English Speakers Attempting to Read French (▶With NO previous study◀)

[@Langfocus]

Learn any language with professional tutors and native speakers on LiveXP & use these discounts: ▶Get your first $0.99 trial lesson by following the link: livexp.biz/langfocus99 ▶Add promocode LANGFOCUS at the checkout to get 30% off a monthly or quarterly subscription

[@rodrigomattioda12345]

The promocode is not working

[@Langfocus]

@@rodrigomattioda12345 Thanks. I will inform LiveXP so they can check.

[@Dracopol]

13:40 "Croissant", the bread is not so-named because it rises like bread. It's also the word "crescent", because they have a slight crescent shape.

[@Langfocus]

@@Dracopol Yes, you're right. The word for "crescent" comes from the present participle of croître (to grow), though. So there's that less direct connection.

[@maxbarr3954]

Btw the few first phrase i was thinking you where making the formal sentences xD. Elle prépare le diner -> elle fait la bouffe/le repas Nous avons une réunion à 2 heures -> On as une réunion/call-conference à 14 heures J'ai du mal à comprendre -> je comprend pas/j'pige rien/ (+ some regional sentences) Je crois que tu a raison -> t'as raison/tu dois avoirs raison

[@marccoulombeau6453]

Hello ! I love your videos Paul ! I'm a french speaker, I just would like to say, croissant (the pastry) is called like that because it has the shape of the crescent moon, the "growing" moon :)

[@flonoiisana4647]

I'm a French speaker myself and he got me confused with that one. Lol I always knew it to be "croissant de lune" the shape of the moon crescent.

[@Langfocus]

Yes, some people have been saying that. I knew it was a form of croître, but didn't know it came via the crescent moon. In that part of the video I was just making an impulsive comment, but thought it would interesting to put in the video.

[@marccoulombeau6453]

No problem ^^ Thank you for your videos !

[@flonoiisana4647]

@@Langfocus I learned something though that I never paid attention to saying it in French : "croissant de lune" comes from the growing moon, "la lune qui CROÎT". Never paid attention to that simple and evident truth while speaking. Feeling a little dumb in my own language. Loll

[@Suldrun45]

@@Langfocus IIRC, the most commonly cited origin of the croissant is that it was invented in Vienna (this kind of pastry is also called a Viennoiserie in French) to commemorate the siege of the town by the Ottomans in the 17th century, recalling the moon crescent displayed on Ottoman flags.

[@jeanettewaverly2590]

I’m a native English speaker, semi-fluent in Spanish, with some academic exposure to French. Put all these together, and I was able to figure out about 80% of the words in, and meaning of, the sentences. Fun video!

[@attilakreisz1870]

I speak only English (In the Indo-European family) and understood 70% at least.

[@Ruthavecflute]

I'm sort of going it the oposite direction! I'm a native Englist speaker who studied French up to A-Level standard (In the UK A-levels are usually taken at age 18). I'm now learning Spanish. I find my French knowlege plus a wide English vocabulary means I can make sense of a lot written Spanish. I'd imagine the main problem for you would be French's tendancy to use a *lot* of silent letters. Is that right?

[@jeanettewaverly2590]

@@Ruthavecflute French does have a lot of silent letters, but they occur in combinations that are quite predictable. Even with only a semester of college French (I decided to return to studying Spanish), I find I can easily identify them.

[@didierrichard2486]

The origin of "merci" ("merci beaucoup") is interesting. Originally the meaning was exactly the same as the English "mercy". Although a bit outdated, this meaning still exists in French, for example in the expression "sans merci" ("without mercy"). Over time, probably through religious use, this term became an expression of blessing for someone who dispenses a benefit. The current French term for "mercy" is "pitié" ("pity").

[@prenomnom2812]

16:18 He's not wrong! French "grippe (noun) / gripper (verb)" and English "grip (verb)" actually share a common Germanic origin. In French, "gripper" means "grab, catch" or "block, stop due to friction", so it's not so far from its English cognate. Then, "grippe" meaning "flu" developed from this because of how the disease suddenly "grips" you like claws.

[@ferretyluv]

My school taught me to use ague for flu.

[@flonoiisana4647]

@@prenomnom2812 it's "agripper" in French that means close to the same thing as "grip" in English.

[@morrigambist]

I have seen "la grippe" in written English.

[@hugol4487]

​@@flonoiisana4647you guys are both right : "agripper" means "to grab" though "gripper" does mean "to block due to friction" (usually used in the past tense "grippé" to describe a botched mechanism for instance).

[@John_Weiss]

It's also called „die Grippe“ in German. „Die“ (pronounced "dee") is the German word "the" for feminine nouns. So it even has the same grammatical gender as the French, "la grippe". Hmm… makes me wonder if both don't derive from a common Latin source word.

