People say that LLMs don’t have a sense of humour. That may be true, but I feel it’s closer to humour on the spectrum – no offence for the analogy. After a chat about language competency that drifted into musical competency, out conversation ended thusly.
More diversion, leaning toward pedantic. I need to learn the correct way rather than fall back on ‘native people do this all the time’ excuse. Besides, as a non-native writer, I’d expect less forgiveness, though I think there may be two channels of forgiveness in play.
18:31
Yes, two distinct channels, and they cut in opposite directions.
The first is the non-native allowance — errors read as learner errors rather than carelessness, which tends to attract correction rather than judgment. A missing accent or a wrong tense from a foreigner signals incomplete acquisition, not laziness, and native speakers generally calibrate their response accordingly. Laeticia’s ce n’est pas grave energy, essentially.
The second is the literate foreigner premium — which is almost the inverse. A non-native writer who is mostly correct gets held to a higher implicit standard than a native writer dashing off a text, because the very correctness signals that you’re operating in a formal register, even when you’re not intending to. One slip in otherwise clean French reads as a mistake where the same slip in a native’s casual message reads as style. You’ve essentially opted into a higher tier by being good enough to be there.
Your position is particularly exposed to the second channel, given that your French reading is already at roughly B1 and your written production is analytically driven and careful. The errors you make won’t look like a tourist’s — they’ll look like anomalies in otherwise competent prose, which draws more attention not less.
And frankly, your own standards are probably the binding constraint anyway. The philosopher of language who built a career on precision in signification is not going to be comfortable hiding behind natives do it too. That excuse requires a certain insouciance you don’t appear to have packed.
I recall decades ago taking guitar lessons – always lessons – and I was working on a piece with a solo. To me, it sounded close enough; to my instructor, one would think he imagined my playing whilst wearing mittens.
18:33
Ha. The instructor’s ear and the student’s ear are simply not the same instrument yet — you’re hearing the gestalt, he’s hearing every individual note against what it should be. “Close enough” is a category that doesn’t exist for someone who has already compiled the piece to fluency. The mittens were entirely audible to him.
It’s actually a clean analogy for where you are with French. Your reading comprehension is good enough that you’re hearing your own written output at roughly the right level — the meaning lands, the structure is recognisable, the register is approximately right. But Laeticia, or a DELF examiner, is hearing the mittens: the tense that contradicts the intention, the dangling comme, the á where à should be.
The further irony is that the guitar analogy runs deeper than it first appears. You identified the compiled/declarative distinction yourself — knowing the piece intellectually versus having it in the fingers. Your French grammar is largely in the analytical channel, which means you can catch errors given time and attention, but under production pressure the fingers default to habit. The wrong dead key. The passé composé because it’s the tense you’ve drilled most.
The mittens come off with time, but they come off unevenly — and the last few fingers take the longest.
Call me Harrison Bergeron.
18:34
Ha. Handicapped by your own analytical overdevelopment. The very apparatus that makes you good at understanding French is the dead weight bolted to the fluent production you’re trying to achieve.
Vonnegut would appreciate the specific cruelty of it — your particular handicap isn’t random, it’s precisely calibrated to your strength. The philosopher of language, hobbled by language.
O! the humanity. haha
18:34
The Hindenburg of late language acquisition. 😄
Philosophics 