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@@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.
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
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
I was gonna say the exact same thing ! It's like an unintentonal trick to sound smart.😅 The better a French person speaks English, the less refined they sound.
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".
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
@@camembertdalembert6323 You'll get there don't worry :). As a bilingual Canadian person whose first language is French, I have to admit that it took me around 3 years and a half to become fluent in English. And it wasn't easy to get there but it's well worth it once you've mastered most of the complicated grammar rules that exist in English.
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 :)
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.
@@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
@@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.
The fact that French, my language, had a lot of similar words helped me a lot when I learned English. And in a funny way, learning English helped me improve my own capacity in French by linking the history of the two languages and their links with other European languages. ...by the way, the croissance is close to croissant because croissant is short for croissant de lune (crescent moon, "growing of moon") because the pastry looks like it. It's from the word croître (to grow) and literally means growing. And in English, crescent comes from it. The growing moon.
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").
Yes, the meaning of a word can drift away through time, so the moment it entered the vocabulary of a language is important. For instance the French word for shower (i.e. douche) was borrowed by several European languages (examples: Dutch douche, Russian dush, Swedish dusch, ...) but English took it before it specifically meant shower apparently and thus has a quite different meaning in this language. :)
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!
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?
@@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.
I am a francophone and I can read Italian although I have never formally studied that language. But I became functional in Spanish and Portuguese in only 5 months of studying.
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.
@@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).
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.
I'm french and use my knowledge in english to understand german better. I love that this one man used his knowledge of spanish to understand the word "comprendre"
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
@@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
@@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
@@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.
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 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. :)
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.
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 it's the moon.. "croissant" was a phase of the moon with this shape long before the pastry.. in english it's a "crescent"
@@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.
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.
@@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.
Keep the content Paul, John McWhorter is proud of you to show the full Romanicity of English in pratical, strong way. Continues the logic of video testing english speakers to decode, comprehend and translate normand, picard, walloon, interlingua, spanish, portuguese, catalan, romansh and romanian. Keep the real experiment. Put native speakers to test english speakers in a basic, pratical and intermediate level. Continues your precious work. Hugs 🫂
I was quite surprised that no one knew what "elle" meant, but I'm a native english speaker who took spanish in k-12 and then french in college. I currently live in an area where around 40% of the population speaks Spanish natively. It was interesting to see how english speakers with little exposure to a latin language understood things without being able to use prior knowledge
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!_
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 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.
@@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
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?
@@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.
@@smallwisdom8819 1. us Romanians also loaned in „gripă” for the flu. (I speak Romanian as my mother tongue, as an idea of why I am saying this.) 2. Flu is indeed an abbreviation of influenza. 3. "Story" came through Anglo-Norman, where it was spelled as "estorie", and the initial "e" got cut off, so to speak, and there was "storie", and through years of sound changes and such, it came to the current form of story. "History" comes from the same source, and in Middle English, there was zero distinction between story and history semantically, but one was borrowed from "historie" in the Medieval times and the other was borrowed during the Norman times as "estorie", basically. The distinction was most likely drawn around the time the term was reborrowed.
@@smallwisdom8819 English uses way more scientific language (often Latin or Greek based) in everyday speech when talking about matters of medicine than any other language I know.
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.
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
People from Louisiana would've instantly noticed beaucoup. We never stopped using it to mean "alot/many" even after English became our main language. We'll say things like "It's beacoup hot ouside" or "They have beaucoup money." We even have a yearly music festival called "Buku Music Fest."
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.
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.
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 ....
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.
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
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." 😄
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 👏👏👏
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 ^_^
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.
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 elbentos responded I believe well 👍, like someone who likes/is competent in doing home painting/building, but I was quite in trouble explaining in a 15 word sentence 🤣
13:47 while "croissant" and "croissance" are related, your derivation is still false. The "croissant" is actually named after its shape, the (rising) half-moon, aka "crescent" in English (another cognate). The "Red Crescent", the Muslim counterpart of the Red Cross, is called "Croissant-Rouge" in French.
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.
I liked so much the effort of 3 participants they dont speak french but can understand, basic, intermediate and pratical French without confusions. Only true advanced french is harder for all them, the basic level of french or other french regionals idioms for them all aren't difficult in concret case. Love your test and linguistical experiment Paul. Love ya. 💙💙💙💙💙💙💙🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻
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).
as a native speaker in french and english due to my english family living in france since before i was born, i find it fascinating how similar some words are that i never thought twice about. it also explains why i accidently use some french words when speaking english and vice versa
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. 😂
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.
i personally would love to see a similar video of folks that are spanish/english bilingual or semi bilingual. there are millions of folk that speak english and spanish in the united states alone and they would perceive french quite differently. keep up the great content !