[@Georgeirfx]

Having studied Spanish as a foreign language I can definitely say that you can understand about 80% of written French. That's on average since the percentage would go higher when reading formal sentences. The true kryptonite when trying to understand French is its pronunciation, it just sounds so fast and monolithic you can't distinguish the words and the places where they begin and end

[@flonoiisana4647]

@@Georgeirfx Good luck with the pronunciation! But English has its share of inconsistencies in pronunciation too... But yeah, we French speakers master the art of confusion. Lol

[@Georgeirfx]

@@flonoiisana4647 I studied French at school and I can't even imagine what a torture it was for the teachers to having their ears bleed almost every day. I started studying Spanish at an older age and was so pleased with its much simpler phonetics. English is also messed up a lot but I guess you get used to it faster due to the level of its ubiquity

[@RogerRamos1993]

Qu'est-ce qu'on va faire pour resoudre ce problème? (Keskong vafair pohaysoudrãs problem?) 😅

[@flonoiisana4647]

@@RogerRamos1993 loll

[@flonoiisana4647]

@@Georgeirfx Agree. I thought learning English was pretty smooth. I as a French speaker understand the apparent nonsense of French when it comes to pronunciation. It's just that they kind of kept the old spelling for words that are pronounced completely differently centuries later.

[@guillaumejeremia8779]

Well done guys! "Croissant" is about the shape of a moon crescent, not because it grows. It's the moon that grows. The French have the same difficulty as the English speakers: many words are very similar or the same but they have a very different meaning. A french person would simply pronounce french sentences with an English accent 😂 "Hello, I'm very content to encounter you. I adore to regard football, especially when they put the ball in the but." (Just kidding, nobody's that bad -- right?)

[@TheLifeHeLives-HeLivesToGod]

What came first the growing moon or the growing dough. We may never know!

[@colinstu]

faux amis are a bitch. both within french itself, and then with english-french.

[@oneeyejack2]

@@TheLifeHeLives-HeLivesToGod it's the moon.. "croissant" was a phase of the moon with this shape long before the pastry.. in english it's a "crescent"

[@TheLifeHeLives-HeLivesToGod]

@@oneeyejack2 Yes you are correct, that's the point the moon was growing and so they called the shape "the growing moon", Then the pastry was made in the same shape as the growing moon. The meaning does not change but the association in the mind of the language user has failed to recognize the ancient origin of the word. The moon grows and so does the dough of the pastry, the pastry can be shaped like a brick and it will still be called a croissant. Search: Etymology Crescent and see where the word came from.

[@JeanLoupRSmith]

Nobody's that bad? Mais si, malheureusement, ça fait grincer les dents

[@Farid1213]

Very nice video Paul, as a native french speaker I'm surprised to see how much of french english speakers can understand when written, by the way your level in french is really impressive ! Just one little thing, the pastry named "croissant" is not called this way because of the fact that it grows while being cooked, actually it's called this way because of its shape which looks like a crescent moon, which is called "croissant de lune" in french, that's why this pastry's called "croissant" :)

[@Langfocus]

Yeah, I knew it was related to croître in some way, but didn't know about the "croissant de lune" route.

[@bremexperience]

@@Langfocus But it is related to how the moon "raises" every day more and more. In astronomy there is a moon crescent and decrescent. Croître et décroître. So it is has the same meaning, but for an entirely different reason. That dates back to time immemorial, way before the pastry was invented. :)

[@ferretyluv]

He’s Canadian, he’s legally required to know some French ;)

[@canchero724]

In Argentina they call the crossaint a medioluna, literally meaning half moon. So the association with the moon checks out.

[@alantew4355]

One interesting question is whether French speakers can liaisonize English effortlessly, whether they can switch on and off liaison at will? English speakers do liaisonize certain words: eg, "thank you" is pronounced as "thank kiew", but if we were to apply liaison consistently, then "love you" would be "love view", "for example" would be "for rex-xample", etc. I wonder if French people can liaisonize all English words fluently and whether they can turn off liaison and speak French without liaison fluently.

[@LuisAldamiz]

Croissant is called that way because it resembles a waxing Moon, which is calling "crescent" ("growing") for a reason.

[@slycordinator]

Also, in Latin the waxing moon (luna crescens) originally referred to the stage of the moon's apparent growth, but later was conflated as the shape instead of the stage.

[@LuisAldamiz]

@@slycordinator - Of course: your typical "crescent" 🌘 is actually what in Spanish at least is called "Luna menguante" (shrinking or waning Moon) 🌘, as oppossed to "Luna creciente" (growing, i.e. crescent, or waxing Moon) 🌒. A mnemotechnique in Spanish (and probably also in other Romances like French, unsure) is to remember that the Moon is always "lying": it looks like a "C" when it should be a D rather ("decreciente", "de-growing") and vice-versa.

[@TheChrisSimpson]

Interestingly, Grippe used to be used in English as well for flu in the early 1900's and before.

[@schusterlehrling]

It's actually the German word for flu.

[@smallwisdom8819]

German also uses Grippe and I would not be surprised if some other languages too. I would suspect flu being just an abbreviation of in"flu"enza. Also like Story probably beeing and abbreviation of HiStory?

[@slycordinator]

​@@smallwisdom8819 From Wiktionary... In Old French, historie was also called estoire and meant both a tale and history. And in Anglo-Norman, this became "estorie". Then we got story (originally storie) from the first syllable of estorie being dropped. So, in a roundabout way, it's kind of an abbreviation of history.

[@camembertdalembert6323]

as a french native speaker, I realised that I sometime sounds "posh" when I speak english because words of french origin are more familiar to a french person, therefore easier to memorise. For exemple as a teenager I told to an english family that hosted me "that's a marvellous information" instead of "that's a great news".

