> When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious person for “poux.” He was telling us to check for “pouls” — a pulse, pronounced identically.
There are homophones in many (most? all?) languages; but in this case "poux" are almost always plural (les poux / des poux) whereas a pulse is always singular (le pouls).
"Check his pulse" would be said as "vérifiez son pouls" and "check if he's got lice", "vérifiez s'il a des poux": it seems hard or impossible for the author to mix them up.
"Check his pulse" would be said as "vérifiez son pouls"
and "check if he's got lice", "vérifiez s'il a des
poux": it seems hard or impossible for the author to
mix them up.
As someone who learned German as an adult (which also has lots of homophones + gendered nouns etc) I assure you it's not hard to make such mistakes.
I can't edit my parent comment anymore; I didn't mean that it would be hard for anyone to fail to make the distinction, esp. for people beginning to learn French.
But the author has been in France for 15 years and by her own admission, speaks the language pretty well; so I doubt that she actually had a hard time discriminating between "les poux" and "le pouls" -- she probably thought this play on words was funny, but didn't experience the confusion herself.
It's not hard to them to make this mistake: "le", "la", "les" is all "the" for english natives, while verbs and adjective don't change according to plural or gender.
A lot of my mistakes in spanish comes from me trying to call masculine something that is not and vice versa.
French is a difficult language to learn:
- many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent.
- conjugations, plural, gender requires a lot of memory.
- rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master.
- we like have a name for everything. Unless you know your latin, guessing meaning is not natural.
- verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well...
- similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
- way less fun easy original french video content than in english (spanish is terrible in the same way). Not saying we have nothing, I like to advice "un gars, une fille" for french noobs, it's easy to get, and light. But learning english on Netflix is a treat.
> - many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent.
> - similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh...
The same can be said about English "two", "write"?
I would say even more so: the amount of silent vowels, silent consonants in English is rather puzzling for someone coming from a Brazilian Portuguese background.
I still remember as a kid trying to get by the concept of not saying the S in "island" or just ignoring the K in "knight", "know" and "knowledge" or G in "align" and "design".
I studied English as a kid and then French, German and Spanish as a teenager and early 20s. In the "pronunciation from written form" department, Spanish is spectacular: an absurdly regular language in this department. German was unexpectedly regular and quite manageable to grasp in my experience. French coming in third place but yet shows some rather high degree of consistency — once you get the gist it coming with a close-enough pronunciation from the written form is doable for a new learner of the language.
I would not say the same applies to English, and the amount of loan words it takes from other languages doesn't make it any easier to someone learning it.
> And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
Again, dialects/accents variations are not a French exclusivity. I understand you are not comparing say inter-country variations (like Irish accent vs a Texan accent, Quebecois vs Parisian French ) but rather intra-country variations, but yet, Northern Germany German and its Souther variations are quite distinct.
> - rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master.
> - verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well...
Both resources list the languages according to "time to Professional Working Proficiency" level. Not native level.
Learning any language to a native degree is going to be exceedingly difficult. French has more difficult pronunciation and spelling rules, significantly moreso than Spanish or German. Even for native English speakers.
The fact that overall, learning French is easier than say Korean, does not change the fact that French has difficult pronunciation.
> - similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
That's true, but probably irrelevant for English speakers. English is possibly the only language that is worse than French in that respect. And there are English accents too.
Me too. As there are only around 602 000 results on Google I suspected it was only used in specific areas and according to the dictionary ("Petit Robert") it originates from Lille.
You're being harsh for pouls/poux being singular/plural, provided it was the first time the author had encountered those words. That kind of knowledge comes with experience with the words, which the author didn't have.
I still think it is weird to be that bad after 15 years in the country.
Counter point — I think it was French ambassador or someone from diplomatic corpus who impressed me in their interview on the radio. I think they have been in the country for half a year only and spoke amazingly well. And I mean it. It was not amazing in the way bear dancing is amazing (e.g. it dance terribly, but the fact itself is amazing). She spoke genuinely very well. And Lithuanian is a very very difficult language.
I don't know what foreign learners of french learn, but native speakers very early learn the complete list of words ending with ou whose plural is with an x instead of an s, which poux is one of (there are only 7 of them)
Keep in mind that her encounter with "pouls" was spoken, not written. The "poux" warning probably came with a written note.
Regardless, @bambax said she should have known that, in a spoken context [lə pu] is the pulse and [lɛ pu] is lice. I argue that it isn't surpising that the author didn't have that knowledge. Lice exceedingly rare in adult life (if common for school kids). Pulse is specialized vocabulary.
A good way to get an idea of how your language sounds to a foreigner is to throw away every other word. Literally. Then randomly mix close sounds (depending on your accent it can be buck/bark or buck/book).
Was it "a symmetrical" or "asymmetrical"? Was it "inward" or an "n-word"? Was it "not able to" or "vagina"?
Although your three examples are definitely not homophones in New Zealand English, but the vowel sound distinctions could be difficult for some non-native speakers.
I disagree. I find most of what the NYT publishes nowadays of a very low level, biased along with a lack of research. I think it used to be a much better newspaper, but that was a long, long time ago now.
Note that this is not unique to the NYT, the (former) printed press has fallen enormously since the advent of online news (once you can measure what attracts viewers, your articles will tend to be more and more clickbaity and sensationalist by nature).
It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche
> When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious person for “poux.” He was telling us to check for “pouls” — a pulse, pronounced identically.
There are homophones in many (most? all?) languages; but in this case "poux" are almost always plural (les poux / des poux) whereas a pulse is always singular (le pouls).
"Check his pulse" would be said as "vérifiez son pouls" and "check if he's got lice", "vérifiez s'il a des poux": it seems hard or impossible for the author to mix them up.