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OK, but that doesn't contradict what I was saying : that she probably learned how to count in a French-speaking school, that's why she prefers to count in French. (I never said that I thought she was born in France.)

Then why did she count in French and not in Arabic? She was counting aloud, but still for herself: and the vendor spoke Arabic anyway.

I recently heard an interesting form of code-switching. A woman was talking with a street vendor in Arabic. Then she took out her purse, and began counting her money in French. My hunch is that she grew up in an Arabic-speaking family, so she speaks Arabic natively; but she learned to count in schoo...

The Onion could make a similar article about a Californian man getting killed for ordering a "soda" in the Midwest.

- since I was saying to him that dental sibilants were not a big thing to worry about, clearly I don't think I have a noticeable lisp - so saying that dental sibilants are a lisp is also saying, in a very mocking fashion, that I'm wrong about my language, which you are not a native speaker of Or, y...

Acid Badger wrote:Holy shit what is that article

It's from Le Gorafi, a satirical news site. Basically a French The Onion.

Even in the colloquial? In Louisiana you also say "ça mouille", "ça fait deux ans", etc. Esos no son verbos impersonales. Hablaba de verbos como pleuvoir, falloir, neiger ; la mayor parte son verbos que hablan del tiempo que hace. Es posible decir ça neige beaucoup , de verdad. Pero es un poquito d...

Hier soir, le "Selwyn Snowball" s' est passé. I think I said it before: reflexive verbs always use être as their auxiliary. J' étais devenu si ivre que j'ai crié dehors de ma salle à quatre heur e s du matin. Ditto: devenir uses être . C'était cathartique en fait. I was quite cathartic in fact. I'm...

Now whenever I speak Spanish I'm really conscious of where my tongues touching whenever I articulate /t d s n l/ Oh, I have it even worse than that. When speaking in English, I have to be careful of my /s/ and /z/ consonants; they should be alveolar instead of dental. Ditto when I'm singing. But I ...

Careful: a man once died for calling it [pæ̃ o ʃokola] instead of [ʃokolaˈtinə].

Yeah, that seems to be correct. Lady Gaga doesn't fit with your definition, but she only ended up on the list because she did a duet with Tony Bennett, who does. Edit: by the way, I just looked at the Grammy awards for "hard rock" and "metal". The difference seems to be "for each band, flip a coin t...

This is a definition that eats its own tail. Well, that was the point, wasn't it? "Pop" is a vague concept. As soon as some sort of new sound comes up, someone will try to make it more marketable. Make it acceptable. Make it simple and catchy. And it's not even necessarily a bad thing! Edit: Okay, ...

Warning: there may be some overlap with things said by other posters. I will skip the ones I know little about (e.g. everything about electronic music and world music). Question 1: what is "pop"? . "Pop" is music made for the charts. Short, 3-minutes songs with a catchy chorus. That's basically it. ...

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand now I've finally had the time to go to the post office... and the package went back to the US this very morning , because it had been "unclaimed" for two weeks. Of course, it wouldn't've stayed unclaimed if you guys had bothered to tell me it was here in the first place . ...

Aaaaaaand once again a package went through an "attempted delivery" weeks ago, no one warned me about it, and now nobody knows where my package is. The post office can be very annoying.

My landlord is asking me for my yearly water bill... and it's a ludicrous amount, more than 4000 euros. My usual bill is 200 to 300 euros: I live on my own, in an apartment, have no washing machine, and never take baths. There's no leak that I know of, the water meter seems to stop when I'm not draw...

Je ne sais quoi je pourrais écrire. C'est la fin de l'automne , que je n'aime pas - il fait très froid. Cuando quieres hablar del tiempo, tenes que utilizar faire . Il est très froid significa que alguién, o algo, es frío. When you want to talk about the weather, you have to use faire . Il est très...

What I meant was what I did in English - putting a term into quotation marks as a kind of meta-reference, meaning "anything harrowing". That also works in German, but from your reactions I see that it doesn't work in Polish (or, for that matter, in French or Dutch). Actually, now that I think about...

linguoboy wrote:Are you some how implying that the naked celebration of capitalism and consumerism is meaningless?

That was just a flippant way of asking a real question: was it always just a marketing tool, or does it come from some older tradition?

Various remarks about French use... Eh bien, je pense que ce sujet est considéré neutre. Tu pourrais commencer par parler d'un sujet émotionnel mais je ne sais pas comment la conversation se développera. It's commencer par if you mean "start with doing X"; and commencer à if you mean "start doing X"...

Now they're trying to import the Black Friday to France. (Actually, it seems to have started in 2014, but I hadn't really noticed. Plus we had other things on our mind two years ago.)

Is Black Friday supposed to, like, mean something? Or is it a naked celebration of capitalism and consumerism?

Frislander wrote:Aujourd'hui il fait froid, mais il n'a pas plu.

Je me suis réveillé à onze heures, donc je ne sais pas si il y a du gel comme hier matin.

Reflexive verbs always use être as their auxiliary.

Dans l'ort h ographe ancienne, tes fautes auraient été correctes. Very slight nitpick: I would have written ancienne orthographe . The adjective ancien has different meanings before and after the noun. When it's after the noun, it means "old, ancient". When it's before the noun, it means "former" o...

Frislander wrote: Merci, j'était assez surpris moi-même quand j'ai commencé à écrire de nouveau en français.

It's always commencer à.

Frislander wrote: D'accord. J'ai découvert que je ne suis pas fort en adverbes.

- Découvrir is an irregular verb.
- forte is the feminine form.
Everything else is perfect.

I just had a weird dream, with some odd sense of logic however. "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't". I was hunted by two serial killers (one woman and one man), and had to escape in a car. I later realized that I was driving naked, for whatever reason. Later, I discovered that the kil...