2 weeks ago
16
When I was 17 my family visited France. One night in a restaurant in the Loire Valley, I summoned up my high-school French and ordered poulain, assuming it was some kind of chicken (poulet). The snooty garçon (it was the 80s, that’s what we called him) was quick to put me in my place: “Does mademoiselle know she has ordered horsemeat?” Mademoiselle did not.
Fast forward 40 years to another family holiday, this time in Paris with my own children. Holding my own this time (or so I thought) with the serveur, I asked if there were any organic wines – “sans préservatifs?”. He smiled and explained that préservatif is French for condom.
I took it as a small victory that the waiter laughed with me this time, not at me. And in my defence such faux amis (similar words with different meanings) trip up even the illustrious – remember France’s President Emmanuel Macron describing the former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull’s wife, Lucy, as delicious (délicieuse can mean delightful).
But it was further proof that my grasp on the language hadn’t improved much in four decades.
My vocabulary is so limited I often take the coward’s way out and resort to franglais. I stumble over whether to use the imperfect or passé composé; the subjunctive I mostly don’t even attempt. I can’t for the life of me get my tongue around the r in rue and my cent, sans and s’en all sound exactly the same, when I’m sure they shouldn’t.
Yet despite all the faux pas, I persist. I gave my French a red-hot go on that last trip to Paris, even managed a discussion of the pension age with a very forgiving cab driver. What I lacked in fluency, I made up for in enthusiasm and hand gestures.
It’s satisfying when you can bridge the language divide but beyond the practicalities of communication there are other reasons not to give up French:
1. It opens the door to French culture, history, politics, film and literature. You can escape the Anglosphere for a bit – keep up with the latest political crisis in Paris, read a French novel, watch the French thriller Lupin on TV.
And translation can only get you so far. It’s an art, not a science, so inevitably an interpretation; English translators can’t even agree on the famous first line of À la recherche du temps perdu. If you want to read Proust as it was written, you have to read it in French.
2. Learning French can help your English. It’s estimated about 40% of English words are derived from French; they crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror in 1066. Many are obvious (that’s why French Wordle isn’t as difficult as you might think) and in my conversation class we can often guess the French word based on the English. Others are less apparent – I only recently realised the connection between inevitable and éviter (to avoid/prevent).
And there are many French words and phrases to use if you can’t find le mot juste (exactly the right word) in English. A sudden feeling of excitement or fear? Frisson. The sense of purpose that gets you up in the morning? Raison d’être.
3. The French take their language seriously – and that appeals to a longtime subeditor like me. Ever since the revolutionary era writer Antoine de Rivarol opined “Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas francais” (“If it’s not clear, it’s not French”), French has had a near-mythical reputation for being precise. I’m not sure it deserves it – languages tend to be as precise as they need to be – but there certainly are a lot of grammatical rules and conventions lying in wait to trip up the novice. And a watchdog, L’Académie Francaise, to defend them.
4. There’s just something alluring about learning a foreign language. Dare I say I think it’s the foreignness? But I need a French word to explain: depayser (literally to “uncountry”). It’s the feeling you get, when you travel far from home and out of your comfort zone, of being unsettled and charmed at the same time.
Unsettled is how I feel when I struggle to make myself understood in French or when I can’t keep up with the torrent of unintelligible words from a native speaker.
But I’m charmed when I manage to carry on a conversation. I’m charmed when I discover a French word or idiom is the same as in English – bulldog is bouledogue! – but also by the differences. “I’m missing you” in French is “tu me manque”, literally “you are missing to me”. The frame of reference has shifted and there’s an alternate way of thinking about the world, a parallel linguistic universe.
Perhaps that’s what Charlemagne meant when he said: “To have a second language is to possess a second soul.”
Of course I’m far from being at second-soul level. I only hope my French teacher, if he reads this, doesn’t find too many glaring errors.
