Enjoy these untranslatable French words! And grab your 🥳discounted language lessons with Lingoda using my link ➡️ https://try.lingoda.com/RobWords25 or code ROBWORDS25 for $25, €20 or £15 off Flex, Sprint and Teams courses.
English has already borrowed thousands of words from French. However, there are still many beautiful and useful French words for which English has no equivalent. In this video, I introduce you to 10 of them (and propose we steal them for ourselves”.
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==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Introduction
0:55 10 Rebonjour
2:16 9 Gourmandise
4:09 8 Goûter
5:22 7 Chez
7:21 Lingoda
8:43 6 Si
11:43 5 Tutoyer
14:26 4 Connaître
17:58 3 Flâner
19:18 2 Dépaysement
20:46 1 Bouquiner
31 Comments
Give me your untranslatable words from 🇫🇷French or any other language! And grab your discounted language lessons with Lingoda using my link ➡ https://try.lingoda.com/RobWords25 or code ROBWORDS25 for $25, €20 or £15 off Flex, Sprint and Teams courses.
Please do a video on Escher sentences
“More people have been to Berlin than I have”
Or “More girls ate pizza than the boy”
In Norwegian, ""dus", no longer formal (no longer using the plural (formal) "De"). And in the Danisj novel "Det forsømte foraar", where Mikael Mogensen is "accosted" by two of his old classmates: "En erindrer ikke at have drukket dus med d’herrrer, og vil således foretrække, at den blandt dannede mennesker pluralis tiltaleform anvendes…"
"Drikke dus", having a toast and dispensing of formalities, I guess. And "old" people may often prefer to be "Des", to use the pliral, or formal form. Yoy say "du" to people you know, and "de" to those you don’t know. Like "tu" and "vous", or "du" and "sie".
Indeed, English is now just formal!
Savoir VS Connaître :
"Je sais combien tu pèses" et "je connais ton poids."
"I know how much you weigh" and "I know your weight."
Please explore the Finnish concept of Hän
Heh. "Flâner" has been integrated into Norwegian. In the old days (…) one would "flanere" on Karl Johan street… And of course "flanør", from "flaneur".
I’d recommend a chapter from Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Outliers’, in which he talks about the connection between a culture’s treatment of formal vs casual speech and the likelihood of plane crashes in airlines from that country. In an intense situation like a flight emergency, needing to be overly polite/respectful/indirect to your captain is detrimental to communication. A South Korean airline had unusually high rates of plane crashes, partly because problems weren’t communicated clearly enough, and as part of the airline rebranding they decided to enforce all crews to speak English on the job instead.
Yet another reason why I’m glad English doesn’t have different levels of formal speech!
Honestly, as a Swiss, the word "gourmandise" don't have any positiv meaning to me and it's the same for all my friends and family, probably a cultural difference with France, then "goûter" isn't use here, we use "dix-heures" and "quatre-heures" (for the eat at 10 AM (1000) and the eat at 4 PM (1600)), probably because we are a little bit german afterall and that german love words made of different words.
And at least in Switzerland, we can't say "Je te sais" (I know you), but we can say "Je connais ton poid" instead of "Je sais combien tu pèse" (I know your weight) (and that actually a mistake made by a lot of people because they will express it in kilogrammes, even if the "poid" should be expressed in newtons, kilogrammes are the unit of the "masse" (not the hammer)) and personnally I feel like "Je sais combien tu pèse" is more a "objection"(probably not the best word), like "I'm not so overweight"- "I know your weight", where "Je connais ton poid" is more a fact, the fact that I know it.
Funny thing : you said you would only refer to "French words from France" but accidentally used an expression from Québec: trou de cul. In France we say "trou du cul". The nuance would be, in Québec it is a "hole of ass" (generic), whereas in France, it would be a hole of the ass (specific, but undisclosedly specific).
It is an unmistakable clue as to whether a film dub is a VF or VQ (if the accent, the heavily anglicised pronunciation of first/last names and the use of "ACR"/"BFE" instead of "CIA"/"FBI" did not tip you off already)
Grub-shaming is a great phrase!
Wrt chez, I don't mind this one, but personally I prefer the contraction of the sentence we do in English, instead of "I am going to the bakery" , it becomes "am goin' t' bakery" or "am comin' o'er" (this is for where I'm from, but other areas do the same thing) which kind of makes including chez slightly redundant in many variants of spoken English at least.
Rebonjour wouldn't work quite as well in English imo, at least in that form, the idea would be neat for sure but for me a different form wouldn't feel as clumsy as rebonjour does.
In French it's a very elegant and neat word, but when I think about how I would say it in everyday conversation it doesn't translate as well.
Your reasoning for si is a bit forced imo, you're either omitting or forgetting that spoken English has emphasis that can indicate infirmative or affirmative answers, which admittedly isn't helpful to none native speakers who aren't as fluent in the language, but is intuitive to native English speakers.
