complicated, j'aimais mieux le four-way stop!" (Man, these new lights are complicated, I preferred the four-way stop.)
• "T'é pu avec lui anymore, c'é pretty right on ça." (You aren't with him anymore; well that's good news.)
• "Sylvie, ça semble comme si tu work out man, moi chu naturally fit though!" (Sylvie, it looks like you have been working out, I'm lucky enough to be naturally fit.)

 

 

It doesn't help that half the quotes are about cars, the way I'm hearing it.

[Hermie]

Tegan, that looks easy. You just learn very basic French and just use the English words for the important words of the sentence.

[tegan]

The only good thing about Canadian French is that nobody uses the bizarre French titles that English movies get.

 

"The Teeth of the Deep"

Jaws

"The Eighth Passenger is an Alien"

Alien. The French title uses "Alien" and not "extraterrestre," so there was literally no point to this translation.

"The Strange Christmas of Mr. Jack"

The Nightmare Before Christmas

[tberton]

There's not really one "Canadian French." What teg's showing is Acadian French, which I imagine is fairly different from the French in rural Quebec, which is different from Montreal Joual, which would be different from the French spoken in Ontario and Manitoba. It's all super cool though. Those lines that teg quoted are fascinating.

[JonCole]

My wife has a particular problem with Quebecois French, but I don't know the nuances of her argument. With my rudimentary knowledge of the language, that Acadian French looks horrifying.

[Roderick]

I could barely parse those sentences, and I can read French.

[miffy495]

The only good thing about Canadian French is that nobody uses the bizarre French titles that English movies get.

 

"The Teeth of the Deep"

Jaws

"The Eighth Passenger is an Alien"

Alien. The French title uses "Alien" and not "extraterrestre," so there was literally no point to this translation.

"The Strange Christmas of Mr. Jack"

The Nightmare Before Christmas

 

My personal favourite from seeing all the bilingual DVD covers when I worked at HMV:

 

"Mom, I missed the plane!"

Home Alone

[Jutranjo]

The only good thing about Canadian French is that nobody uses the bizarre French titles that English movies get.

 

"The Teeth of the Deep"

Jaws

"The Eighth Passenger is an Alien"

Alien. The French title uses "Alien" and not "extraterrestre," so there was literally no point to this translation.

"The Strange Christmas of Mr. Jack"

The Nightmare Before Christmas

 

 Slovene has a few ok title translations but nothing is thankfully ever dubbed.

 

"Osmi Potnik" (Eight Passenger) is

Alien. It's a better translation than "Tujec" since that just brings to mind "Foreigner from another country" not a foreign entity.

 

"Žrelo" (Throat) is

JAWS. The title flows much better than "Čeljust" (Jaw).

[Nappi]

Some of the Finnish movie translations are pretty interesting. For example:

 

"Huuliharppukostaja" (Harmonica Avenger) is 

Once Upon a Time in the West

 

"Robert Altmanin huonot vitsit" (Robert Altman's Bad Jokes)

A Prairie Home Companion

[Gormongous]

My favorite instance was from when I was living in Greece and saw a listing for "Σε Βλέπω" (I See You).

It had never occurred to me that the movie Saw is a pun, nor would I have chosen that part of the pun to translate as the foreign title had I known.

[osmosisch]

Sterrenoorlogen is also not great. Especially since it contains stropdasvechters en Luuk Luchtloper.

Star Wars/cravat fighters/you know who

[Gormongous]

Sterrenoorlogen is also not great. Especially since it contains stropdasvechters en Luuk Luchtloper.

Star Wars/cravat fighters/you know who

Is it common for Anglophone sci-fi in other languages to have its jargon translated so literally? I've read a small number of German and French works, but it's never occurred to me.

[hedgefield]

Sometimes. Scifi is maybe not super common since most of it is some science-y thing that the translators probably know little about, but they do it sometimes. Fantasy has it worse, they translated every name of a person or spell or place in Harry Potter in Dutch, Lord of The Rings too. But at least they don't dub it and translate the title like they do in Germany. *shudders*

[tegan]

Last night I had the best idea for the title of a Canadian crime comedy.

 

Dial M for Murder. Pour Assassiner en Français, Appuyez sur le Neuf

 

 

 

This is the best joke I will ever make.