throwaway41968

>But you were originally stating that subjunctive in French lost its semantic value. Now you making it narrow and added "compared to Spanish".

I said almost lost, and I'm choosing to believe out of charity that you didn't notice the extra word.

> But you were originally stating that subjunctive in French lost its semantic value. Now you making it narrow and added "compared to Spanish".

Yes, that's the crux of my argument, comparing use cases in French with that of other Romance languages in order to show how far the subjunctive use cases in French drifted from their original purpose and meaning. How else am I supposed to demonstrate it without a couple of reference points to compare with?

> It was meant to say that misuse of tenses and moods may alter causality and in general events chaining is not commutative (poop o wipe != wipe o poop).

I did take your point a little too literally, sorry. Still, the fact that mood and tense use across Romance languages is inconsistent, yet:

-People who speak either Romance language have no trouble distinguishing the actual from the hypothetical within their language, and

-People who speak multiple Romance languages have no trouble switching from one mood to the other according to the use case/language combination at hand,

shows how unlikely your "poop o wipe" situations are in practice. People "misuse" tenses and moods all the time (which is the prescriptive way of saying tense and mood usage evolves all the time) yet they still manage to communicate clearly somehow. This shows that these are not actually central to convey meaning and there are other avenues that do not use this system (context, adverbial cues, etc.).

>I said you can do it in any language, but the formulation at some point will become cumbersome.

Do you have any evidence for this? Like, can you showcase foreign languages that do not feature this system and whose formulation of the hypothetical would prove consistently more cumbersome and verbose than that of Romance languages? I'm not sure if you realize how far-reaching that statement is.

>That’s definitely not true, and what follows is thus complete bs sorry. Where does this come from to begin with?

Alright I have my trusty Grammaire espagnole (Beschrelle) at hand, and here are the differences in use of the subjunctive. The following cases involve the indicative in Spanish and the subjunctive in French:

-A concessive clause, whose opposition relies on a reality-grounded fact (aunque està lloviendo/bien qu'il pleuve)

-A relative clause after a superlative or similar adjectives expressing the idea of "first", "unique", uses the subjunctive in French. The comparison point being grounded in reality, Spanish always uses the indicative. (la mejor secretaria que hemos tenido/la meilleure secrétaire que nous ayons eue).

Conversely, here are cases where Spanish uses the subjunctive and French uses the indicative:

-Expressing a condition, hypothesis or hypothetic comparison after si (si vinieras conmigo/si tu venais avec moi)

-Expressing a supposition (quiza ella esté al tanto/peut-être qu'elle est au courant)

-Temporal clauses in the future (Cuando venga/Quand il viendra)

I can go on if you like. Very clearly, Spanish's use of the subjunctive very closely follows the hypothetical/unrealized aspect of the content, whereas French's use is less consistent with that aspect, and mostly depends on the locution being used.

>I even miss Spanish’ subjunctive future in French!

And yet I'm sure you don't have any problems expressing the hypothetical and/or fictious in Spanish, do you? At least hundreds of millions of Spanish speakers don't.

>Wiping your butt after pooping is overrated too, you should try the opposite.

Seeing how mood use is inconsistent from one Romance language to the other, I guess Spanish and Italian speakers aren't wiping their butts according to your point of view (and you aren't wiping yours according to them). Or...we could just stop adopting such a normative attitude and admit usage changes across countries and time periods without anything being reprehensible about it?

>That’s what makes a language more or less concise and elegant. You can express countless shades of meanings in pure arid arithmetic too, but yet...

Are you seriously arguing that languages that lack the tense and mood system of Romance languages are somehow less elegant and concise, or less able to express countless shades of meaning somehow?

Except the subjunctive almost completely lost its initial semantic value of expressing the hypothetical or fictious in French, and in most cases has been replaced by the indicative. (Contrast with languages like Italian or Spanish that did retain the subjunctive in these cases, and look at the (many) situations where the indicative is used in French and the subjunctive is used in Italian/Spanish). These days, the subjunctive is mainly used in clauses where an infinitive could be used (pour qu'il ait/pour avoir, sans qu'il ait/sans avoir, etc.) In that sense, après qu'il ait, on top of feeling more "natural" due to the symmetry with avant qu'il ait, isn't as outrageous an error as académiciens would have you believe, it simply follows this very handy rule of thumb.

Generally speaking, proper use of tenses and moods is overrated; it is inconsistent across Romance languages yet speakers of either have no difficulty making themselves understood, or learning others' systems. Many non-Romance languages dispense entirely with this system and yet their speakers don't encounter any difficulties expressing the same shades of meaning as they would in French.

The way you learn as an adult is very different from the way you learn as a child. There's nothing compelling about kid shows. I don't know what drives your efforts to learn a language but, mine are about having access to interesting media, literature, conversations, etc. Speaking like a 4 year old only gets you so far.

And if you want to do it, and do it quickly, you've got to do your Anki reps. Acquire lots and lots of vocabulary so you get through the boring part and start enjoying the use of the language.

>I noticed that most of native speakers of any language are not that good actually in their mother tongue.

That doesn't make any sense. Maybe they're not good according to the normative institutions attempting to control the language, but that doesn't have any bearing on the ability of billions of people to communicate with their peers using their mother tongue. Just because an institution says a certain form is "incorrect" doesn't mean people are going to stop using it and make themselves understood with that form.