[@Ruthavecflute]

Native English speaker here. Just in case you want to know, we wouldn't use 'a' in either of those sentances. They'd be 'That's marvolous information' (which, like you said sounds very formal, and also a bit odd), and 'That's great news.' In grammar terms, 'news' and 'information. are both uncountable nowns

[@prenomnom2812]

It definitely works the other way around too! Speaking a Romance language is such a cheatcode when learning English. Being a native French speaker gives me tons of advanced vocabulary almost without work - except for the pronunciation though, which even afters years remains tricky to me. Basic vocabulary is much harder though: I struggle with everyday Germanic words, which look really diverse and random to me since they are often unrelated to French and thus much harder to retain - even if they are the most useful ones! As a result, I'm better at naming ideas and concepts than habits and items, and I'm worse at talking with a child than writing an essay... But overall, Romance languages speakers still have a big, unfair advantage for being able to already know or easily guess half of English vocabulary with little to no effort nor memorisation... That's why I truly pay an immense respect to all non-Romance and non-European students who _really_ have to learn English, _from zero!_

[@flonoiisana4647]

I get you! lol Fancy words in English are just common regurlary used French words to me. lol

[@frechjo]

Yeah, with Spanish it's indirectly through the similarities with French, but I had a similar experience. Another related thing: I often rely more on specific verbs than on phrasal verbs , and that is often perceived as "good". But that's just what's easier for me.

[@mikedaniel1771]

I never realized until recently how difficult phrasal verbs can be for a non-native English speaker. I saw a friend's ESL homework on the subject.

[@frechjo]

@@mikedaniel1771 Yeah, the basic stuff is alright, but then you have to be aware of things that change the meaning just by changing the place of the preposition, or stuff like that. I can never think of good examples to explain what the issue is, but let me see: "put it up with that thing" and "put up with that thing" have very different meanings, right? Or "Go off" is one thing if it's an alarm, a different one if it's a bomb or a fire (and why does it go "off"?? it should go "on", "up", "boom", anything but "off"), and "to go off on (someone)" yet another thing. And there are worse cases than those, lol.

[@Hastdupech8509]

​@@mikedaniel1771 As an Italian native with a C1 certificate, I still try to desperately avoid them. Idc if I'm gonna sound formal, I'm not using too much of them. Recognizing them is an entirely different story though, I've gotten to the point where I associate meaning and form on the basis of "eh, it's a feeling", and that feeling's right. But feeling's not enough to nail the context, the right verb and its tiny word which the whole meaning depends on

[@sa..9780]

As a Cajun who only speaks English, I'm surprised at how much French I actually know 😛 Didn’t realize how much stuck with me!

[@hirozensarutobi4838]

Time to learn it my guy

[@alexj9603]

I grew up bilingual with German and French as my parents' languages. Learning English vocab was a piece of cake for me, as I could find a French or German cognate for almost every word I encountered.

[@Ruthavecflute]

Interesting. Did the grammar give you any major problems?

[@alexj9603]

@Ruthavecflute Not really.

[@steph7793]

As a French speaker, especially in formal context and when I don't find my words, I often make a bold attempt to say the word I know in French with an English accent. Then 3 cases: 1 - It works and it's a real English word and everyone understands -> WIN!!! "Connaisseur" (ok with an o, I had to repeat for pronunciation that day!), "flamboyant"... 2 - It kinda works, it's a real English word but can be very formal or old fashioned and not everyone understands -> (very) PARTIAL WIN ! "Louche"... 3 - It just doesn't work, and the response is 'whaaat?" -> LOSE! "Bricoleur" was a total failure 😅

[@Ruthavecflute]

You can't leave it there! How did you transalate bricolour?

[@Aye-Aye136]

I'm a Polish with good knowledge of English and German. I've never studied Romance languages but I've been to many Romance language countries (Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Moldova, Latin America). For me English is an 'open door' to the world of Romance languages.

[@mariemyriam5616]

i m a native french and Arabic speaker... i learned English all by myself by watching TV...it was very easy for me since there are a lot of shared words (even if the pronunciation is different) and i learned Spanish too (since Spanish resemble french a lot and have also words from Arabic origin). thank you for this video :) it was quiet interesting

[@dombthekid]

Studying Spanish helped me immensely with the French. My guesses weren't all correct but because of Spanish cognates I was close!

[@Stan-v7g]

Grippe is also grippe in German, griep in Dutch, gripp in Russian and grip in Bulgarian.

[@acidrefluxcharlie3834]

Spanish gripe too

[@krips22]

With MAL there's also malediction, malware, malevolent, for instance. As for CONTRE, there's indeed contrary (from contraire), but also counter (to counter comes from contrer) as in counterattack (contre-attaque, sometimes spelled contrattaque) and counterargumentation (contre-argumentation). There's also CONTRadiction.

[@kurosora1984]

I understood "the grippe" only because I know it was used in English a long time ago - "the grip/grippe" - it was mentioned in a song in Guys and Dolls, the musical ^_^

[@dpjb78]

As a french, during the first years of English learning at school, I found it very easy to learn because many words were just the same, especially every word in terminating by "tion". Also the grammar is pretty similar compared to other germanic root languages.

