Carolyn vs the French Language
Did someone force you to read Camus, too?
I have a long, fraught relationship with the French language. I began studying French in the 7th grade. I had moved from a large rural school to a small private school, and many of my new classmates had been studying a foreign language for years.
I was excited to start speaking this exotic new language, and when my teacher whisked into the classroom, pointed to various objects, and said, "La porte, les fenêtres, et les étudiants," I was all on board. Then he said the word "conjugation," and it was the beginning of the end. My grammar education from the public school was basically nonexistent, and I had no clue what conjugation meant. I was lost, and throughout high school and college I never felt like I could catch up.
It didn’t help that in French class one reads books like Le Petit Prince and Camus’ L’Étranger. These books are weird, people. Reading them I would be thinking, my French is horrible. There is no way the boy is speaking to a flower. Or in the case of Camus, There must be a story here. I wish my French were good enough to understand it.
Why couldn’t these teachers assign The Three Musketeers or The Hunchback of Notre Dame or something with an actual plot to follow? To make beginning French students read Camus is like making beginning ESL students read To the Lighthouse. It’s plain mean.
When I left college I thought my days of being tortured by French were over, but then in 1997 I decided to apply to a theater school in Paris, L’École International de Theatre Jacques Lecoq. Despite what many people assumed, I did not go to this school just because it was in Paris. I went despite it being in Paris. I was quite worried my French wasn’t strong enough, however, the application materials stately clearly that it was an "international school" and that French was "not a requirement." This turned out to be "a big fucking lie."
Every single one of my classes was in French. I had two teachers (one German, one British) who would repeat everything in English, but all the others would only speak in French. It was terrifying. I wasn’t sitting at a desk writing things down. I was expected to get up and do acting exercises based on what a teacher had just said. I was in a constant panic. Did she just say "turn in a circle" or "circle the room"? Does she want me to "discover the other" or "find the otter”?
My worst experience was a day when we were doing character work based on various animals. I was on stage by myself and the teacher, Sandra, a terrifying French woman whose pores leaked gin, asked me what the hell I was doing. I confidently said, "Je suis un chat." I am a cat. A simple sentence.
She raised an eyebrow as the French students giggled. She said again, "Qu’est-ce que vous êtes?" What are you? I repeated myself. "Je suit un chat." The French students laughed harder. The teacher told me to sit down. Once seated on the floor, I was told by a bilingual friend that when you pronounce un chat like "uh shah" it means cat. When you make it feminine, as I unknowingly had, and say "une shat" it means lady parts. So I stood in front of my entire class and teacher and insisted not once, but twice, "I am a pussy."
(Here is a stunning list of cringe-worthy mistakes one can make with slight mispronunciations or grammar mistakes in French).
Beyond the school humiliations, I suffered the daily grammatical corrections by French strangers in bakeries, corner stores, laundromats, and basically anywhere I had cause to open my mouth. When Roberto and I started looking for countries to retire in, I immediately assumed I would want nothing to do with France and their confounding language. They could take their persnickety grammar and stick it up their derrières.
But the longer we discussed France as a retirement option, something began to happen. I slowly started to remember the small Paris victories: leaving an outgoing voice message entirely in French. Successfully giving directions to a cab driver. A Parisian complementing my accent. I began to remember the fun of walking into a cafe and saying, "Puis j’avoir une tasse du thé, s’il vous plait?" Can I have a cup of tea, please?
I realized that moving part time and then permanently to France was the opportunity to reclaim the language for myself. And there are so many more resources available now. In high school and college I had no internet and no Google to quickly search for vocabulary or phrases. When I lived in Paris I would have killed for a quick source to tell me how to say "Please excuse my grammar. I’m still learning your language," or "What is the word in French for this product?" Learning such simple sentences seemed far out of reach. The current abundance of apps, games, YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, etc. is incredibly empowering.
For example, do you know about the photo function on Google Translate? You can take a picture of a large amount of text (like a menu) and Google Translate translates all of it within seconds! It is a miracle. And then there is the speech function that allows you to speak into the phone and get an instant translation. It is such a safety net.
Most surprisingly, I am loving throwing myself full force into learning the language. I am determined to become as fluent as possible. I do DuoLingo exercises every morning for 15-60 minutes.
I have also begun working with a tutor, Alyson Weaver, once a week. She and I are watching Call My Agent separately (in French with French subtitles) and then we meet for an hour and discuss the plot in French. Talking about good TV? You have just named my favorite homework ever.
Visiting Montpellier in person also had a huge influence. Not one person corrected my grammar. Not one person pretended not to understand my meaning because I mispronounced a word or used the singular instead of the plural. I attribute this to two things:
Firstly, we were told many times that the south of France (le sud de la France) is much friendlier than Paris, in the same way that say, Austinites are more friendly and chatty than New Yorkers. Secondly, I think the younger generation is excited to learn English, and therefore they understand the frustrations of trying to speak a foreign tongue. All the shopkeepers seemed excited and proud to speak English with us.
The positivity of the people in Montpellier gave me the confidence to open my mouth and speak, and I suspect that even if I’d accidentally said "I’m a pussy" no one would have been gauche enough to mention it.
Jusqu’à la prochaine fois (until next time)
Carolyn & Roberto
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I feel this. Also learned French BECAUSE of going to Lecoq/ Paris, despite not being at all enamored with the French. Weirdly, I stayed there four years total and ended up with moderately fluent French, considering. Which I use almost never, except to watch Call My Agent. I've often thought I'd love to go back, but not to Paris, to the south. Also i think it would be better to return as an older woman (being 20-something in Paris SUCKED. Just constant sexual harassment.) I think it's so neat what you are doing!
Cette histoire est parfait. Merci.