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"
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! ^^
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.
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!
That is such a great observation about French being the language of the upper classes. I know that when I was taking French in high school, it definitely did help when taking the SATs. My favorite $10 word is ameliorate which is very common in French but sounds very snobby in English.
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?
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.
@@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.
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.
"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".
@@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
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.
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. 🙏
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
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...
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! :)
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!!
"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.
It's very funny to find random french words in complicated english books, like "milieu" or "ennui" or even compounds like "en masse" As a french student, using those words in english class would seem ridiculous and lazy, but not only do they exist, they sound very classy and formal!
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)
My bf and I think you should do this next with English speakers trying to read Dutch. (FTR, I was able to figure out most of the sentences but that's because I speak some Spanish. The only sentence that tripped me up was the one about the rain.)
13:43 : As a native speaker, I'm not so sure that the word croissant comes from the bread becoming puffy when it bakes. Croissant is literally the present participle (or gerund in english) of the verb "croître", which means "to grow". Croissant is, word for word, "growing". So to think that it has to do with it getting puffy is not a bad guess. Historically, it is believed that the croissant itself was created in Vienna after a victory against the Ottoman armies trying to invade westward. It was given its unique shape after the symbol of the ottomans. Much like modern Turkey where they hailed from, this was a crescent moon shape. Hence, the name of the delicacy itself has more to do with its shape, a "crescent" shape, which itself is shaped like a crescent moon (or sickle moon). A crescent moon is the first phase of the moon cycle, where the moon "grows" in shape, that's why a crescent moon is called "croissant de lune" in French. Hope this helps ^^ !
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a french person, I feel back to my first years at school learning english, and being able to recognise some words and trying to get them together to get something right out of it
Croissant comes from its shape, a crescent moon, and in turn crescent/croissant comes from the phases of the moon, croissant/growing, décroissant/shrinking.
I have to say as someone who does Duolingo French for about 4 months written French in the formal context is immediately understandable to a degree and easy to comprehend. Conversational French especially without seeing the sentence is still barely intelligible to me. Also to add to that being Taiwanese was absolutely helpful to the last video of Japanese vs Mandarin. We have cognates, cultural influences, and certain slangs in our dialects that old people use.
As a French speaker, I can say that the french vocabulary helps us like it helps English speakers. There are obviously some trap like library (not librairie) and actually (not actuellement) but it can help to understand a unknown word. It also gives the sensation that every french word has an equivalent in english, so we invented this equivalent (and sometimes it's works!). The word order is also different so it can be difficult to use "our words" but in a order that make no sense in french. So yes, it helps but we have to be careful!
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.
Being a native English speaker who is proficient in Esperanto and is also a scientist, so I am exposed to lots of Latinate terms, it's remarkable how much of these sentences I understood.
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.
"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
"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".
I must add that "nouvelle" can also mean a novella (the Italian equivalent which got loaned into English) with the sense of a medium-sized story. Bigger than the short story, shorter than the novel. And yes, it is pretty much related to the English novel.
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.
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!
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)
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 "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.
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.
"croissant" the pastry or the adjective have effectively the same root, the verb "croitre" (increase) in French. And I think (I'm not an expert) that "crescent" and "croitre" have also the same roots, the Latin: "crescendum". For an English musician, I think it's quite easy to see the similarity(?) between "croissant" and "crescendo" (phonically) and so, by analogy "croissant", "crescendo", "crescent" and "increase".
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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.
@@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.
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
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
I was gonna say the exact same thing ! It's like an unintentonal trick to sound smart.😅 The better a French person speaks English, the less refined they sound.
Haha same here
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".
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
@@Ruthavecflute I still have to learn those details, thanks. English is so weird...
@@camembertdalembert6323 You'll get there don't worry :). As a bilingual Canadian person whose first language is French, I have to admit that it took me around 3 years and a half to become fluent in English. And it wasn't easy to get there but it's well worth it once you've mastered most of the complicated grammar rules that exist in English.
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 :)
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.
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.
No problem ^^ Thank you for your videos !
@@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
@@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.
The fact that French, my language, had a lot of similar words helped me a lot when I learned English. And in a funny way, learning English helped me improve my own capacity in French by linking the history of the two languages and their links with other European languages.
