Getting to know you: who are you and why do spend time on French Language SE?

Question

Since our chat room Chez Cosette is relatively quiet, I thought we should try something else to get to know each other. I'm posting this meta question to give everyone the opportunity to introduce themselves, talk a bit about themselves and tell the community about their motivation for participating on French Language Stack Exchange.

So, unless you are here incognito, join in and tell us about yourself and why you hangout here :-)

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PS: This question was inspired by Getting to know you: who are you and why do spend time on unix.se? on Unix & Linux Stack Exchange (and Getting to know you: who are you and why do spend time on Language Learning Stack Exchange? on Language Learning Stack Exchange).

Answer 1

Bonjour ! I started learning French in high school. I really enjoyed it, and I spent a lot of additional time on it outside of class. It's still useful to me, and I'm fond of French literature and history. (In fact, most of the questions that I've posted so far were motivated by various texts that I read.) I hope to become fluent enough some day to be able to understand everything I hear and to ad lib about any topic, but we'll see how that goes.

Writing questions and answers has been a great way to practice my writing, and I enjoy reading posts about grammar or about pronunciation. It's also been rewarding to realize that I know enough now that I can, in fact, answer some questions about French, even if they're relatively easy questions.

I was introduced to SE through the math site and naturally found the French beta after a while. Over the years, I've long since stopped really browsing some of my other sites, but I haven't had any reason to stop reading this one yet. While it doesn't work for some subjects, the SE format is great for languages: everything is fairly centralized, so there are fewer duplicates, and the site interface is relatively clean and easy to use.

Answer 2

I'm Alan and I'm a Brazilian software engineer in my 30s. I have started learning French when I was a teenager and reached an intermediate level, but after I graduated in college, unfortunately I have not used it at all for 10 years. I have started speaking it again during a trip in South America in 2017/2018 in which I found many French people and I'm slowly working my way to get fluent in the language since then.

I started using Stack Overflow for programming questions many years ago, eventually found out French Language Stack Exchange and I have really liked it because of its objective QA format and voting system which highlights the best answers. Since then, I come here whenever I have a question about the French language which I cannot answer by simply checking Google and dictionaries.

Answer 3

I am Tsundoku, a Dutch-speaking Belgian who lives in Germany. I have been a researcher in digital accessibility since 2001. This line of work has little to do with the French language or with languages in general, but I have done most of my work in the context of European research projects, so I have encountered many varieties of English: not only British and American English, but also “French English”, “Spanish English”, “German English”, etc.

I started learning French in the fifth grade of primary school and continued with this at secondary school, where the French language classes were taught entirely in French. At home, watching French TV was not unusual (I must have watched La Grande Vadrouille at least a dozen times, for example). However, since I studied English and German at university, I became more fluent in these languages than in French. (More details about my language learning experience can be found in this meta post on Language Learning SE.

Online, I am a moderator on Language Learning Stack Exchange (since October 2017) and on Literature Stack Exchange (since 28 April 2020). On Literature Stack Exchange I have suggested a number of reading challenges focusing on French literature: so far we've had L'Étranger and works inspired by it and Guy de Maupassant, and I hope we'll have a reading challenge on Rabelais one day.

I also maintain a website about language learning, which obviously also has a page about resources for learning French.

At the time of writing, I've been on French Language SE for almost four years; I admit that the goal is improving my French :-)

Answer 4

I'm Reyedy, a 24 years old software engineer from France.

I discovered French SE 3 years ago, coming from StackOverflow and seeing that StackExchange was actually a whole network with a lot of different themes. I was very interested in it, but back then I wasn't able to participate actively.

During (almost) 3 years, I kept very quiet here, still coming regularly to see what was being discussed, what kinds of questions people could have, etc. And 2 months ago, with the whole pandemic/confinment situation (I was still working but I didn't have to use public transports anymore), I decided to use my newly acquired free-time to start participating and answering questions.

I always had a thing for French language, and it goes as far as I remember. I learned to read by myself, and since then I got stuck with books most of my life. At some point, I even tried myself in writing, but the task required too much commitment and I wasn't ready to deal with the frustration of a blank page. It humbled me and increased my respect towards writers even more. Who knows, maybe one day I'll try again!

Now, I guess I'm just an enthusiastic nerd who likes helping learners with concepts of a language he loves. French got very interesting in the last few decades, with a lot of new words coming from globalization, borrowed from other languages. I like seeing it evolve and I try to keep myself up to date.

I would like to be around for a while, so I hope I can help as many people as possible, and take pride in it!

Answer 5

I'm ava, I'm a 20-something healthcare engineer who lives in Western France. I'm an avid consumer of stacks, both for work and for improving my linguistics. French is one of my mother tongues yet I often find myself clueless when I see this stack's tailored answers. Despite this, I try to answer whenever I think my input could bring something to the discussion.

I'm often in chat so you can count me in if help is needed to revive "Chez Cosette" ;)