With time and patience a non-Francophone (anglophone or allophone) will eventually understand a written message in French.  But the same spoken message delivered spontaneously by a francophone will often, if not always, sounds like a bunch of strange noises which do not seem to correspond to their written counterpart. 

 

Do francophones modify written French when they speak? Absolutely yes!

 

One has plenty of time to read or write a sentence. Time is not an important factor when reading or writing, so you can process a lot of mental operations at your own pace, looking for the words in a dictionary and analyzing the many traps of complex French grammar. 

Just consider that listening or speaking is essentially processing at least five mental operations in one second and you can understand why speaking spontaneously MUST be different from reading or writing.  This is the same for any language.  Only well trained communicators can speak their own language the way they would write it.  And it can take a long time to master that.   

 

So…

Can we seriously ask somebody in the process of learning a second language to rapidly master the most complicated form of this language?  

 

Can we require an anglophone (or allophone) student of French to speak language that even a long trained francophone cannot spontaneously speak? 

 

Well…  The world of French training is doing just that.  The second language is learned, though grammar and conjugation books, with a lot of written exercises.  The so-called conversational French is a classical and "châtié" French, a virtual language that francophones do not speak, even in very formal occasions.  It is the language of official speeches (written) and Radio-Canada’s radio and television news (written). It is also the language of most of the teacher of French as a second language who make their students feel secure by convincing them that "what they see is what they will hear and the way they must talk" and also by disdainfully calling any normal, spontaneous speech "le language de la rue" (street language).

Actually, what they mean by street language is French Canadian slang or "Joual".  So, if students listen carefully to the spontaneous speech of the Francophones, it is obvious for them that they all speak "joual", not respecting the magnificent language they, as students of French, courageously try to acquire.  Students are told that they will have a hard time understanding the Francophones and are required to not speak like them.

 

 French Canadian do not speak "joual".  They speak normal spontaneous spoken French.  They use simplified grammar and vocabulary as opposed to more complex written French.  They pronounce words and sentences, contracting and assimilating sounds as a result of their rapid speech.  Even if as in any language, some individuals are almost unintelligible, even for their peers, the large majority francophones (politician, lawyers, academics , businesspersons, even teachers) speaking to other francophones produce spontaneous speech, which is grammatically and phonetically simplified.

 

Canadian French is not a degenerate way of speaking.

 

Are English Canadian speaking, degenerate or bad English?

 

 A person who intends to learn English would never inquire about the quality or validity of spoken Canadian English 

 

Francophones learn English quite rapidly Essentially by imitating English locutors.  They do not need inhibiting grammar rules.  They just repeat what they hear, trying to reproduce orally as perfectly as possible the grammatical and phonological phenomenons of spoken English.  

Why then do teachers of French  keep encouraging their students to stay away from Canadian spoken French?  Why are students being driven to learn a so-called international French, which actually is oral written French far from the way French Canadians really speak? Why does the French as a second language training system insist on teaching complex written French, almost ignoring the phonetic characteristic of spontaneous speech?

 

 Because it is probably easier to do so.  Official grammar rules the writing.  Specific efficient grammar of spoken French to address the locutors various ways of speaking is to be invented.  Most teachers are experienced "classical" grammarians often reluctant to use conversational grammar.  Most are not familiar with phonetics.  They cannot explain to the analyzing adult learner the contractions and assimilations of consonants and vowels which occur in normal rapid speech.  Instead they prefer to talk about people not being able to speak good French.  

 

Because exposing students to written French is also responding to the student’s need for paper, their need to learn by seeing and their need to have plenty of time to understand and perform a sentence in the new language.  As a result, the student becomes a visual learner (actually  an educated adult is a visual learner).

 

"Please write the word! Please put it on paper!"  Those are the usual requests a teacher will hear a hundred times a session.  Encouraging this habit is inhibiting the student capability to discriminate sounds and therefore their capability to discriminate spoken messages.  As soon as students see the written words or sentence, they usually understand the message and will not focus anymore on the speech, which confuses rather than helps them. 

Spoken French can be learned quite rapidly provided that a  training system first addresses the spoken French rather than the written French and also provide that one accepts the legitimacy of spoken Canadian French.   

 

At Logibec ILAQ 

you will be introduced to the reality of the grammatical characteristic and phonetic phenomenon of real spoken French. 

 

You will learn the easiest way to speak French. 

 

You will be astonished by your natural capability to discriminate and reproduce French sounds, words and the sentence.  You won’t ever need to "see" to understand. 

 

As a result you will understand the normal speech of any francophone in any formal or informal situation.