...by the way, the croissance is close to croissant because croissant is short for croissant de lune (crescent moon, "growing of moon") because the pastry looks like it. It's from the word croître (to grow) and literally means growing. And in English, crescent comes from it. The growing moon.
That is interesting. I never before connected croissant and crescent. Tomorrow I shall ask for almond crescents at my local artisan bakery.
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").
I would add that "merci" as in "mercy" is feminine while "merci" as in "thank you" is masculine.
Yes, the meaning of a word can drift away through time, so the moment it entered the vocabulary of a language is important.
For instance the French word for shower (i.e. douche) was borrowed by several European languages (examples: Dutch douche, Russian dush, Swedish dusch, ...) but English took it before it specifically meant shower apparently and thus has a quite different meaning in this language. :)
« La merci » as a noun meaning mercy still exists, but it's poetic
In French, we also have the term "miséricorde" closer to "mercy" than "pitié".
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!
I speak only English (In the Indo-European family) and understood 70% at least.
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?
@@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.
I am a francophone and I can read Italian although I have never formally studied that language. But I became functional in Spanish and Portuguese in only 5 months of studying.
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.
My school taught me to use ague for flu.
@@prenomnom2812 it's "agripper" in French that means close to the same thing as "grip" in English.
I have seen "la grippe" in written English.
@@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).
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.
I'm french and use my knowledge in english to understand german better. I love that this one man used his knowledge of spanish to understand the word "comprendre"
It's interesting he thought about that before thinking about comprehend. Even if the others did.
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
@@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
@@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
Qu'est-ce qu'on va faire pour resoudre ce problème? (Keskong vafair pohaysoudrãs problem?) 😅
@@RogerRamos1993 loll
@@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.
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" :)
Yeah, I knew it was related to croître in some way, but didn't know about the "croissant de lune" route.
@@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. :)
He’s Canadian, he’s legally required to know some French ;)
In Argentina they call the crossaint a medioluna, literally meaning half moon. So the association with the moon checks out.
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.
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?)
What came first the growing moon or the growing dough. We may never know!
faux amis are a bitch. both within french itself, and then with english-french.
@@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"
@@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.
Nobody's that bad? Mais si, malheureusement, ça fait grincer les dents
Croissant is called that way because it resembles a waxing Moon, which is calling "crescent" ("growing") for a reason.
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.
@@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.
I believe it was invented in Vienna after the Turks were defeated, to mock the Turkish flag, though I am not sure how it ended with a French name.
@@LuisAldamiz That's funny. In German the moon is honest. We liken it to an a or a (cursive) z (abnehmend, zunehmend)
@@HotelPapa100 - Curious. Seems a bit more forced than D and C but fair enough: I'd also prefer the Moon to be honest, but she isn't. XD
Keep the content Paul, John McWhorter is proud of you to show the full Romanicity of English in pratical, strong way.
Continues the logic of video testing english speakers to decode, comprehend and translate normand, picard, walloon, interlingua, spanish, portuguese, catalan, romansh and romanian.
Keep the real experiment.
Put native speakers to test english speakers in a basic, pratical and intermediate level.
Continues your precious work.
Hugs 🫂
I was quite surprised that no one knew what "elle" meant, but I'm a native english speaker who took spanish in k-12 and then french in college. I currently live in an area where around 40% of the population speaks Spanish natively. It was interesting to see how english speakers with little exposure to a latin language understood things without being able to use prior knowledge
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!_
I get you! lol Fancy words in English are just common regurlary used French words to me. lol
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.
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.
@@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.
@@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
Interestingly, Grippe used to be used in English as well for flu in the early 1900's and before.
It's actually the German word for flu.
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?
@@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.
@@smallwisdom8819 1. us Romanians also loaned in „gripă” for the flu. (I speak Romanian as my mother tongue, as an idea of why I am saying this.)
2. Flu is indeed an abbreviation of influenza.
3. "Story" came through Anglo-Norman, where it was spelled as "estorie", and the initial "e" got cut off, so to speak, and there was "storie", and through years of sound changes and such, it came to the current form of story. "History" comes from the same source, and in Middle English, there was zero distinction between story and history semantically, but one was borrowed from "historie" in the Medieval times and the other was borrowed during the Norman times as "estorie", basically. The distinction was most likely drawn around the time the term was reborrowed.
@@smallwisdom8819 English uses way more scientific language (often Latin or Greek based) in everyday speech when talking about matters of medicine than any other language I know.