You also need to take into account that si is understood almost primarily as a Spanish word, and using its French form which would confuse a great deal more people than it would help
REHELLO YOU ALL DÉPAYSÉ FLANEURS!!!!!!
When you say French, do you mean the latin on which French is based? Like, putting 're' before something seems as English as it is French. Either way, it's not exactly untranslatable.
Maurice Ravel wrote an opera titled "L'enfant et les Sortileges." The word "sortileges" is usually translated to English as "magic spells", except that it is actually describing those things animated by magic spells. I've heard the title translated as "The Spellbound Child", but that's just not right. In musical circle, we refer to it by its French title.
If we borrow these, we're going to have to do something about the pronunciation. Hmm. Let's use the word "adjust". We'd have to adjust the pronunciation. Rebonjour, for example, has that French R sound, that is almost completely impossible for a native English speaker to learn how to pronounce after exceeding a certain age (somewhere around 25 or 30). It's even worse than the German R sound, which is going some. (And yes, I'm aware that our R sound is similarly difficult for people from other linguistic backgrounds. I'm not passing value judgements on phonemes here, just being realistic about what people are going to do if you ask them to pronounce a word with this sound in it.) Perhaps we could instead borrow the idea, and go with "rehello"? Otherwise, we're going to end up butchering, err, I mean, "adjusting" the pronunciation of the French word.
I don't think most Americans are really consciously cognizant of the different formality registers in the English language. I mean, we instinctively use them where appropriate, but we don't give a lot of thought to which one we should use, it's just automatic. This may be partly because it doesn't generally have as much to do with the relationships between people, as with the context of the situation. A graduating student giving a valedictorian's address to his fellow students, for example, instinctively uses more formal language, than he would use when speaking with the same people in a different context. So we don't get into those mind games of "do I know this person well enough to switch to using informal language", because it doesn't really matter how well you know the person. Historically, we had the phrase "first name basis", but these days, basically everyone is on a first name basis with everyone else. It's been decades since I've heard the word "Mr." used with a person's actual surname, outside the set phrase "I now pronounce you Mr. and Mrs. [name]" at weddings. (It does still get used in other ways, e.g., "Ok, Mr. Neat and Tidy, which cupboard did you hide the crock pot in, that I had set out to use this afternoon?")
Y'all is our informal you..duh
😂❤
You did X!?
What!? I never did X.
English flip^
If English people keep on adopting French words, in just a few decades, English will become another Romance language.
And I think some Anglish defenders would get very mad at you Rob.
I think you should look for Germanic words in other languages.
I don't like foreign words into my language (Portuguese). I know it's almost impossible to stop it. I will become one more influence.
The point is: how much influence is it allowed from one language in another?
In my language, this meal between lunch and dinner is called lanche. I'm not sure if it has English influence from lunch. I guess it doesn't have.
0:52 not sure how many ppl can rebut whatever you say 🙌🏼 hello from NYC 🍎🇺🇸
Aussies have ‘nah-yeah’ in place of ‘si’
There is also "vachement" which is quite used in every day french. It litterally is "cowly". It Means something big, as big as a cow, in a dramatic way. For example "this is awfully expensive!" could be "c'est vachement cher!".
Anyway, this is where cross knowledge of languages get its spice in my opinion, for there are plenty of untranslatable words in any language. Glad you reminded us French of the "to do/to make" distinction! Other words not sure how they could translate in french I can think about : "bliss", "flirt" (we use it differently)
"Chez tu" is more efficient and more "familiar" than "A ton Maison" , but I have trouble un-thinking "A Ton Maison". It's unfortunately how I learned it in my high school French class.
I can confirm, the Finnish language also distinguishes between knowing (as in being familiar with something) and knowing (as in possessing information).
"Tuntea" is the verb for being familiar with something.
"Tietää" is the verb for possessing information about something.
The verb "tuntea" also has a second meaning, "to feel," and it can be used to describe both physical and mental sensations.
Si I subscribed to your channel Rob, as a french linguistics enthusiast, I loved the 3 videos I've seen from you! Keep up (phrasal verbs again) the good work !
Edit: I'd be happy to trade some of your words as well 😂
Wouldn't "tutoyer" be the same as "palaver"?
I realised through this video that french is very similar to German actually.
5 Sietzen/Dutzen
4 Kennen/wissen
3 flanieren
Depaymonte is homesickness
I think the main sticking point for getting gourmandise introduced will be that 100% of the time that someone says it, it will be swiftly followed by "gourmandise nuts"
I have heard the phrase " mon chez" in Louisiana. 40 years ago, now,. Not happy about my second thought on that. It would be interesting if you could work out what that means. I do know, and I don't know why I know.
Si