well, that is pretty niche. it’s not a phrase that probably comes up much in the works of Hugo or Voltaire.
Montreal is probably the most bilingual city in Canada (“Bonjour, hello” is the usual greeting on the phone or for service).
I took a stab at it, but it wasn’t easy because of broken up sentences and odd turns of phrase (who uses a language vs. speaking it?) where the word order is different in French (I kept the text order ). Also, flipping back and forth to confirm which words were in which language took a few tries because English borrows quite a bit from French. I tried to keep the line breaks close to the original, too, so voilà:
Vous ne pouvez pas lire ceci if you’re not bilingual.
Être bilingue is among les plus grands plaisirs in
the entire world. Pensez-y for a moment.
On peut use two différentes langues at the
same time dans une manière que rends your
brain veut explode de la vitesse by which
ça changes d’une language à the other
mais encore you can faire cela et feel special en
même temps, and it is for that que vous êtes unique. The
fait que you can read cette text sans arrêter
pour réfléchir is a talent very peu gens auraient. The
majority des gens luttent reading only en une
seule langue, mais ce que vous faites
now is a sign de génie absolu.
Lire une text very compliquée en deux different
languages parfaitement fait de vous a intello
and quelqu’un who finds la joie en langues.
Lire this text doit avoir donné votre cerveau un
bon petit exercice. C’est pourquoi on doit share it
with your friends on Facebook. You’re welcome à
l’avance et passez une very nice day/night.
Good job.
One thing though; in Quebec the more formal “vous” is not used much in casual conversation, it should probably be “tu” as used in the original.
Am I the only one who finds that text a bit condescending? I doubt it’s even true that the majority of people is monolingual. I don’t know whether there are any statistics on a global level but I am almost sure that the number of languages people speak is closer to two than to one on a global average.
Around the world, more than half of people – estimates vary from 60 to 75 per cent – speak at least two languages.
(Of course, in the UK, and in the US, it’s rarer)
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. They’re doing that very Canadian thing of comparing themselves to the US and thinking they’re comparing themselves to the world.
While in the US learning is being demonized as something for the “elites,” at the same time folks are peddling polyglot cred like a prize or point of snobbery. Interest in (or love of) languages doesn’t make a person super-special or a genius. However, saying that is less likely to motivate people to learn, I guess.
Certainly as much as Franglais does.
Yup. Very unusual.
One day in a train station in Germany, I helped a French family who spoke no German to book their train. They’d booked in France, then missed a train, and were kinda stuck (pre-smartphone era). I translated back and forth at the ticket desk between German and French and we got there. After the French family went on their way, my wife strolled up and said something to me in her Aussie drawl, and the ticket agent was literally gobsmacked (dangling jaw and all) that English was my main language.
“Sie sprechen … Englisch???”
Not his usual experience of English speakers.
French was always a second language for me, apart from a couple weeks I spent in Montreal. I had the joy of losing track of which language I was speaking. I was really fun, not being sure whether that conversation I remembered was in English or French.
This makes me wonder if it’s more or less difficult to learn a different accent than to learn another language. Sometimes people I’ve met during my travels refused to believe me when I told them where I grew up. My accent doesn’t match the stereotypes. Some actors who have dialect coaches for roles discuss the process a bit, but reviews of performances leads me to think it’s easier to mess up how words sound than to use completely different words.
I saw an interview with Australian actress Rachel Griffiths, who commented that the Australian accent is a great one for actors because “the mouth is soooo lazy - there’s nothing to un-learn.”
ETA: found it. On a mini-doc about the Australian accent called “The Sounds of Aus”. Here’s a snippet from it; Rachel Griffiths starts at 1:11. As an immigrant to Australia, I found the whole thing kinda fun.
Russian reporter sees an RPG with instructions in Polish, and thinks that it’s Americans writing Ukrainian in the Latin alphabet.
I tried it for Irish. The first choice sends you down the wrong path because of the v.
Interesting concept though
Possibly made for geoguesser (and not just reposted on their subreddit)
I currently recognize polish as the slashed L language but the flowchart doesn’t use that scheme.
Kinda works for Finnish we have a Swedish O (Å)…