My pleasure! The nice thing about historical linguistics is that you can know stuff without needing to know the language in question.
Your measly three years of French in a German (I assume) school probably far surpass my measlier two years of French in a not only American, but academically poor even by American standards, high school. That plus my one semester of French historical linguistics in college is about it for me and French.
My German background is even weirder: one semester of proper German in college, one semester on German syntax from a linguistic perspective (so a lot of diagramming sentences and reading up on different theories that account for where verbs go), one semester on reading academic German in grad school, two semesters of Middle High German, and a few semesters of even more remotely removed long dead Germanic languages: Old English, Old Norse/Icelandic, Gothic. ;) All of these give me a slight edge in reading German over an English speaker who had only that one semester of German 101, but leave me with a total German reading proficiency that is actually worse than my two years of high school French. Largely due to English having a far greater overlap in vocabulary with French, notwithstanding that it's a Germanic language.
I will never cease to complain that my graduate program: - required nominal reading proficiency in French and German, - failed to provide us with resources to acquire academic reading proficiency without taking years and years of irrelevant "When is the train coming?" undergraduate courses on spoken French/German that no one actually had time for, - held the bar so low we could pass without actually being able to read French or German, thus giving us no incentive to prioritize reading proficiency over all the other things we were trying to cram into our years there.
And then we'd get random lectures like, "You know, you should also learn to read academic Russian," and we'd blink and stare at our advisors like..."I don't disagree. In principle."
Re: French pronunciation
Your measly three years of French in a German (I assume) school probably far surpass my measlier two years of French in a not only American, but academically poor even by American standards, high school. That plus my one semester of French historical linguistics in college is about it for me and French.
My German background is even weirder: one semester of proper German in college, one semester on German syntax from a linguistic perspective (so a lot of diagramming sentences and reading up on different theories that account for where verbs go), one semester on reading academic German in grad school, two semesters of Middle High German, and a few semesters of even more remotely removed long dead Germanic languages: Old English, Old Norse/Icelandic, Gothic. ;) All of these give me a slight edge in reading German over an English speaker who had only that one semester of German 101, but leave me with a total German reading proficiency that is actually worse than my two years of high school French. Largely due to English having a far greater overlap in vocabulary with French, notwithstanding that it's a Germanic language.
I will never cease to complain that my graduate program:
- required nominal reading proficiency in French and German,
- failed to provide us with resources to acquire academic reading proficiency without taking years and years of irrelevant "When is the train coming?" undergraduate courses on spoken French/German that no one actually had time for,
- held the bar so low we could pass without actually being able to read French or German, thus giving us no incentive to prioritize reading proficiency over all the other things we were trying to cram into our years there.
And then we'd get random lectures like, "You know, you should also learn to read academic Russian," and we'd blink and stare at our advisors like..."I don't disagree. In principle."