Hurdling the Language Barrier.

Comfortably back in a country where I can speak (almost) my mother tongue, where visiting the library provides an embarrasment of riches, I reflect a bit on the struggles and joys of learning French in France.

Bravo for the experience of going somewhere where you don't speak the language, and trying to learn from scratch. I'd love to write about this in French, but two months with little writing practice... I'd be here all night!

France, was in some ways an easy place to try my experiment. For one, not many people speak english, and even less like to. Lots of opportunity to practice speaking. Second, there is the abundance of French words (debut, hotel, sautee...) and phrases (de ja vu, haute cuisine, en passant...) that have passed into English. I learned quickly however that there are 'false friends' - 'Chef' for instance means not only the one who cooks, but any sort of boss, a 'crayon' denotes a pencil, and the 'curiosities' of an area can be major attractions.

The huge gulf between spelling and pronunciation also provides a barrier for the cold-start immersion learner. To try to hurdle it, I taught myself a few phonetical symbols to get my head around the French vowels and dipthongs.



Much to the delight of my friends, I could never master the 'r' sound. When I tried to imitate the strange growling gurgle of my teachers, I would usually end up sounding like I was trying to throw up. Some days I practiced the sound, but the motion of pulling my tounge downward inside my mouth caused me to feel nauseous!

Why do I like the language? Well, as popularly observed, there is the sexy, exotic sound to it, but that impression faded the more I learnt (perhaps it was because many of my early sentences were about dumping rotten grapes into a huge trailer). It seems like a powerful language, like Arabic, where one is capable of both the most soothing sounds and equally harsh guttural utterances.

Then there is the great French literature... I aspire to, but may never read Moliere, Apollonaire, Proudhon, Derrida (pictured), Focault, Rosseau... the list could go on and on. But at least I can say I can enjoy and understand the mighty Asterix in the language it was written in. Mais oui! Ah yes.>



It makes sense to me too, to 'miss out' the ends of words as the French do. In conversation, any ambiguous meaning can be sifted through other cues, and so shortening words is no real problem. In print, however, it makes sense to have the full word.

And I'm not sure whether it was just mon amis, the company I was with, but I learned many colourful phrases. To be egotistical is to have 'the melon', presumably for a head. To be really hungry is to have 'les croc', to have fangs, or 'le dalle', a stone block. Curiously, modern urban French slang involves switching the phonemes in certain words, an itbay like igpay atinlay. So 'bizarre' becomes 'zarrebi'.

Can I speak French now? Not really. Could I return to France and use my melange of French, hand signs and the odd stray word of Spanish to make myself understood about day to day matters, even make people laugh with me, not at me, and understand someone who speaks slowly and clearly? Yes. One thing I believe now is that communication depends on patience and creativity much more than simple language profiency. So why learn other languages at all? To be able to say "Ils sont fous ces romains"*, of course.


*These romans are crazy