Vocabulary
These four guys are terrible, they are easy to mix up and misuse.
And let’s be true, a very large percentage of French do NOT use them properly… that tells a lot about the confusion!
“Porter” means “to carry.” It is used with things which can’t move by themselves. You need to carry them, be it in a car or whatever means of transportation.
“Mener” means to “guide.” The etymology goes back to the X th century : accompany someone while directing him/her. I relates to all persons (usually including the ones that can’t move by themselves like babies) and animals as long as they can “walk” by themselves.
2 – EMmener Vs Amener and EMporter Vs Apporter
You use A mener or A pporter when you bring along someone or something to the place you’re coming to.
You use EM mener or EM porter when you take a thing or a person with you from the place you are to another place.
Did I lose you? Don’t be surprised.
Now, let’s make if K.I.S.S. compatible 😉
Many – MANY – French use amener and emmener all the time instead of apporter and emporter. Even if you speak correctly, you WILL hear them make the mistake, so be ready and expect it.
My proposition is that you do it wrong too!!!
Choose Amener et Emmener, it’s the way the mistake is usually made.
Now these two words don’t sound very differently, actually, and the French make that mistake too. Let’s go for the not very good but ten times simpler way: use either one and any French will understand you.
Conclusion: in all cases Amener OR Emmener will do the trick. The distinction will come later, with time.
Vocabulary
Here, for once, the French makes it simpler 
There is no “tch” pronunciation in French unless there is a “t” before the “ch”, that has then to be pronounced.
Chocolat is pronounced sho-co-la like in shingle or sharp.
Tchad (the African country) is pronounced t-sha-d like in… chocolate 😉 or cheese.
There are extremely few words in French that start with “tch” or contain this “tch” combination. So you might as well forget it and just make an educated guess if you ever meet one.
Back to the French “ch”… il will always be pronounced “sh”
PS : For the scholars… no pun intended, we do have words where “ch” is pronounced “k”. And no one is going to make a fuss about them as most French don’t prononce them well, anyway
Musings, Vocabulary
Take heart… here come good news :
According to the Dubois-Buyse scale, which lists the words of the French language according to their frequency of use, the “average French“ uses about 5,000 words to make him/herself understood.
Obviously, this average hides important distinctions:
– The daily and practical vocabulary varies from 300 to 3,000 words, depending on the environment in which one evolves;
– Active vocabulary has 800 to 1,600 words for high school students and some 3,000 words for the average adult;
– The vocabulary of “general culture” – the words whose meaning we know, but that we hardly use in everyday life – varies between 2,500 and 6,000 words for high school students, and between 20,000 to 30,000 words for scholars.
Soooooo… 300 to 3,000 not bad to survive in everyday life. I’m sure you can manage really well with 500 to 1,000. And it comes a lot faster than we think 😉
Vocabulary
It’s commonly said that French is a “latin language” and English an “anglo-saxon language.” OK, it’s true for the majority of French, along with Greek roots, plus a few other influences.
It’s true too that English has a lot more than Anglo-Saxon roots… especially a good deal of Latin and Greek too !!!
It reminds me of the time when we moved to Canada and my girls started school in Toronto, Ontario. Their teacher called me one day to express her surprise regarding the vocabulary range of our daughters. Being born from French parents and speaking French at home, they naturally tended to use the Latin based part of the English language… which was absolutely not the case of the other children in the school.
OK, now, that was to tell you that you probably know way more French than your think… if you can access this part of your own language that has the same roots as French !
Isn’t it good news ?
Vocabulary
Last night, the word “decorticate” came to my mind.
I wondered a bit : “décortiquer” is the French and I was not so sure that “englishizing” it was good enough to have a real English word.
This morning, I checked : yes, it’s English but, apparently, it belongs in the medical world, with the sense of dissecting.
To decorticate – most commonly named to shell – is very often used when it comes to remove the… shell, of course, of shellfish… makes sense, right ? But also… and we’re getting closer… for the practice of removing the bark from tree trunks. In France, in Portugal (the biggest producer), the bark from a certain species of oaks is used -still used, but less used as plastic is coming stronger – to make cork…
Cork… decorticate… got it ? They are all latin-rooted from “cortex,” meaning “outer layer.”
It’s been extended in the “abstract” world to mean open or remove the outside layer/coating/envelope/shell and reveal the inside, the core.
It may not seem like a very frequent word in a mundane level of language… although it feels to me like it’s all I have been doing all my life !!!
Remove the ignorance or preconceived conceptions about things to get a little deeper, grab a better understanding… and when you understand better, you remember better too !
This is exactly what I propose in the Dare Speak French programs : decorticate the French, compare it to its English counterpart if possible, shed light and simplify. And I love it !!!
