Oh, for shit’s sake. Now I’m never gonna learn whether or not those guys think we’re calling them staple removers.
…at least to the non-French-speakers.
The OP in French, according to http://www.freetranslation.com :
Now, for all I know, the above is a treatise on how fuzzy kittens fly out of my ass during Lent.
Are there awful idiomatic mistakes here that the software rendered incorrectly? More importantly, if there are mistakes, are they the same sorts of mistakes LoftStory made in his/her “French dmonstration?”
Ha ha very funny indeed, but to be honest I don’t see (parts of, at least) the OP’s English being borne out of French at all. It just looks like s/he is being purposefully doltish.
That bit about dog shit is also rather telling. Unless I missed something, in France you generally pick up after your pets with a pooper scooper or the like. None of this “better on my shoes than my hands” garbage.
Mr. OPer, here’s a bit of French slang I picked up when I was there a few years ago: tu est le merde de la mère du maire du mer.
Oh, and some questions for you as well: were you a freshman, sophomore, junior or senior in France when you spent a term (or year, or whatever) over here? Did you have a host family or did you stay in a dormitory? What university did you attend, and what was the name of the program under which you went, or was there another reason for your foray into the States? Inquiring minds want to know allllll about your trip:)
And for those in the know, just lay back and smile and let the OP reveal his/her true colors. You know exactly what I’m going for here:)
Ogre, thanks for that link and the “translation”, which for literal needs is okay but beyond that is kind of . . . lacking.
“J’a vie en france de depuis ma naissance”
In my experience a French person would not normally use naissance but would use the “since I was born” construction. I recognize that I have not been through all of France (I haven’t been, for example, to the parts of France near the Iberian Peninsula), but this just strikes me as being a false formation. I have talked to people in France who were native French speakers, and I do not recall ever hearing this “from since my birth” construction. I welcome the possibility that it’s used someplace I didn’t go, but this seems rather too wordy to be taught.
“mieux comment est ma maison que le grand USA.”
I’m going to hope there was a programming glitch, because otherwise this thing saw “country” and read “house”. and it also replaced splendid, it would seem, with “how”. Yaaaah . . .
“Est-ce que”
Is a construction for starting a question, not a statement. This isn’t borne out of the OP as far as I can tell.
The problem with all of this is that we need to see the OPer write in French with characters that we can understand (i.e. none of this %% bullshit). I’d REALLY like to see the OPer do a French version of his/her OP. I won’t even object to there being no accents. I do, however, want to see a nice idiomatic translation in the passé simple; since babelfish doesn’t seem to be able to translate English into passé simple, this makes it so our dear OP has to either learn the form, or if s/he already does, simply use it properly.
Another telling thing will be use of the imperfect vs. past tenses, which was drilled into me (and doubtless Maeglin and other dopers). Hoo boy will that be fun to see:)
Libertarian said:
Thanks a lot…I had just taken a puff on my cigarette, and now I’m in pain.
iampunha, if I may ?
Pour LoftStory
Hé, Ducon ! Est-ce que tu pourrais écrire ta tirade d’origine en français ? On se pose énormément de questions à son sujet. Est-tu un crétin qui essaie de se faire passer pour un Français ou un imbécile qui peut à peine balbutier l’anglais ? Si comme ton profil líndique tu résides à Paris, tu devrais être en mesure de nous répondre dans les heures qui suivent. Et rappelles-toi, les absents ont tort.
And SK, I’m still working on the staple remover question and no, we do know that you call us for the little green amphibians. <Homer>Hmmmmm, frog legs</Homer> ! 
Why do we take offence? I don’t know, but I can give you a hint as to why I take offence.
Remember the “social experiment” gag xanakis pulled in GQ? That was great, wasn’t it? How we laughed and laughed and… We didn’t? Right. Because his “joke” was unoriginal and we’d seen it before a hundred times. First law of humor: stale + repetitive = not funny.