[@jacksim]

As a native French speaker this video was enlightening. So close to other languages and yet at the same time sounding so foreign. Keep up the good work. Your channel is amazing.

[@diegoalejandroherranaragon8121]

I'm a native Spanish speaker; I learnt English as a foreign language (currently I'm a C1), and I also speak Portuguese, as a foreign language too (but I'm not fluent at all maybe B1, or B2 if I believe a lot in my capabilities), and I didn't do it much better than the guys on the video. I was able to understand more single words, and just one sentence more than them.

[@aspacelex]

The overlap in the French and English vocabularies is so great that if you spent like a day familiarizing yourself with the basics of French grammar - the articles, pronouns, how the tenses are generally formed, common forms of have and be, - that's enough to enable you to read most text in French on the basic level. Sequel video idea?

[@DonaldMains]

Not true. All 4 of the "big" verbs (Etre, avoir, faire and aller) are different. throw in the conjugations and all the grammatical complexity and the only thing one could understand after a day are cognates. I doubt anyone with no training could even make a stab at understanding.

[@DELottProductions]

​@@DonaldMains Additionally stuff like false friends will throw people off. Looking solely at reading, in basic informal texts the vocab is too different from English to understand. And at an advanced level, the level of vocabulary is very similar to English, but is much harder to understand due to a higher level of comprehension needed to understand a formal text. Additionally, false friends make up probably like 1/4 to 1/2 of similar words between the languages which will further throw people off. Furthermore, in the video they are given the text read out to them which you wouldn't have if you were actually reading. Also the sentences in this video are very much cherry picked to give people a high chance of guessing right. A fairer analysis would be to give a news article as a formal text, and a story written by a child as an informal text.

[@d.v.t]

It helps but it also comes with nuances.

[@yosh1907]

French here, I really liked this video because as an English learner for professionnal purposes I was pleasantly surprised by the similarities between French and English! But of course, and because it wouldn't be funny *sigh*, the pronunciation sends me off most of the time. Even if I KNOW how it's pronounced in English, during a conversation, my brain would just go back to French on its own. Takes lots and lots of practise! ^^

[@WineSippingCowboy]

"pleut" originates from the Latin word pluvia, meaning rain 🌧. Spanish 🇪🇸 took the middle to the suffix, hence, lluvia. Similar. "clavem" = key 🔑 in Latin. "cle" in French. "llave" in Spanish.

[@hoangkimviet8545]

Canadians when watching this video: "Is that even worth asking?"

[@torrawel]

😂😂😂

[@BlueDusk95]

Paul's Canadian BTW

[@hoangkimviet8545]

@@Samy-bu1ze Ah, c'est excellent, mon ami.

[@Langfocus]

Yeah, I can read every cereal box in French, no problem!

[@lemonz1769]

Most Canadians don’t speak French. Aside from the native Francophones it’s really only a minority of Anglophones that live in or near Quebec.

[@JTulou]

Knowing French helps to learn new English vocabulary, but also it makes us no longer at ease with how to write French correctly. For instance, we have 'rempart' in French for 'rampart' in English with the same meaning. I used to write this word correctly as a kid, but now I feel like I need to check which one is French and which one is English whenever I come across the word.

[@RogerRamos1993]

You're lucky you're not Brazilian and haven't learned Spanish.😅😂

[@palupalu5647]

There is also the word example in French and example in English. It's very annoying to see French people writing the English form through too much exposure on the internet.

[@RogerRamos1993]

@@palupalu5647 You did exactly that. 😂 Sure, it was your corrector, but funny anyway.

[@Ruthavecflute]

Native English speaker, who learnt French at school here. I can relate, thought to be fair my spelling has always been terrible. Is is carot or carrot or carott or carrote or carrotte or ....

[@emojicoolman56]

For the question of the day, I'm a native English speaker who learned French and while learning I definitely noticed that I started to see more and more familiar words as I continued to study. Once i reached a certain point, a pretty large amount of the words i learned either had an English equivalent or looked a lot like an English word, in fact, I ended up learning a lot of words in french that had the same spelling and meaning in english that i didn't know in either. So yeah, English helped a lot with the later segments of learning and with learning formal speech a lot more than it did with basic words, just as the video suggests.

[@floflo1645]

Same but in reverse for me learning English

[@ivanalejo1991]

My mother tongue is spanish (mexican spanish) and I know a bit of english, I think french could be easier to learn now! I was amazed to know that in french they use the verb "believe" as in "I believe you're right" just like I would use it "Yo creo que tienes la razón"

[@andrewcorrell5000]

You can speak good English!!

