Dammit French

[fuzzyred]

The good news: I'm only three lessons away from regaining my Golden Owl in French on Duolingo.
The irritating news: Course updates made it so that I did, in fact, need to re-earn my Golden Owl, and the two new/updating sections got set to level zero, so it wrecked my progress towards getting everything in French to Level 5.
The annoying news: French has some goofy turns of phrase (as I'm sure English does to second-language learners). In particular, the sentence "Selon moi, un changement est assez peu probable." English translation of the full sentence: "According to me, a change is quite unlikely." Literal translation of the itlaicized bit: "enough (a) little likely." WTF French, wtf?

After some quick googling, "peu probable" translates to "unlikely", and "assez" can be used to mean "quite," so that makes a little more sense, but still. It was entirely foreign was I only had the individual meanings to go off of.

Comments

[technoshaman]

Zut alors. And I thought English was bad.

[fuzzyred]

English can be bad, but French also has some really different customs sometimes. It can make some really unnatural sounding sentences, since I think the French do things that the English don't. For example, "Le bureau, ou est-il?" "The office, where is it?" I see that kind of repetition a lot in the French sentences but we really don't do that in English, we would just say "Where is the office?"