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.
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
Canadians when watching this video: "Is that even worth asking?"
😂😂😂
Paul's Canadian BTW
@@Samy-bu1ze Ah, c'est excellent, mon ami.
Yeah, I can read every cereal box in French, no problem!
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.
People from Louisiana would've instantly noticed beaucoup. We never stopped using it to mean "alot/many" even after English became our main language. We'll say things like "It's beacoup hot ouside" or "They have beaucoup money." We even have a yearly music festival called "Buku Music Fest."
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.
You're lucky you're not Brazilian and haven't learned Spanish.😅😂
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.
@@palupalu5647 You did exactly that. 😂
Sure, it was your corrector, but funny anyway.
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 ....
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.
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
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." 😄
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 👏👏👏
seems u hv created a new european language :)
Studying Spanish helped me immensely with the French. My guesses weren't all correct but because of Spanish cognates I was close!
Same
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 ^_^
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.
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 😅
You can't leave it there! How did you transalate bricolour?
@@Ruthavecflute
Bricoleur = Tinkerer
@@Ruthavecflute elbentos responded I believe well 👍, like someone who likes/is competent in doing home painting/building, but I was quite in trouble explaining in a 15 word sentence 🤣
13:47 while "croissant" and "croissance" are related, your derivation is still false. The "croissant" is actually named after its shape, the (rising) half-moon, aka "crescent" in English (another cognate). The "Red Crescent", the Muslim counterpart of the Red Cross, is called "Croissant-Rouge" in French.
I was about to jump into the comments and yours appeared 👏🏻 👏🏻👏🏻
Same! @@anicetcastel9393
I was about to write this.
I was screaming against this false explanation 😂
Grippe is also grippe in German, griep in Dutch, gripp in Russian and grip in Bulgarian.
Spanish gripe too
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.
Interesting. Did the grammar give you any major problems?
@Ruthavecflute Not really.
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!
Time to learn it my guy
@@sa..9780 learn French language, it's never too late😉
I liked so much the effort of 3 participants they dont speak french but can understand, basic, intermediate and pratical French without confusions.
Only true advanced french is harder for all them, the basic level of french or other french regionals idioms for them all aren't difficult in concret case.
Love your test and linguistical experiment Paul.
Love ya.
💙💙💙💙💙💙💙🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻
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).
as a native speaker in french and english due to my english family living in france since before i was born, i find it fascinating how similar some words are that i never thought twice about. it also explains why i accidently use some french words when speaking english and vice versa
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. 😂
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.
i personally would love to see a similar video of folks that are spanish/english bilingual or semi bilingual. there are millions of folk that speak english and spanish in the united states alone and they would perceive french quite differently. keep up the great content !
First time I fully understand both languages! It was fun to watch! Maybe do somekind of French & Spanish or Italian video!
French native speaker here. I read somewhere that old English prononciation was actually much closer to French.
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"
You can speak good English!!
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! ^^
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.
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!
That is such a great observation about French being the language of the upper classes. I know that when I was taking French in high school, it definitely did help when taking the SATs. My favorite $10 word is ameliorate which is very common in French but sounds very snobby in English.
Really good! More videos like this, please!
As someone who's studied both english and french, it fills me with joy to see both languages collide for once ❤
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?
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.
@@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.
It helps but it also comes with nuances.
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.
Same but in reverse for me learning English
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
"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".
This was so much fun to follow along, hope there's a part 2 and 3 😊
I don't know about English speakers reading French, but I will probably make more videos with this kind of format.
@@Langfocus a portuguese and spanish one could be fun 😁
@@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
13:40
I am sure the word comes from the growing moon as it shapes
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.
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. 🙏
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
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...
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! :)
Amazing video! Would love to see one with Spanish.
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!!
"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.
as always, AWESOME job Paul! 🎉
It's very funny to find random french words in complicated english books, like "milieu" or "ennui" or even compounds like "en masse"
As a french student, using those words in english class would seem ridiculous and lazy, but not only do they exist, they sound very classy and formal!
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"
Haha. Yes. In Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, dîner is lunch. In some parts of England, they also say dinner for lunch.
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)
@@devinstewart2973 In french from our grand parents the last meal also was the souper (supper), but everyone uses dinner now
My bf and I think you should do this next with English speakers trying to read Dutch. (FTR, I was able to figure out most of the sentences but that's because I speak some Spanish. The only sentence that tripped me up was the one about the rain.)