[@javicruz9754]

My first language is Spanish so I was able to determine far easier a lot of words from this video, there were a couple, like lutter that was difficult to decipher at first but then with the explanation made so much sense, because of the different spelling it has compared to Spanish "luchar" which means to fight but overall I found it really easy to decipher the majority of words by just looking at them

[@ProximaCentauri88]

In the early 2000s, the Internet was not yet easily accessible in the Philippines. I love French so much that I made a list of vocabulary by reading inserts with French to English translation found in bottles of perfume and packs of chocolate. It was laborious but I enjoyed copying the French words and finding out what could be their equivalent in the English translation provided which also gives me a clue about the French grammar. Because of my lack of resources, I coined French words from English words which lead me to accidentally creating a French-inspired conlang: 1. English: :The boy with a red hat is running." 2. Real French: "Le garçon au chapeau rouge court." 3. My French: "Le bouy avec hat rouge ronnet." 😄

[@emmelinerousset3523]

Sir, as a French, that is THE CLEVEREST language learning curve I've ever seen from a French-studying person. Do you realise you've single-handedly invented a new form of 'creole' *... ? Thats is A DARN FEAT. PRAISE YOURSELF 👏👏👏

[@DavidTabakian]

As someone whose first language was Armenian, then had English become their native language, as well as having taken 3 years of Latin in high school; most of this was fairly straightforward to me. One interesting thing to me was "grippe", in Armenian we have the word "Գրիպ" (g'reep) which means sick, so there's some connection there I didn't know about. 😂

[@tonybaihao4178]

"Croissant" is an adjective meaning "growing". It comes from the verb "Croître" which understandably means "to grow". Connecting the dots and moving on to the nouns, it leads to "Croissance" and therefore "growth".

[@aveekbh]

As a near-native (maybe L2) English speaker (I am Indian, so English isn't really a foreign language) - when I learnt French some years ago, the shared vocabulary definitely helped. It also helped me with learning Spanish more recently. It definitely made reading French a lot easier when starting off. Of course, in practice much of the shared vocabulary has a somewhat different meaning in French (I can think of platform and quay in both languages), but that's half the fun - figuring out what meaning the word is used to convey (in other words, nuance).

[@skoubidoo]

As a French this was very interesting and informative, especially to notice the vocabulary similarities in French and more formal English. I had never considered things from that angle! I was surprised to realize how easily English speakers could understand very formal French sentences (indeed vocabulary is almost the same!), but had much more trouble with simple everyday-life sentences. 😮 About the question at the end of the video, I couldn't answer it unfortunately. My first touch with English was in kindergarten, I was VERY young; all I remember is child assistants playing with stuffed animals with us to make us learn their names in English. 🤣 Anyway thank you Paul for your work, keep making those amazing videos. 🙏

[@Eazyrun]

As someone who's studied both english and french, it fills me with joy to see both languages collide for once ❤

[@colinedmunds2238]

Native English speaker, strong Spanish abilities, can reverse engineer some Portuguese, limited exposure to French. French vocabulary is pretty straight forward either because similar words exist in English or Spanish. BUT my grip on french grammar is awful. Complex verb conjugations will absolutely wreck me. Nouns and adjectives are usually pretty easy to decipher. Spoken french is still largely incomprehensible to me. Fun exercise. Great video

[@coda5998]

For the first one "elle prépare le dîner" can also be a false friend depending where you're from it can be "she's making lunch"

[@d.v.t]

Haha. Yes. In Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, dîner is lunch. In some parts of England, they also say dinner for lunch.

[@devinstewart2973]

Came to comment that in the US south (currently living in southern Virginia), "dinner" is the common term for "lunch". And "supper" is "dinner" (evening meal)

[@sebastiencote1565]

First time I fully understand both languages! It was fun to watch! Maybe do somekind of French & Spanish or Italian video!

[@bertranddelclaux516]

Pluvia (latin)-> ☔️ pleuvoir (to rain), Il pleut (it’s raining), pluie (rain), pluvieux (rainy)-> pluviométrie (pluviometry), pluvial (pluvial)

[@lafamilleerre7733]

En ancien français, raier signifiait ruisseler, et un rai signifiait un filet d'eau, un jet d'eau... l'analogie rai et rain est troublante, non ?

[@foxmccloud9609]

I wish there are more of these, like Spanish speakers reading Portuguese or French...Or English speakers reading German?

[@jean-francoiscaron5706]

"Nouvelle" is used in literature to mean a short story. I believe it is related to the english term "novel", but they mean different things. A novel in french is called "un roman".

[@d.v.t]

You can also say une nouvelle as in news. Not too far off.

[@adrianestrada8099]

This was so much fun to follow along, hope there's a part 2 and 3 😊

[@Langfocus]

I don't know about English speakers reading French, but I will probably make more videos with this kind of format.

[@adrianestrada8099]

​@@Langfocus a portuguese and spanish one could be fun 😁

[@hdldm7970]

@@Langfocus maybe a video about how much english speakers can understand german, that would be interesting, i assume the results could be a reversal of this video

[@PainterVierax]

Salut Paul ! As a native French speaker, I believe loan words from Latin and Old French helped me quite considerably to learn English. It's a double edged sword though as there are plenty of false friends and it doesn't help for casual speak and the myriad of prepositional verbs. But my case is unusual because I started to learn German almost 5 years before having my first English course so even though I've lost most of it, German helped me to get a grip on vocab and grammar on English as well as it occasionally helps me to read Flemish or even some Swedish.

[@DanHominem]

I can't really speak or understand French, but I know quite a bit of Spanish, and I've had a good deal of unintentional French immersion. If I see French text online, I don't even bother using an online translator because I end up understanding most of it anyways...

