On Learning French

Something I find fascinating is languages. I have studied four of them (English, French, Spanish, and Italian) and think it is really cool to think about all the different names that one object will have. For my senior seminar in creative writing I wrote a 15 page essay all about my experiences with language learning mixed in with some other themes of identity and labels. I have included some excerpts below and I hope you enjoy them!

Learning French for the First Time

Madame Davis was the name of my first French teacher.  She had long brown hair that was turning gray, and she wore long denim jumper dresses and large round glasses.  My first day in French class, Madame Davis explained how to get our mouths in the right position for speaking French.  In English, when we say a word that starts with the letter ‘l,’ our tongue hits the roof our mouth just before it slopes down to our teeth, but the French ‘l’ is said with the tongue lightly tapping the back of our front upper teeth.  In French, the letter ‘r’ is said in the back of your throat.  To practice this, we all had to pretend we were gargling so our tongue would flatten out and allow the growly letter ‘r’ to escape. 

            Then, Madame Davis lit a candle and turned out the lights of our musty basement classroom.  She held up the candle in front of her mouth and told us that in English, puffs of air come out when we say letters like ‘p’ or ‘b.’  She demonstrated, “Peter.”  The little flame wobbled violently.  Madame Davis repeated it again more slowly so we could see.  Then, she said, “Pierre.”  I watched in amazement as the flame barely stirred.  When said correctly, those ordinary consonants in French slipped into the dark around the candle like silent little spies.  They crept into my ears softly and sweetly, completely unlike any version of English I’d ever known.  I wanted the secret knowledge, to know how to have my consonants creep up on people instead of announcing themselves with an attack of air.

            My second day in French class, Madame Davis insisted we choose French names.  I was not at all averse to this, especially after having heard how awful my own name would sound in French what with the ‘r’ and the ‘th.’  My middle name, my mother’s maiden name, was French so I decided to become Noël.  Noël is the French word for Christmas and it is a boy’s name.  I ought to have been Noelle, but I convinced Madame Davis to let me keep the boy’s spelling because I was secretly proud of the two little dots above the ‘e’ which I learned meant that the vowels were to be said separately instead of blended together.  Thus, my name was pronounced No-well instead of Nole.  And voilà, just like that, a new name was born for me.  In here, in this basement classroom where just the sound of French charmed me, I became Noël.

            When I first started learning French vocabulary, I made associations in my mind to English.  Green, vert, was like verge which was green, so I tied green to vert.  Yellow, jaune,  was like jaundiced which was when you got all yellow, and so I tied yellow to jaune.  Slowly, I began to weave my English-French web.  Some words were easy.  Blue was bleu, and brown was brun, but, then we got to verbs.  Suddenly, I had to think about whether I was talking, he was talking, or we were talking. 

            “The verb is parler, take of the –er and you have the stem parl-.  Now, add the endings, -e, -es, -e, -ons, ez, -ent,” Madame Davis said. 

I talk.  Je parle.  You talk.  Tu parles.   He/She/It talks.  Il/Elle/On parle.  We talk.  Nous parlons.  You all talk.  Vous parlez.  We talk.  Nous parlons.  Over and over and over again.  All I could tell myself was, you must remember, you must, you must and don’t puff the ‘p’s.

            I had French class once a week on Wednesdays.  Wednesday evenings would find my family gathered around the dinner table with me practically bursting with French knowledge. 

            “Être is the verb for ‘to be,’ and it is irregular,” I informed my father over the peas.  “But, the French don’t use être to say I am hungry.  You know what they use?  Avoir.  Yes, that’s right, avoir, the verb ‘to have.’  So in French, you say, ‘I have hunger.’”

            “And do you have hunger?” my father asked.  “Because I know I do, so could we please start eating?”

Learning French for the Second Time

At this point I have finished high school and entered college. My last two years of high school I studied Spanish so coming into a college-level French class was a bit of an adjustment.

