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Originally Posted by CleverCowboy
A few years ago when we at AAm wanted to send a gift to Alizee and Greg for the birth of Maggie, we got in contact (by email) with the owner of a store in Ajaccio that sold baby clothes. Luckily, she spoke English. And even more lucky, she was good friends with Alizee. We had a message we wanted on the card, and they designed a card for us. We wrote the message in regular French, but the owner gave us the option to translate it to Corsican French, which we agreed to do. They did the translation and sent us a picture of the card. There are some subtle differences and a few not so subtle differences. It's a local dialect and you are probably right that it will eventually die off, but for now, Alizee does speak it and being that she has spent most of her life in Corsica, probably prefers it over the French that the people on the mainland use.
If I ever had the choice, I would choose to learn regular French instead. Alizee understands it and knowing the language would be useful traveling around France or any other French speaking country.
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Oh, perhaps we are talking about different things here. I took the first comment that advised learning Corsican to mean the Corsican language, which is a separate language in itself. It is not mutually intelligible with French and is much closer to Italian (native Italian speakers would understand it). As for the version of French spoken in Corsica, I thought it is just an accent. Like if you think about differences between the English spoken by a Londoner or a Scot, the words are the same but pronounced with different accents. So if words are different in Corsican French that is news to me.
The topic of minority languages in general is quite interesting to me. Languages die out every year. There are often debates about how to preserve them as most people agree it is important heritage. Maybe this is too off-topic now, I just think it's cool.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Scruffydog777
I had taken a couple of years in French in high school, but that just teaches you the basics and not really enough to learn conversational French and the thing I felt I needed to learn it well that I never had was someone you could speak to on a regular basis who knew the language well. Today I imagine some of the programs that are available today are better equipped to do a better job of teaching it than was available back in my day.
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Yes, it is hard when you don't have someone to speak with but there are more resources than ever thanks to internet!
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Originally Posted by AlizéeSuperFanFIN
Okay. Good tip again.
It could work, even if it seemed difficult at first.  The French language is somehow so special when you compare what you hear and what the words are. 
But gradually I could try that, calmly...
By the way, how long did it take to learn, ie, that you began to understand more?  |
Music lyrics are the harder things for listening practice and even in English music I remember never being able to work out which words they were saying...
It's difficult to say exactly how long this took and I'm still learning. I started in my young childhood and picked it up again a couple of years ago in a more enthusiastic and proactive way, trying to absorb words and watch street interviews. How much I understand of something really depends on how slow/fast they speak.