[@tomarnd8724]

"Croissant" is related to "croissance" because it comes from a moon crescent which gets bigger in the sky each day, not because of the puffiness of the dough

[@gropki8508]

As a Frenchman, when I was in high school and a bit later I read a few English novels in my free time, and I think having some passive knowledge of English words of French or Latin origin helped me a lot with going through them and acquire more vocabulary. Sci-fi was certainly easier than Tolkien.

[@ahoj7720]

French native speaker here. I read somewhere that old English prononciation was actually much closer to French.

[@CityLights-v6u]

There's also the dreaded false friends. An example on the top of my head is "libraire" not meaning library --- it's actually a bookstore. A library is a "bibliothèque". And the grammar. I've never really been one for grammar, but French grammar is SO damn difficult! Especially the tenses and all the irregulars!

[@torrawel]

Thanks for your little cœur Paul :) Huge fan of the channel. I've said that before but gladly say it again. On a more serious note than "oh wait, my mom is French..." : I do agree though with Gideon from the "Let Them Talk TV" channel. It's not only formal English, it's also a lot of everyday words, syntax and even grammar. When you are a native speaker of another Germanic language, like me, that's very "clear and obvious". Even though, for a very long time, I struggled with English. It took me waaaay to long before I realised that all these difficult words were actually words that I already knew from French! :)

[@oldcowbb]

this series is so much fun

[@Langfocus]

I'm glad you like it. I like it too.

[@ArturoSubutex]

As a French native speaker, this is exactly the reason why, even when my English wasn’t that good, English-speaking people were often amazed at my command of “advanced” vocabulary lol

[@Grabehn42]

I was always told knowing Spanish made romance languages more understandable, but once I learned English, French became a LOT easier to understand. Now with German, the sentence structure seems more similar and I can also understand SOME words, but that's about it.

[@alfyryan6949]

pleasantly surprised to hear a Singaporean here :) 🇸🇬

[@Langfocus]

Yeah, some people don't know there are Singaporeans who speak English as their first language.

[@EKsUrbanTracks]

Croissant comes from its shape, a crescent moon, and in turn crescent/croissant comes from the phases of the moon, croissant/growing, décroissant/shrinking.

[@marccoulombeau6453]

As a french speaker, learning English was definitely easier in the latter phase of language learning where you already know the pronunciation and grammar but just need to gather up a bunch of vocabulary. In other languages like Chinese, this phase is very very very long and sometimes it just seems you don't really make any progress. Whereas in English, a lot of vocabulary I already could understand, but sometimes I'd say wrong endings like "determinated" for determined, or just make up a word from french that actually doesn't exist in English. Also, a lot of times even now I can understand a new word which comes from french but since English spelling isn't consistent, I can't tell where to put the stress on and how to pronounce the vowels.

[@Ruthavecflute]

I feel like I should apologise for the English spelling system!

[@clementrenaud4260]

Little tip, for the word "history", if you are speaking about someone, a country, the world... You have to write "Histoire" with the "H" as a capital letter.

[@pierreabbat6157]

I don't know which to answer; I learned both languages when I was a kid. "Jeune" and "young" are cognates. "Jeune" is not to be confused with "jeûne", which means "fast", like the Yom Kippur/Ramadan war when both sides fasted.

[@MsManomen]

I learned English as a second language as a child, later i learned french and latin in school. Then it helped me understand difficult english words, By translating them from the latin roots and affixes

[@simonpierre-histoiredislam2074]

13:30 NO !!!"Croissant" comes from the "croissant de lune" meaning when the moon is growing/crescent !

[@Zarthaam]

MERCI

[@alicelevesque5265]

Hey Paul! As a native French speaker, I learned how to speak English later in my life and now consider myself bilingual (easy language to learn the basics, much harder to speak it). However, I still sometimes don't know the exact word to use in English, so my trick in those moment is to say the French word with an english accent, hoping the word also exists in English.. it usually works at least 50% of the time!

[@planeurs]

I m honoured to see a postcard of Lille in the background😊

[@florencehollygibbons9300]

What was interesting for me was how much Dutch actually helped me. I learned French at school for about 14 years but haven’t used it in about 10, so the basics are still there but it’s rusty. I have, however, been actively learning Dutch for 6 months (it’s better than my French ever was due to actually enjoying the process) and it helped me with a few words here, like for flu. It’s been quite useful the other way round too

[@mep6302]

Very interesting experiment. I remember when I started learning French after having learned English and having Spanish as my native language. I had a huge advantage because if one word wasn't an English cognate, it was a Spanish one. But even so, some words were still unrecognizable or hard to figure out their meaning.

[@marccoulombeau6453]

Also, we also use the word junior in french as junior in English, whereas we use jeune where in English you'd use young.

[@Langfocus]

Yes, and we also have "juvenile" in English, which is related.

[@marccoulombeau6453]

Oh right!

[@gostavoadolfos2023]

I think the pastry name croissant comes from the croissant moon shape.

[@xandudicanda6303]

Correct! “Croissance” comes from the word “croître” that means “to growth”; “croissant” means “growing” and the pastry name comes from the shape of the crescent moon, i.e., tho growing moon.

[@xandudicanda6303]

Iʼve just noticed right now: someone else had already explained that...

