En france

[derien]

I've been trying to study French using Duo Lingo, because in the past year we've gained and lost several French speakers in our workforce and it's really evident that, in our area, French is a very useful second language. We have a lot of people who come down from Canada and don't speak any English, and then there's so many new African immigrants who speak French as a second or third language. And then there's elderly people here in Maine who are happier if you can speak French to them. But there's dialects. Eor and I went to a friend's house the other day and when we took off our shoes she asked us if we wanted some 'pea-shoes.' I kind of knew she must mean slippers, but asked anyway, because I thought they might be some specific type. She said "Sometimes the old people say 'PISHoos.'" Google chokes on this word, and gives me "chaussons" for "slippers."

Comments

[camwyn]

I've been using Duolingo lately to try and get back the Italian I learned in high school. (I come from an Italian-American family, otherwise I would probably have gone with French, or, you know, ANY OTHER LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD BELONGING TO A COUNTRY WITH A COLONIAL EMPIRE. Ethiopia isn't enough of a colonial empire to count, Italy.) I would laugh so incredibly hard if Duolingo tried to cover any of Italian's dialect idiosyncrasies. It's an incredibly fractured language and they'd never be able to keep up.