How does that apply here? First, could you explain to me just what part of ‘you frogs are smelly, snail-eating cowards’ is so new and original? I’m pretty sure I’ve heard most variants on the theme, and this thread added nothing new. Second, you may not hear French insults that often, but I do. About once a week now, but while I was living in the US it was a daily occurence. So we’ve got stale, and we’ve got repetitive. You do the math.
What I do find amusing, however, is that when xanakis got called on his antics, he accused us of not having a sense of humor. And now here you are, doing the same thing.
–sublight.
And as for LoftStory? My guess is he’s an American 14-year-old who’s pissed that his teacher assigned The Little Prince for summer reading.
Sofa King, this post is for you.
A staple remover is officially called an “ôte-agrafe” and unofficially called a “grenouille”.
(Did I make your day? Huh? Did I??)
Anyway.
The OP is full of crap. No French(wo)man I’ve ever met will say it’s better to have dog crap on their shoes than on their hands. French people don’t smell as bad as they apparently used to. Actually, they smell a lot like Americans. Even if they reeked, I cannot concieve of a French person a) admitting it or b) acting proud of it.
The LoftStory handle had me fooled for a bit since it was a wildly popular show here, one that not many Americans probably know about. However, the gender of the words is wrong and the bad English is totally fake.
Final note, who the heck eats cassoulet in August, for crying out loud! It’s hot!
IMHO, just some guy getting a kick out of playing off old stereotypes and insecurities on both sides.
Hello I have something to say to all of you since it seems to me that several people (including LoftStory) subtly referred to comments which I have made.
Gary Kumquat said that he likes the clothes, wine, music, pate and cheese. Now personally I don’t drink, I’m vegetarian and the only French cheese I like is Boursin. But I think Gary’s got the right attitude. When someone insults a country that I like, I respond with what I think is good about the country. I might deny those accusations which I think are untrue, or point out the exceptions to the rule, but I would not blindly refuse to admit any of the more well-known (and I mean, by the country’s citizens) problems in that country.
For example, iampunha believes that “in France you generally pick up after your pets with a pooper scooper or the like”. I don’t know what a pooper scooper is but I know that the recommended way to do it is by turning a plastic bag inside out, picking it up, and then turning the bag out over it. I have once seen someone actually do this in Paris (the fact that there were two policemen standing right next to her may have had something to do with it, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt). I agree that most French people do not believe that dog excrement is “better” on their shoes. In fact, the problem of dog litter is the third biggest problem that Parisians have with their city. There was recently a huge publicity campaign which consisted of three posters which were supposed to shock the irresponsible dog-owners. The first showed a picture of a child playing with play-dough cutters in a pile of dog excrement, the second showed how blind and wheelchair-ridden people are also vulnerable to it. Here are some French links where you can read about this problem:
http://www.paris-france.org/parisweb/FR/vivre/environnement/PROPRETE.HTM
http://www.cfpj.com/spe_cfj_2001/thematique/thema_environnement.html
http://www.ville-nevers.fr/magazine/582627.htm
There are many more, and you can also look at French newspapers for more information about this problem.
Those of you who do not live in Paris may not be aware of this, but I have met many French people who not only agree with me that Paris is an unusually smelly place, but even joke about it and complain about just like I do. London was also quite a smelly place about thirty years ago; I feel that Paris will change as it becomes more modern, just as London did. I am also glad that Parisians admit these areas for improvement in their city. In fact it is usually the starry-eyed tourists and francophiles who are strangely blind to all these aspects of life in France. Upon hearing the statement that a French newspaper has made claims that many French people do not shower every day (and is that even so bad? I often skip a day), these francophiles retort, “Yeah, of course…and all german people are proud to be nazis”. When I say that I have nevertheless met French people who are exceedingly clean, the “ironic” rebuttal is “Yeah, of course…and all americans are obssessed by guns”. (Forgive me, but this is “ironic” like Alanis Morissette is ironic.)
If I were to defend France from the France-haters, here’s how I would do it. I would say that I have lived in several cities all around the world and I feel safest in France. I would say that French people are very tolerant of gays. French people have written a lot of great literature such as A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. French people have made a lot of great movies and Parisians are friendlier than Londoners or New-Yorkers. Like Gary Kumquat I would talk about the French things which I like.
