As some of you know, I have had French studies in my life since the age of 10 years, when our 5th grade teacher (a WW II war bride from France) stepped into our 4th grade classroom one day and began to teach us French! Now, in a small rural community in Indiana, this was quite novel--but, bless her heart, she kept it up all that 4th grade year, and then in 5th she was MY teacher, so we had 1/2 the day in French and 1/2 the day in English, and then in 6th grade she made arrangements to return to our classroom (good old Mr. Kerr) and keep us going with it. In 7th grade we moved to Oregon, where French was an elective in Jr. High, so I kept up with it, all the way through High School. I "quizzed out" of French when I took the AP exam of the SAT exams, so I was entitled to count that as one of my two required languages at Bryn Mawr (the other was ancient Greek for me, which is still mostly Greek to me!), but I wanted to keep it going so I took a 202 French Lit class my Freshman year. We read Voltaire, and Les Miserables, and poetry, and several other things which I've now forgotten (oh yes, "Huis Clos" No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre). All of which is to say that at one point in my life, I ws pretty comfortable with French. Over the years I've had the opportunity to use it with the Vietnamese refugees who were served by Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, and occasionally with families who are from France or French Canada, or the western African countries. But I haven't really had LOTS of practice until I got here.
One of the things one realizes right off the bat is that, in real life, people don't speak in sentences all that much, unless they are having a conversation about ideas, political or otherwise. Mostly, people speak in short phrases (parents: "don't!" "I said don't do that!" "Hear me?" etc.) Teens speak with "like" or "cool" interspersed throughout--the French equivalent for both of those is "d'accord" which can also mean OK. Interesting to listen to teenagers speaking to each other, from a distance.
Secondly, as David Sedaris points out in his wonderful book of essays "Me Talk Pretty One Day", French is like most of the other Romance languages in that there are male and female designations for all nouns. Who knew that a table would be female? Or that a radish is male? (The Greeks are ahead here--both ancient and modern Greek have a third, neuter, gender for things one is not sure about, or for things which have no obvious characteristics of either gender). Remembering the word for umbrella is bad enough (parapluie), but then to recall whether it's male or female can be daunting before you've had coffee.
Third, we rarely speak in the past pluperfect verb tense, or any one of 5 or 6 other arcane English-isms; many Americans don't get that right, even in English ("I wish I WERE in France" is correct--many of us say "I wish I WAS in France"). So forget all the endings of the French verbs which designate temporal or active status--and Heaven help us with the French IRREGULAR verbs (the ones they got from German or English or Dutch). Fortunately, most French are very forgiving about verb tenses, and I can say "I enjoy music last night", meaning I went to an outdoor concert evening before last, and they still understand my meaning. (At least we have a way to express the past--my understanding of the Asian languages is that they don't actually have past-tense verbs, which is why my patient parents from China, say, will struggle with telling me the history of their child's illness.)
What's really throwing me here in the SW of France is the TEMPO of the speaking. We are only about 50 miles from Spain, remember. And the Spanish speak VERY fast--so do the French down here. And they tend to swallow the final consonants on some words and SING the final consonants on others, so that it's fairly unintelligible at some points. I felt a little better when our native-French guide (she was taking Jan, Ryan and I to a castle in the area), who grew up in Lyon, said SHE couldn't understand some of the Languedoc folks, either. I am getting to be able to hear the accent and sort out the native Languedocians from the transplants. I had such a lovely SLOW conversation with my taxi driver this morning on the way to the airport to pick up my rental car--he grew up in Paris, where they speak more slowly and enunciate more clearly, and cut off the word at the end rather than singing an extra syllable onto the end of the word; we chatted about the weather, and the people of Carcassonne, and different accents around the different parts of France--made me feel as though I really MIGHT be able to speak this, after all!
And, of course, it's true that the French are like anybody else--if you give it a TRY in their language, they are most willing to be helpful if they can. They are really a lot friendlier than some folks make them out to be! Bien sur!
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