Oh, to speak and perchance to dream that I might actually be able to say all that I want to!  My first day in a college French class was disorienting.  My French professor was a tall, well-dressed, intimidating man!  For the first time, I was being taught French by a man.  We had to rearrange the desks into a semi-circle, so that everyone in the class could easily see everyone else.  It was unnerving, and I felt all exposed as though I was sitting in my French underwear.  I had abandoned it for Spanish.  Would my betrayal show? 

            He called roll, and when he had managed to glide through my cumbrous last name, I raised my hand and told him I went by Noël.  He smiled and corrected my name on his sheet.  I could almost see him adding the extra ‘l’ and ‘e,’ and I cringed because I would once again have to explain why I had what he considered to be a boy’s name.  After calling roll, my professor used familiar phrases like “tournez à la page 5” and “comment dit-on…?” which I understood.  Like old friends, they welcomed me home.  But, when I opened my mouth to respond to questions that were addressed to Noël once again, I accidentally said things like porque instead of parce que for ‘because’ or sí instead of oui for ‘yes.’ 

            “Noël, est-ce que tu aimes le chocolat?” he asked.

            “Sí, j’aime le chocolat porque il est delicieux!”  He smiled indulgently, as if I were a child who had stolen the cookies from the cookie jar and still had the crumbs on my cheek as evidence. 

            “Parce-que, Noël, parce-que,” he said and swept majestically across the classroom to his next victim.  Little slips of the tongue, and yet the Spanish mistakes kept bumbling into my French sentences and getting me into trouble.  Whenever I went chasing after a word in my mind, the Spanish met me first, so I had to fight through it to the French one hidden in the depths.

            Our professor took off his watch and handed it to one of the students.  The student then had to practice replacing the words for the direct and indirect objects with pronouns.  So instead of I gave the watch to Susan, he was wanting: I gave it to her.  After the student messed up several times, our professor asked the class to help.  I was still recovering from being grateful that I knew from my excellent study of grammar what direct and indirect object pronouns were, and it took an extra couple of seconds to remember that a watch was montre and that it was feminine.

Learning French for the Third Time

After taking Italian and French together I then studied abroad in England and thought I was done with French. I came back to UMW and discovered I only needed a few more French classes to get a minor. So I decided to work hard my senior year so I would have something to show for all of my years of studying French. 

I’m not going to lie; those classes were hard especially my literature one where I was supposed to analyze texts in French.  I struggled to find the words to convey the correct thing in French even as I struggled to talk about romantic love in Le Rossignol or Tristan et Iseult.  What could possibly be so important about these medieval texts that they survived to be read by me, a one-time lover of the French language, but now a jaded language survivor?  Where was the joy and wide-eyed wonder with which I used to drink in each French word?  How can I sound scholarly and intelligent in French?  Gone are the lovely associations and silent consonants when I have to look up every other one in the dictionary.  Gone is the joy and mystery when single words struggle to form sentences, to build paragraphs, and fill those oh so empty pages. 

            When I first started learning French, it was easy to point out improvement.  Yesterday I did not know the word for sky in French, and today I know it is le ciel.  Since I had been studying so long, and was now at the harder levels of reading French literature and translating French to English or English to French, I wondered if I was getting better, if I had reached some sort of competency level.  If I was parachuted into a remote village in Southern France, would I know enough to make myself understood or would they call me an ignorant American, an English speaker, a foreigner?  Has French helped to define me as someone who can communicate with others who share this ability?

            Sometimes, I think Noël is the one who speaks French fluently.  She’s in there, a part of me, the part of my brain that controls my French ability.  If I let her out, if I threw my language web away, if I forgot I was a native English speaker, would she rise to the challenge?  Noël can say whatever she wants without a problem, but Ruth can’t even tell the difference between American and British all the time. 

            We are sitting in the dining hall eating lunch.  My friend is bent over a crossword, his pasta momentarily forgotten as he works on the USA Today crossword.

            “Ruth, 26 down, French exclamation.  Three letters.  Something Dieu?” 

            “It’s mon.  Mon dieu.  M-o-n.”

            I know the answer!  I know what it is.  He addressed me as Ruth, and Noël answered, but isn’t she me; aren’t I her?

There are some of my thoughts/experience on language learning. I'm sure many of you can relate, and, if not, you can at least see how my brain works with regards to language!