Secondly, John Corrado corrected LoftStory’s use of the words “term” and “football”. cazzle has already explained the use of the word “term” (which is indeed used the same way in England), and as for “football”, if Americans don’t know that Europeans refer to what they call “soccer” as “football”, then that’s too bad for them. I don’t see any reason for Europeans to change the way they speak just so that Americans will understand them. Americans can learn to at least recognise words like “football”, “lift”, “flat”, etc.
Lastly, a question. What exactly is a “troll”? At first I thought it was just a short ugly creature which lurked under bridges, but I’ve seen the word used a lot on this message board and I wonder if it has any other connotation?
Reread my former post. I answered about the staple remover. And if the question is : do french people think that “frogs” means “staple remover”? : absolutely not.
DEMISE, je ne comprends rien sur ce forum, qu’est ce que c’est que cet “op”?? est-ce que tu peux m’expliquer tout a stp? 
(on fait comment pour faire appara”tre les petites smileys graphiques?)
As it seems to to me that American does not love my English I used this translator for better expressing my opinions I hope than that will be easier to you to read. The majority of American whom I met ever came out of their country and sometimes even of their state. Whereas would know they about France? I passed a stay of studies to the United States then allow me to say that I know your country and that it is a dirty corner. I will wait until Denise explains me what one said.
PS - I assure to you that it is “sa forme” not “son forme”.
Ogre - I liked this line so much I’ve made it my new sig. Translated into French for maximum effect.
Damn preview.
LoftStory stated:
“OP” stands for “Original Post”, meaning the post that actually starts the thread. In this thread, your pro-French/anti-American rant was the OP.
“As it seems to to me that American does not love my English”
American is an adjective, as in “we are an American band.” Americans is the noun. Therefore, it should be “Americans do not love my English”.
“The majority of American whom I met ever came out of their country and sometimes even of their state”
See above correction. In addition, that should be “never”, not “ever”.
“Whereas would know they about France?”
Oy. Let’s see if I can explain this without fucking it all up- I studied to be a history teacher, not an English teacher. Okay, the correct form would be “Whereas what would they know about France?” One must include the what; without it, one is asking whether they know that the country of France exists at all.
As for those who attempted to correct me regarding the usage of “term” and “football”- you’ll note that I specifically stated in each of those paragraphs that I was speaking for American usage. Yes, I understand perfectly well that a term indicates a school year (or possibly several school years) in other English-speaking countries, and that in Europe they call soccer “football”. My point is that this board is American-centric by dint of the number of American posters in contrast to the number of non-American posters, and therefore American usage and slang tends to be the standard.
Besides, if I were really going to study French, I’d like to know which usages will get me weird looks in Paris, a hearty slap on the back in Bordeaux, and chased by villagers with pitchforks in Quebec, y’know?
The correct translation would be :
Maintenant, à ce que je sache, ce qui se trouve ci-dessus est un traité sur la façon dont des chatons duveteux s’envolent de mon cul durant le Carême.
John Corrado, you have a point: I suppose that it would be helpful for people learning English to know about the different dialects, but since you insist on correcting LoftStory’s English I would like to respectfully ask that you do the same for those native English speakers who make grammatical errors everywhere on this message board, such as incorrectly using the word “lay” as the present tense of the verb “lie”. E.g. “Just lay down and relax”, “I was laying in bed last night when it happened”, etc.
Thank you detop. I had used the freetranslation site mentioned in Ogre’s post.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by clairobscur *
**
Well, I disagree. I lived in France and went to university there and speak French pretty much fluently, and I have been told by numerous French professors that lots of native speakers mess up the gender of the article (and I personally have seen this and other mistakes of “basic” grammar many times). Furthermore, there in fact IS a way that a native French speaker will write “LE chaise est casse”: it’s called a typo.
I’m not saying that this guy is truly French - he could be pulling all of our legs. But saying that there’s no way a native French speaker would ever say “le chaise” is equivalent to saying that no native English speaker would ever say, “Them books are mine.” Poor education or simple carelessness are not limited to Americans.
I love it! 