https://www.the-sun.com/news/11868514/france-investigation-marine-le-pen-fraud-election-defeat/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sunyoutubestories

But will he do it…?

https://x.com/CilComLFC/status/1810110921383010563

His comment:

“Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party received, by far, the most votes in France’s election today, but only won the third most amount of seats.

The French people wanted to take back their borders and sovereignty, instead they got communism. We can’t vote our way out of this.”

group/party % of votes seats
_______________________________

New Popular Front 26.8 177
Macron & allies 22.3 148
National Rally & allies 37.4 142
The Republicans 5.1 39
Other Right 3.5 27
Other 5.0 41

Unless there’s some kind of serious reason to quickly sober up (nuclear conflict?) Britain and France may well be writing the textbook on How to Disassemble One’s Country (Forward, of course, by Foucault…and Afterward, too)….

…with the “Last Best Hope of Earth” and the “True North” not far behind….alas.

File under: To save it you gotta kill it.

It is the same thing with things today like the Muslims overrunning France and England through “immigration,” and like the crazy lefties in the United States that threaten riots over everything. You might as well fight them now, before they get any stronger.

Folks should go and study how Neville Chamberlain’s policy of “appeasement” did not work (and would never have worked). All you do when you try to appease bullies is to hope that they will eat you last, but in the end, you will be eaten.

Spanish looks much less mysterious now that I’ve been studying French. I suspect it’s harder for a Spanish speaker to learn French than the other way around.

I would agree. The pronunciation would be a stumbling block, for starters.

I had a computer science TA from Brazil. He would speak to me in Brazilian Portuguese. I would more-or-less understand him (which wouldn’t happen were I to hear Portuguese from Portugal. I get maybe every second or third word from an Amalia Rodrigues song.). I would reply to him in Spanish, and he would more-or-less understand me.

But neither English nor Spanish will get you through the nightmare of hearing and pronouncing French.

Some French spent some time trying to get me to pronounce “incroyable”(incredible) in proper French. They gave up after a half hour.

My sister’s French teacher, a sweet little old lady, would spend summers working as a waitress in Quebec to keep her language skills up.

Though e-readers with a tap give us near-instantaneous dictionary access, making dictionary access much easier than the days of paper dictionaries.

Reading novels (while also hearing and speaking what I read) is mostly how I’m learning French. I’ve read seven adult novels now and I’m still excited about French.

If you have read seven novels in French, you have a pretty good grasp of the language.

(while also hearing and speaking what I read)
That means the old “good reading knowledge but can’t speak worth a” comment, which described many doctoral students with a “reading knowledge,” may not be as common as it used to be.

I use the text-to-speech app for the Fire HD while reading in Spanish. The app’s Spanish accent is pretty good. I certainly can’t find any complaints about it. Turns out that the normal speech pace of ~200 wpm is abut what my reading speed is in Spanish.

Gringo:

Spanish and English fluency are a great combo for learning French. I envy you!

French and Spanish share Latin roots, but diverged after Rome fell and the Pyrenees mountains isolated the two peoples. Spanish remained truer to Latin (aside from its Arabic influences) than French.

France was invaded by Germanic tribes, the Normans and Vikings which caused French to evolve in ways much different from Spanish. Later there were English influences.

I lean towards Spanish as a bit more useful than English for learning French. The grammar is closer. (I had two years of Spanish and four years of Latin in high school.) But English vocabulary will fill in gaps that Spanish won’t.

Spanish looks much less mysterious now that I’ve been studying French. I suspect it’s harder for a Spanish speaker to learn French than the other way around.

But neither English nor Spanish will get you through the nightmare of hearing and pronouncing French. 🙂

I haven’t used Deepl directly. I use LingQ, an app for reading target text, sentence by sentence, with online dictionaries, translation, and audio play, has switched from Google Translate to Deepl.

Deepl seems better than Google Translate. It is fine though it won’t pick up context outside the sentence nor does it handle expressions well.

I use ChatGPT for the stuff LingQ/Deepl doesn’t pick up. Chat is quite good at languages, even the free version, ChatGPT 3.5, which I suggest you try for questions Deepl doesn’t answer. You can even have conversations with it in your target language.

The combination of LingQ and ChatGPT is an amazing boon. I can’t imagine learning French with paper dictionaries, textbooks and grammars.

Reading novels (while also hearing and speaking what I read) is mostly how I’m learning French. I’ve read seven adult novels now and I’m still excited about French.

The book is about her grandfather Joseph Davrichachvili, who was a peer of Joseph Stalin during their childhoods in Georgia. There were some family rumors that the two Josephs were half-brothers. Who knows?

Some reactions to French to English translations. In seeing French and English translation on the same screen, I can at least some of the time see how the translation went. I suspect that if I went sentence-by-sentence for the whole book, I would have picked up a rough reading knowledge of French. But why bother? While I have known some French people, that was 25-50 years ago, and then I could use either Spanish or English with them. Spanish is enough for me. I use Spanish often enough, for both speaking and reading.

The question becomes, which is more useful in translating French: knowledge of Spanish or knowledge of English? I would roughly estimate knowledge of English is more useful, though Spanish can be useful.

huxley, your quoting the Sinatra song from Hole in the Head reminds me of a family trip to Washington DC when a child. We didn’t go to movies very much, so it was a treat to see Hole in the Head when in DC. Still remember that song. IIRC, Sinatra used High Hopes when campaigning for JFK in 1960.