[@aspacelex]

Grippe actually used to be used for the flu in English as recently as the middle of the 20th century.

[@bernhardkrickl3567]

As a German, I was most surprised by the word "grippe". Because in German it is the same word, so I thought it would be Germanic but of course not recognized in English because there it's called "flu". It turns out, "grippe" is actually a French word, and pretty young (from the 18th century) and the Germans got it from the French.

[@Mercure250]

As a French native speaker, basic English was not made easy by knowing French, but as I became more and more comfortable with the language, I can say the similarities with French did help for a lot of words, especially technical ones (watching science videos in English actually helped with my learning, because so many scientific words are similar in both languages; shout-out to SciShow and Veritasium for that). But there are also cases where I would misunderstand the meaning of an English word because it's actually a false friend, and it would take me longer to learn the actual meaning of the word in English because I didn't realize at first that I was misunderstanding the meaning based on what the cognate means in French. I don't remember any specific example, but I know it happened a few times. Even for words that weren't totally false friends, the specific contexts one would use them would be different, which meant that I had to adjust my initial assumptions about those words.

[@palupalu5647]

currently, actually, are symetric false friends, currently meaning actuellement, and actually couramment

[@Mercure250]

@@palupalu5647 "actually" does not mean "couramment". "couramment" means "commonly" or "frequently". We would translate "actually" as "en réalité" or "en fait", or "vraiment" or "réellement" in some contexts.

[@davidcfrogley]

I learned French living in Belgium during middle school, and my teachers were all native speakers. I don't remember finding much similarity between the English vocabulary I knew as an 11-, 12, and 13-year-old and the French I learned, but knowing French certainly helped me later when I started reading and hearing more formal English to be able to understand it.

[@bpie_ef3967]

Its funny because french words made it to formal english, but today I feel like english words are making it to informal french. Or maybe that's just a feeling I get because I spend my time on the french Internet, where people are heavily influenced by english language

[@andrewcorrell5000]

As a native Australian English speaker, I knew that roughly half of words in English language were originally French. It is a matter of finding root words to figure out as well as some basic French words. It makes more sense for both English and French speakers to learn from each others like both English and Dutch/German speakers. Interesting!!

[@vladimirmosimann3807]

As a french speaker it helped me a lot to learn english at some point for sure but only after learning the basics. It helps because in many cases, the meaning is the same, you just only need to learn the pronunciation and even though the literal translation is false, you can make deductions like the people in this video but you need the basics to do this in a live conversation. As you have to focus on a specific word, you need to get right the rest of the sentence to keep up.

[@melid9]

as always, AWESOME job Paul! 🎉

[@mytube001]

Really good! More videos like this, please!

[@Qbe_Root]

As a native French speaker, I feel like my French vocabulary not only helped me learn English words, but also helps me with English spelling to this day: in English, vowels in unaccentuated syllables tend to get reduced to schwas and end up sounding the same, so I often see even natives mix them up in writing (e.g. "definately" instead of "definitely"), but French vowel sounds are more distinct so I get the right vowels for free on words that come from French

[@sachacendra3187]

What I found interesting is that a lot of english speakers i've met feel so self conscious that they don't dare to do that type of guesses. While personally as a Francophone second language English speaker/learner I think this type of guesses in reverse got me like half the way to learn English. Edit : yeah for the question at the end, "englishifying" French words was how I acquired vocabulary pretty quickly. It made me sound very weird at the start, like I was speaking hyper formal English but slowly I acquired the more basic vocabulary only through exposure from you tube videos and now my English is mostly normal. A bit on the formal side still as you may gather from my writing style in this comment x). There are some domain where I still struggle like groceries, kitchen ustensiles (there is surprisingly few influence from French there) and stuff like that I might be totally lost sometimes.

[@Drewbydrew]

As a Canadian who considers himself a monolingual anglophone I’m impressed how much French I actually know 😛 Didn’t realize how much actually stuck!

[@Jinkaza1882]

The age difference would be interesting to explore. Old, young, and their exposure to other languages.

[@krisrizakis9989]

I'm perfectly bilingual in French and English. I prefer to use spoken English. One advantage is when it comes to spelling words in English. i'll think of the word in french and based on its pronunciation, it helps me write it out in English.

[@donaldwycoff4154]

What a fun video! I see I've gotten way out of practice, though I was only ever vaguely familiar with Quebecer Francaise (lived in Maine for 25 years, Lewiston/Auburn, so lots of Quebecker influence)

[@iSylvan]

Love how the gold play button in the background picks up your gesturing while the camera doesn't 😂

[@morrigambist]

I have spoken a bit of French in France, but I couldn't understand the first page of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in French. So much for that project.

[@Eckmuhl29]

17:26 "Nouvelle" also means "Novel", but it's a specific kind of story so it's not used so much. It's more like a 10ish pages story

[@brunopoterie9114]

as a native french speaker, learning english in school was relatively easy, due to the vocabulary of course, but also the constant exposure from pop songs and movies. German after that was more complicated (especially grammar), but the vocabulary from english helped a lot. Then learning swedish was a walk in the park ....

