I’ve never heard anyone say “on people” instead of “about people”? Is it an Albany expression?
Probably made by a non-native English speaker. Prepositions are so unique to each language and oftentimes seemingly randomly chosen (is that à, de, sur, or no preposition at all, French?). If you roughly know a one-to-one translation of the prepositions from your language into English, you can often get it wrong just like this.
En France, Au Canada, À New-York, Aux Seychelles, À Cuba.
Don’t try to find a logic, there literally is none and anyone who tells you otherwise is just retrofitting rules to chaotic data and will inevitably have a list of exceptions longer than a French politician’s criminal record. Half of it is literally just “what was grammatically fashionable at the time this toponym was discovered/imported/created”.
This does not excuse English’s abuse of prepositions though. Why do I get on the bus but in the car? Why, English?
I once heard a non-native English speaker tell me they remember “on” vs. “in” as “if you can walk around while on it (train, plane, bus) then it’s on, if you can’t (car) then it’s in.”
I kind of liked that description.
It’s definitely not an “excuse”, but I don’t think I’d say English is any worse than French in this regard. Just the examples you gave, they’re all “go to a country”*, but we’ve got “en”, “à”, and “à la” (with conjugations). They’re as bad as each other.
* New York obviously not a country, but its preposition is a duplicate of Cuba anyway, so doesn’t change the point being made.
French is definitely way more complex than English grammatically which is comparatively dead simple. Although things get deceptively hard at more advanced levels (get up/to/at/through/off all mean wildly different things for instance and that’s just crazy).
Where learning English actually gets tricky is the unpredictable pronunciation with zero rules. Through/Thorough/Thought/Cough/Geoff? Read/read? French has some exceptions when it comes to pronunciation but mostly follows a standard (albeit complex) set of rules that lets a native speaker approach an unknown new word with relative confidence. When I learned how y’all pronounce “Hermione” my eyes just about popped out of their sockets, why tf does “ione” have as many syllables as “secretary”?
French is at least mostly consistent, but its pronunciation is pretty wild to someone familiar with literally any other language written using a Latin script.
Mangé, manger, mangez, mangeai, mangeais, mangeaient. The first 3 are the same as each other, the last 3 also form an identical set with each other. All 6 are very similar. Then you’ve got mangerai, mangerais, mangeraient, mangerez… Or mange, manges, mangent.
why tf does “ione” have as many syllables as “secretary”?
idk, why does mangeaient have a grand total of 50% of its letters being entirely silent and contributing nothing to its pronunciation (or rather, all collectively contributing as much as ´ does).
Et maintenant, je dois manger le dîner. J’ai faim…
Silent letters make boys grow into men! Or something. You can know how to pronounce those if you read them, but you definitely can’t know how to write those if you hear them.
Thankfully informal French gets rid of a few of the examples you gave by always using the composed form. Je mange, j’ai mangé, je vais manger, ils auraient mangé. All the tenses you actually need (don’t mind the irregular forms of être/avoir). And we still fuck up and write mangé and manger interchangeably anyways.
Fun socio-linguistic fact: Mangerai and mangerais are distinct in Belgian (and I think Swiss?) French (é vs è ending) but not in France French (è in either case). There are a few other archaisms like this such as the Belgian/Swiss distinction between the pronunciation of “brun” and “brin” that the French don’t make either.
You can know how to pronounce those if you read them, but you definitely can’t know how to write those if you hear them.
I do wonder about the history of that. Presumably they used to be pronounced distinctly and at some point the language evolved the habit of dropping ending sounds? L’academie would never go for this, but it seems like French would benefit from some spelling reform. What’s wrong with je mange, il mange, ils mange‽
Thankfully informal French gets rid of a few of the examples you gave
I’ll admit one of the examples I gave was passé simple, which I recall my teacher saying is the “literary tense” and can be safely ignored; I included it only to make up the neat 3/3. But were any of the others rarely used?
The tenses I was told to care about were present, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, conditional, futur simple, and futur proche. And tbh I still don’t really understand the difference between those last two, so in practice I’d either think about whether in English I want to say “I’m going to” or “I will”, or just default to futur proche 'cos it’s easier. And I know you can do some fun stuff like the “past in the future” and “future in the past” by applying different tenses of the auxiliary verbs in perfect & futur proche tenses, even if those aren’t especially useful to know very often. But yeah, I thought that apart from the passé simple my examples were pretty standard. Is that not so?
Mangerai and mangerais are distinct in Belgian (and I think Swiss?) French (é vs è ending) but not in France French
That is fun! My favourite fun French dialect fact is about septante, nonante, and huitante/octante being used in Swiss French and maybe Belgian and non-Quebec Canadian French instead of soixante-dix, quatre-vingt-dix, and quatre-vingt. I’m not sure of the history there, but I like it.
I don’t eat butter
Are you the dude that attempted putting butter in their butt except that it was salted butter and thus ruined the whole experience…?
The fuck?
I break my butter sticks in half with my bare hands, fight me.
My wife slices straight through the wax paper every time. I call her a monster, she claims it saves time.
But doesn’t she have to then remove the paper from the slice? Wouldn’t that take more time if she ends up taking several?
