What's really great about these lessons is that there are sound files available for each dialogue. This allows you to listen and follow along with the written dialogue. First a Guernesiais woman speaks a sentence, then there is a short pause (this is where I try and repeat ;)), and then a British women says it in English. The Guernesiais is fairly slow and the woman articulates well. I can only assume that it would be spoken much more quickly when spoken naturally. In fact, I think I've read recently somewhere in the in the mountain of articles on Guernsey I have accumulated that Guernsey people do speak quite quickly. I find the intonation of the woman's speech on the sound clips interesting though, and it may be quite authentic.
What is slightly annoying about the the
sound clips though is that they don't play well on any of the
computers I've tried. They are .ram (which I think means they are
realaudio). Anyways, they do not allow me to pause and I often have
to reload the file. Also, some of the files also sound as though the
ladies become posessed at the end of the lesson (voices are
fastforwarded or played in reverse?) which may be due to corrupted
file or perhaps a problem in my download.
My goal for the day was just to go
through a few of the lessons and get used to the pronunciation of the
language. I'm going to see if I can convert the files into another
format so I can play and pause them at my leisure ;)
Also, as a preliminary impression, I'm finding Guernesiais very similar to French, which was to be expected since it is also known as Guernsey French and Norman French. After repeating a set of Guernesiais expressions with a headset on, my husband, who can converse pretty well in Quebecois French, would ask if I were talking about pancakes (guern: crêpes) or sugar (guern: chucre).
Still no word from La Société
Guernesiais about my book order mix up. Now it's a weekend, so I
probably won't hear back until Monday.
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