Fast-Talking Guy

Where does one word end and another begin?  How do you train the brain to process words, phrases, and sentences that are not only unfamiliar but seem to fly by like a flock of oiseaux?  Such is one of the primary complaints of language learners.  Parlez plus lentement, s'il vous plaît becomes one of the most essential sentences--right after Répétez, s'il vous plaît.  

Though French learners often complain that native speakers simply speak at too fast a clip for good comprehension by students of the language, Spanish probably gets the worst rap.  And indeed there is something about Spanish that makes it sound as if the speakers are hurrying through the words just to get them out as fast as possible.  Experts claim that this is just an illusion and that Spanish speakers deliver their speech no faster than any other language is spoken.  Still, when I listen to Spanish, it does seem to whiz by like a flock of pájaros.  I'd say that it's because, though there is less grammatical elision in Spanish than in French, a colloquial speaker will invariably merge vowels on the ending of a word with vowels at the beginning of the word that follows.  And because Spanish is rife with vowels, the results are sentences that contain words that are crunched together.  Presumably a learner will naturally adjust to this, but it rough going at first.

With French (and this is just my experience, so you may not agree) there is a lot of elision of words, but you're also confronted with the tendency of French to leave off entire endings of words, sometimes 3 or 4 characters at a time.  And (forgive me, you native speakers out there) sometimes it just seems that speakers mumble over words or slur them in a way that distorts their sounds.  Believe me, I'm not criticizing, just stating what I've found to be true.  Now, I'm well aware that English speakers also do this very thing, so that 'What are you doing? becomes 'Watchadoin.'  My struggle with understanding the French in movies and TV shows has made me much more sympathetic to what English learners have to go through.  I'm amazed that they can pick it up at all.

Also, a whole lot of the problem seems to stem from the difficulty we have hearing unfamiliar tones.  Again, research has shown that after a certain age we begin to lose the ability to discern new sounds.  See this article. Odd, isn't it?  It's almost as if we've evolved to learn one language as children and stick to it.  I wonder if that was some kind of survival technique:  I know you're not my enemy because you speak my language.  If I can't understand a word you are saying, then I'd better either fight or flee.  Who knows?

I agree with this idea, though, because even people who have studied English for years (but did not learn it as children) speak with an 'accent.'  There are certain sounds, often vowels, that are very close to correct, but not quite.  I'm sure that native French persons hear the same peculiarities in novice French speakers.

I guess the moral of this story is that learning French is not just about memorizing conjugations and vocabulary words.  One must listen carefully and constantly practice reproducing correct sounds.  Then after much time and patience, perhaps those oiseaux and pájaros will come into focus.