OK, I guess he did pronounce it in French. His Mittness, his essential Yankee salesman voice, still comes through. I bought Kerry’s French more.
Found the whole intro in French here: - YouTube
OK, he does at least know the phonics. I noticed him drop into a Yankee “r” once, but would like someone who actually knows French to comment.
OK, one more crack and I’m done: Newt cited French works, but he didn’t read them, he just pretended they said what he wanted–because his love for this country is so much! Not like that Mitt frog!
Oh, the old “pad your bibliography to make you seem like you did more research than you did” angle? Er…um…I don’t know ANYBODY who did that!
Too bad Newt didn’t focus on how totally crazy it was to be a missionary in France. OTOH, one thing Newt doesn’t want to attack is the missionary position.
The (continental) French speakers that I know in Louisiana say that Cajun French is pretty damn hard to understand. It’s not just vocabulary and pronunciation that have drifted, it’s the syntax too. Still, I don’t want to be the one to tell Broussard clan that it’s not French they’re speaking 
Quebeckers can understand Parisians and Cajuns just fine. A certain type of French-from-France will insist that they can understand neither until they talk right.
Endlessly entertaining.
Newt Gingrich is a demagogue who knows how to stroke the Republican base.
Romney has an obviously anglophone accent when he speaks French - I don’t have the ear or linguistic knowledge to say it’s clearly American over any other English dialect, but his French is still heavily accented.
That said, he speaks it as someone who is comfortable with the grammar and syntax and isn’t simply repeating something phonetically - he knows these words, knows what they mean and how to use them, and is comfortable saying them. I’m rather impressed, actually - he speaks better French than Stephen Harper does!
As for Cajun French…it’s pretty easily understandable by Québeckers. There are some odd word choices and anglicisms and idioms to get past, but that’s pretty easy. If this videois a fair representation, then Cajun sounds a lot like Frenglish to me - it’s a nice hybrid of English and French pronunciations of French words that I actually hear often enough, usually from anglophones speaking French. I can see how French-from-France people might struggle, based on their less frequent exposure to anglophones speaking French.
I’m not sure exactly how representative the video is–I don’t actually speak enough Cajun French to tell. The older people and a lot of the background talk in the café have the accent, but the ones actually speaking to the camera are speaking more slowly than I’m used to hearing. Some of the younger speakers seem to be speaking something closer to continental French, like they’re mixing French from school with what they picked up from their families and a bayou-English accent. The subject matter may also play a role; from what I could make out, they were mostly talking about family and the language itself, which may have avoided some of the more impenetrable thickets of loan-words.
Still, like I said, I imagine that a Canadian francophone would have an easier time with it than, say, someone from Paris.
I listened to short clips from a few other videos as well, but picked that one since it seemed to have the most variety of people and voices. Either way, it wasn’t hard to understand at all.
Old joke: why is the cock the national animal of France ? It’s the only bird that’ll still sing when knee-deep in shit.
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Found the whole intro in French here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyP2M0DTch8
OK, he does at least know the phonics. I noticed him drop into a Yankee “r” once, but would like someone who actually knows French to comment.
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Pretty thick anglophone accent he’s got there. Not the worst I’ve ever heard, but it’s still extremely noticeable. He also accentuates his words as if they were English ones (stress on the next-to-last syllable, exceptions galore), like he says organisAtion where we’d say Organisation. The rythm and pitch of his sentences similarly matches English form rather than French.
Still, he’s very intelligible. And I’ll give him lots of credit for getting the “on” sound about right - it’s a bitch for Brits and Americans to get it down pat, about as hard as it is for us to get our "the"s anywhere in the vicinity of a proper thorn :p.
Kobal2 - did you go hup the ill to count the tree threes? My siblings and I used to tease my aunt with that phrase, because she just couldn’t get it right 
Except for the fact that he’s getting the crap kicked out of him in South Carolina.
Good point - wasn’t it France that gave you all *that *statue?
Speaking of speaking French, I give you Stonekettle Station’s take on the topic.
And from the comments to that, this offer from Canada of a new entrant to the race.
Can’t find it on Youtube, but there was an episode of a TV drama (probably The Practice) where a Boston criminal lawyer had to argue a case in another state and the judge kept spitting out MasssssaCHEWsetttttts like it was a ten-syllable word and the ugliest curse word in Christendom. :rolleyes: This made me think of that. 
I’m pretty sure that was Lithuania.
Nah, but they gave us some nice lithographs.
Well, I can understand Zachary Richard fine, but I’m sure that when he’s singing or appearing on television, he’s not using exactly the same French as when he’s hanging out with his buddies in Louisiana.
Keep in mind that Canada and Acadia were different countries under the French regime, so Quebec French and Acadian French evolved separately. This said, people in Quebec are exposed to modern Acadian French, and there are parts of eastern Quebec inhabited by Acadians.
I’ve heard much thicker accents. I’d say he’s doing a fine job. His cadence is a bit odd, but he’s probably reading his speech on the teleprompter. He stumbles a few times, but it’s not too bad. He obviously knows the language. I wouldn’t say he speaks it better than Stephen Harper though.
And I’ve heard on the news that he actually uses his French to speak with Franco-Americans in New England.
Some of these people actually learned (or relearned) French later in life to get in touch with their ancestral culture, so that’s why they’d sound like anglophones speaking French. In their speech I hear some features that remind me of how old Quebecers speak, which is disconcerting when it comes from a young person.
The interviewer didn’t know what “lâche pas la patate” means, which I found striking since it’s still a common expression in Quebec today. It just means “hang on” or “don’t give up”.
I think Romney’s French is better than Harper’s because I felt that he was much more comfortable speaking it. I give credit to Harper for vastly improving his French over the past few years (or at least gaining confidence in using the French he already knew), but I feel he’s still very unsure about a lot of the sounds/phonemes that Romney had closer approximations to.
Your perception of the Louisiana “Frenglish” is interesting to me - I don’t associate it with “old” at all. Listening to the Louisiana video, I was often reminded of Ontarian French. I often get the weird feeling that Frano-Ontarians speak French with an English accent and English with a French accent! It was a fairly natural French that was being spoken (as opposed to some quality that I can’t define that made Romney sound like an FSL speaker) but with words and pronunciations and small grammar influences that are very English-influenced.
My mom told me to 'lâche pas la patate" today.