> The future perfect is very much used both orally

The past conditional, maybe. The future, really? Do you actually say things like nous nous verrons demain or il l'aura fait avant in casual speech? Well I don't know if you do, but the vast majority of French speakers would say something like on se voit demain et il l'a probablement fait avant. Instead of using specific verb forms to convery meaning people instead rely on context and adverbial cues, as do the speakers of the dozens of languages that do not use the byzantine tense and mood system of the Romance languages (see: Japanese, Chinese, etc.) and are certainly not the worse for it.

>I've noticed that the subjunctive is used less in writing since some change to 'simplify' (i.e. dumb down) the language.

You're aware that the argument you're making about the language getting "dumbed down" is literally millennia old, right?

No one would bat an eye if you used crédits instead of bons in that context, nor would anyone do so if they said s'inscrire à une salle de sport instead of s'inscrire dans une salle de sport. Maybe they're gramatically incorrect for an académicien, but no one but pedants really cares about what the Académie has to say.

Like most complex interactions in life, it really comes down to just feeling when the time's more appropriate. Sometimes people explicitly ask you to correct what they just said ("was that right?"), sometimes they halt in the middle of a sentence and look at you expectantly so you just finish/reword it for them, etc. But generally speaking you shouldn't try to correct people too much unless it really impedes proper understanding, it can really undermine people's confidence in their speaking ability even when they are otherwise fluent. And when you do correct them, only do so with respect to grammar or improper choice of words; correcting pronunciation can be a minefield given how it can change widely within a native population, what with accents and suchlike. (Some people, especially in such a centralized language featuring very normative institutions, will argue that they don't have an accent and everyone else does, but they're wrong.) It should only be corrected when it would otherwise lead to misunderstandings.

Couple remarks on the author's alleged "weaknesses":

>Understand strongly accented speech. I understand essentially all the “standard” French without subtitles, but very little of the Quebecois.

Most European French speakers have trouble understanding Québecois as well, especially if it delves into slang, so I wouldn't fret much. High level (and written) speech should be ok though.

>Understand very slang-heavy speech. I know a good chunk of argot but there are still plenty of informal vocab words and expressions I don’t know. Especially that damn verlan.

Again, seeing how most people over 35 don't understand any of that stuff either I wouldn't worry too much. Especially because this stuff evolves like crazy and new slang/verlan words keep popping up all the time. I'm in my late 20s and can already feel the divide in the slang I and friends in their early 20s use.

>Write error free text. I can get the message across pretty well without relying on a dictionary, but I often phrase things a bit unnaturally and make minor grammatical errors.

Like I and another poster said, most of the mistakes aren't really mistakes. Only the most extraordinary pedant would object to these.

>Quickly use less common verb tenses. While I know how to construct the past conditional and future perfect, I still can’t use them very fluidly. >Recognize all the weird literary tenses. Imperfect subjunctive? Yuck.

Yeah no one uses these. In fact if you did attempt to use these in a normal conversation there's a good chance you wouldn't be understood. Even in writing, modern authors are more and more switching to present and past perfect. Even tenses like the future are getting increasingly uncommon, people instead use the present and rely on contextual clues or markers, like in German (" we'll meet tomorrow" -> "we meet tomorrow").

What I mean to say from all of this is that even native French speakers are not completely at ease with these pain points so it's no use worrying about them too much.

Yeah basically half the "mistakes" in that text aren't even wrong. I mean perhaps some annoyingly pedant French teacher, grammarian or Académicien would find something to say about things like using à une salle de sport vs. dans une salle de sport but like 99.9% of French speakers wouldn't notice anything wrong.

I don't think genetic means what you think it does. In the field of genetics, a trait is said to be genetic when a genetic mechanism has been identified leading to the expression of that trait. Please, tell me more about the genetic mechanism behind religiosity, let alone 'everything'. Which genes are involved, how does the epitaxis play out, which pathways are influenced?

Ah yes, the famously identified "career women" and "divorcee" genes with well-known genetic pathways.

I don't get this comment. Subjectively, how am I supposed to justify that I find PUA crap repulsive? I just do. Objectively, how am I supposed to prove that it's of any use when literal billions of people live happy relationships without the use of any of that stuff?

>Their strategy doesn't work if other options are available.

Maybe they should rethink their strategy then (by the way, what a lovely word to use when dealing with romantic interests).

At what age should one be exposed to different cultures at all so they learn that everything they've experienced so far isn't an absolute constant of human nature? Pretty early I'd say.

>Women are encouraged to not disclose their sexual history to partners or have sex too soon because they believe no man would ever love a woman who has sex quickly.

>they do not support consensual BDSM, viewing porn, or having sex before commitment has been established in a relationship

>Similar conservative guidelines (“don’t rush into sex,” “let him take the lead”) were promoted as dating advice in books of the ’90s and 2000s such as The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right.

>Like pickup artists, Female Dating Strategy often objectifies the opposite gender and turns dating into some sort of game to be won — just in their case, it isn’t having sex that’s the prize, but finding a High Value Male.

Yeah this is basically redpill/PUA crap combined with a hearty dose of American puritanism. Maybe both men and women who believe in this stuff should find each other instead of trying to give advice to the rest of us.