d_547_ept_424_o

[hasty pendant]

Please be patient

Our volunteers look into many questions every day; sometimes it takes them a little while to answer.

Pro tip: you can rename the thread title with `.tr <thread name>`

Make it descriptive, including relevant context, but also to the point. This way you improve your chances of getting a more relevant and specific answer.

[jolly bolt]

Aimer / aimé / aimés / aimée / aimées

[deep crest]

Hi, Kitty. Why do they all sound the same? How long will this go on?

Should I be concerned?

[jolly bolt]

That’s just how the language works - the infinitive form of -er verbs sounds just like their past participle forms. These various forms that used to sound different eventually collapsed into a single sound in the spoken language over the centuries, but the spelling never changed.

How long will what go on?

[deep crest]

Thank you for taking the time to respond. I understand your point, but perhaps it's important to remember that this is not the case for most languages. I have been diligently studying French for an hour every day for several weeks now, and I have encountered numerous words and conjugations that sound exactly or nearly the same. On the other hand, in Spanish, I have yet to come across a single instance of this, despite dedicating two hours a day to learning it. I am not complaining; I am expressing my apprehension about this situation. Just you know. 👋

I have been paying close attention to the pronunciation. I hope it will pay off. I do a lot of listening, just to alleviate any upcoming problems with words like those.

[amber forum]

Great that you're focusing on pronunciation and listening from the beginning

I will say that as "adult" second language learners it can be more of a challenge than for younger natives who learn orally at first (and then having to learning how to spell later on), since we bring our expectations from our past experiences

My mother tongue also doesn't conjugate verbs so in a way, that's similar

My 2c on how to improve listening - you would look more for the context to understand the semantic meaning than individual phonemes

• In Spanish: "[yo] te amo" / "[él] te ama"
• In French: "Je t'aime" / "Il t'aime"

^ Spanish is a pro-drop language so you pay attention to the verb to determine the subject, whereas in French you pay attention to the pronoun

[spring torrent]

French stands out as more "rigid" romance language to me (as a native portuguese speaker) than its other family members because of the various homophones and not being pro-drop. Because of the way french evolved, it had to become more rigid to avoid confusion with the number of homophones by restricting the way one or other homophones are used and using context clues to achieve that too. So yeah, aimer sounds exactly the same in various inflected forms, but if someone says "ma mère est aimée par toute la famille" (awkward example but it works) you know that it can only be aimée that can be used here because it's mère is a singular female noun, and aimée is the past participle working as an adjective here, so aimer is definitely not the option

But this involves a lot of studying and getting used to though, even today when listening to people I sometimes get confused because I think one homophone is being used and I don't even know the existence of the other (I remember one time a conversation about la maire and I kept thinking what does la mer have to do with any of this)

[amber forum]

Interesting point because in Parisian French we also lose the distinction between -ai and -ais so that leads to further collapse of phonemes, so if you miss one syllable that's the difference between:

• Ma mère **a mangé **du porc
• Ma mère mangeais du porc

(Apparently this has the potential to confuse Canadians who maintain the distinction)

[spring torrent]

Yeah you need the whole sentence to know what is being said, if you just said the word "fois" to someone, they would have no clue whether you are talking about fois, le foie, la foi, or what, you need more clues

Those clues can be auxiliary verbs, gender, personal pronouns, whatever

[amber forum]

Agree, I think in particular verbs and participles can be challenging - I see lots of natives mix it up when typing due to not having learnt spelling super well.

But yes homophones are common all throughout! I recently got confused by a semi-native who typed résonner (when they meant raisonner) 😅

[spring torrent]

Lmao yes! At first I thought "yeah maybe reading Reddit posts would be nice to get some informal vocab" but soon enough even at my level I knew there were a lot of grammar and spelling mistakes and I didn't want to absorb them because I didn't want to get derailed in my learning just books for now!

[amber forum]

omg I just read this coment on Reddit and IDK if this would be a consolation for you, or make you feel scared haha

France has a competition that's similar but not exactly the same as an American spelling bee. Someone reads out whole sentences, rather than just words with definitions, and you write the sentence. The challenge is that there are a lot of words in French that sound exactly alike but are spelled differently depending on grammatical usage. So in order to spell the words in the sentence correctly, you need to understand how they are being used. There is a public one here in Paris every year, where they set up a bunch of desks in a public space:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0VHaclPnU0