[@jeff__w]

A friend of mine who’s French (but speaks English very close to a native English speaker) thought that English was a Romance language-which really surprised me because I had always thought that it was obviously not and certainly a French speaker wouldn’t think so. (I tend to think English sentence structure is closer to something like that of Swedish.) Well, based on an n=1, I suppose not.

[@petrapetrakoliou8979]

I would say "croissant" comes from its lunar shape, it is the crescent of the moon, which itself is called "croissant de lune" because it is growing.

[@PizzaRanger]

I think something worth bringing up is the so-called "cearal box french" or "cereal box english" that people will learn natively in Canada as all of our packaging and most of our public signage is required by law to have a french and english translation. Therefore even before learning french to a native level I knew roughly half of the words in first year and all of the grammars and transmutations just from looking at all of the parallel signage. On top of that my father was a native french speaker who raised me in english so of course a lot of my child hood words were incomprehensible in kindergarten. words like bonhomme, ranger, pischneu, bizoine etc x'D

[@Langfocus]

Canadian mom: No Fruit Loops! Let's have organic low gluten oatmeal from Whole Foods. Canadian kid: But I'm learning French from the box! Bilingualism is the essence of Canada. Canadian mom: Oh, in that case here you go!

[@PizzaRanger]

@@Langfocus its not Fruit By The Foot .... its FRUIT-O-LONG!

[@danielterrazas]

This was really interesting. As a native Spanish speaker I managed to understand a couple more words than the English speakers. If you ever want to make the same experiment with a native Spanish speaker, who also speaks English, I'm up for it.

[@Nazmazh]

It's interesting as an Albertan - I've had probably more informal and formal school exposure to French than a lot of Americans or Kiwis, so the basic structural words, I know from casual exposure/remember from elementary and middle school (I lived in Ottawa for grade 2 and 3, so those years I had French class, which was a couple years' head-start on other Albertans when we moved back when I was in grade 4). But we're probably among the least French part of Canada, outside of specific communities. I know I dropped French as soon as I could - Because that was just the thing to do, y'know? I did end up taking German in high school (which, sadly, I never got the opportunity to build on in college and university - But, German's relative rigidity on grammar/sentence structure compared to English is something that stuck with me and has helped me appreciate it more in English and recognize it better in other languages). Even as much as I'm an etymology nerd, though, there's definitely some words that I could not begin to parse in these French sentences. Context might let me make a guess, but that was about it. I have to agree with you on the technical/formal language stuff being more recognizable as directly related to English words in many ways. In addition to the relatively common technical terms (economy, sanitation, etc.), my background in biology/ecology meant seeing a lot of Latin/Romance-derived specialized terms. And, being the nerd I am, I tried to pick up some understanding of recurring elements. Never did actually sit down and formally learn Latin, though. Honestly, the grammar of Latin's by far the most alien part of it to me - How to change words for different tenses/genders/other situations/etc. It's actually kind of weird seeing how many words in English are just the same French/Latin words, but adapted from different grammatical cases, then the meaning diverged to something more specific in English. I suppose that's one advantage for English - Having ~3 major potential sources for words for different situations means there was room for some nuance to develop in their usage - eg: "kingly" from Germanic/Old English for commoners vs. "royal" from French for the aristocracy vs. "regal" directly from Latin for formal/technical language. Technically, all very direct synonyms, but using one over the other might impart a different feel to whatever is being said.

[@joshchotiner]

Je crois que tu as raison. Nice picture of the Fourvière Basilica in Lyon ! 😁❤️

[@yewenyi]

the dangerous words are the words that sound similar and have nothing to do with each other.

[@jessicapigg]

Absolutely brilliant thank you. These are my two languages so I appreciated this so much ❤

[@mbgal7758]

I took French in high school and this was frustrating because I’ve forgotten a lot but I recognized so much. So I see words like aujourd’hui and know it but couldn’t remember the meaning.

[@arnobozo9722]

The boxing of words made the thinking very clear.

[@Langfocus]

Thanks! That's part of my signature style that I've developed over the years.

[@BassHelal]

I only have a very small exposure to French and Latin and the results are almost the same as the participants. It would be very interesting to see the same experiment with Arabic and Persian, like Chinese and Japanese and French and English, the same thing happened to Persian from Arabic (Arabic words are extremely prevalent in formal and Classical Persian) where both can read each other's formal texts to a high degree (60-70%) but the informal and spoken language probably goes down to like 5-10%. Many thanks for these videos, it's an interesting idea to explore because it's quite motivating for learners of a language to find another reason to keep going, for example by learning Arabic you have less work to do if you choose to learn Persian or vice versa.

[@jlu3ai]

When we had to choose a second language in secondary school my cunning plan was that I would pick French after English because I knew of the big amount of shared vocabulary. The hurdle that I haven't really been able to get over to this day is this everyday French part that English has nothing to do with. :D Interesting video as always.

[@GreatCollapsingHrung]

Native English speaker, took Latin in high school. I feel like in the examples given, the Latin helped in a couple of cases, like being able to guess that "nous" was some kind of first person plural. Honestly, though, just having a decent English vocabulary was enough to get the gist most of the time. Now, if I couldn't see the words written out, and had to do it based on just hearing spoken French, I think I would have been lucky to pick up more than a few words in the entire video.