13:43 : As a native speaker, I'm not so sure that the word croissant comes from the bread becoming puffy when it bakes. Croissant is literally the present participle (or gerund in english) of the verb "croître", which means "to grow". Croissant is, word for word, "growing". So to think that it has to do with it getting puffy is not a bad guess.
Historically, it is believed that the croissant itself was created in Vienna after a victory against the Ottoman armies trying to invade westward. It was given its unique shape after the symbol of the ottomans. Much like modern Turkey where they hailed from, this was a crescent moon shape. Hence, the name of the delicacy itself has more to do with its shape, a "crescent" shape, which itself is shaped like a crescent moon (or sickle moon). A crescent moon is the first phase of the moon cycle, where the moon "grows" in shape, that's why a crescent moon is called "croissant de lune" in French. Hope this helps ^^ !
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.
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.
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.
@@bernhardkrickl3567 there are a lot if germanic wards in French . Frank people gave us a lot.
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.
13:30 NO !!!"Croissant" comes from the "croissant de lune" meaning when the moon is growing/crescent !
MERCI
this series is so much fun
I'm glad you like it. I like it too.
as a French, I find this video very interesting
As a french person, I feel back to my first years at school learning english, and being able to recognise some words and trying to get them together to get something right out of it
Croissant comes from its shape, a crescent moon, and in turn crescent/croissant comes from the phases of the moon, croissant/growing, décroissant/shrinking.
I have to say as someone who does Duolingo French for about 4 months written French in the formal context is immediately understandable to a degree and easy to comprehend. Conversational French especially without seeing the sentence is still barely intelligible to me.
Also to add to that being Taiwanese was absolutely helpful to the last video of Japanese vs Mandarin. We have cognates, cultural influences, and certain slangs in our dialects that old people use.
Grippe actually used to be used for the flu in English as recently as the middle of the 20th century.
Also, we also use the word junior in french as junior in English, whereas we use jeune where in English you'd use young.
Yes, and we also have "juvenile" in English, which is related.
Oh right!
As a French speaker, I can say that the french vocabulary helps us like it helps English speakers. There are obviously some trap like library (not librairie) and actually (not actuellement) but it can help to understand a unknown word. It also gives the sensation that every french word has an equivalent in english, so we invented this equivalent (and sometimes it's works!).
The word order is also different so it can be difficult to use "our words" but in a order that make no sense in french.
So yes, it helps but we have to be careful!
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.
I feel like I should apologise for the English spelling system!
pleasantly surprised to hear a Singaporean here :) 🇸🇬
Yeah, some people don't know there are Singaporeans who speak English as their first language.
Being a native English speaker who is proficient in Esperanto and is also a scientist, so I am exposed to lots of Latinate terms, it's remarkable how much of these sentences I understood.
I wish there are more of these, like Spanish speakers reading Portuguese or French...Or English speakers reading German?
I think the pastry name croissant comes from the croissant moon shape.
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.
Iʼve just noticed right now: someone else had already explained that...
12:20 Réarmement démographique 🗣 🗣 🔥 🔥
"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
I'd be interesting to see Tagalog speakers reading Spanish sentences since 30% of its vocabulary comes from Spanish
"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".
You can also say une nouvelle as in news. Not too far off.
I must add that "nouvelle" can also mean a novella (the Italian equivalent which got loaned into English) with the sense of a medium-sized story. Bigger than the short story, shorter than the novel. And yes, it is pretty much related to the English novel.
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.
13:43 "Croissant" refers to the crescent of the moon because it is shaped like it. 🙂
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.
Sometimes I like to mix in Spanish with English spelling and it ends up looking somewhat like French, which is a little funny
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!
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)
Pluvia (latin)-> ☔️ pleuvoir (to rain), Il pleut (it’s raining), pluie (rain), pluvieux (rainy)-> pluviométrie (pluviometry), pluvial (pluvial)
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 ?
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.
currently, actually, are symetric false friends, currently meaning actuellement, and actually couramment
@@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.
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.
"croissant" the pastry or the adjective have effectively the same root, the verb "croitre" (increase) in French. And I think (I'm not an expert) that "crescent" and "croitre" have also the same roots, the Latin: "crescendum". For an English musician, I think it's quite easy to see the similarity(?) between "croissant" and "crescendo" (phonically) and so, by analogy "croissant", "crescendo", "crescent" and "increase".
Even hospital is written the same way when you remember that the circonflexe stands for a missed out *s*