Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart

by William Alexander

  With no enforcement power, the commission was widely ignored, so just five years later the government passed the Maintenance of the Purity of the French Language act, introducing fines for the use of banned anglicisms (TWA received one for issuing its boarding passes in English), which was followed in 1984 by the General Commission for the French Language, which in turn was succeeded by the 1994 Toubon Law, mandating the use of the French language in all official government publications, commercial contracts, and advertisements, and in all workplaces and public schools.

  Yet for all the hullabaloo it is estimated that anglicisms account for only about 1 to 2 percent of all French. Undoubtedly, though, English is encroaching. Will France succeed in keeping France French? Or for that matter, keeping French French? It’s one thing to legislate, but another thing to get people to give up “wee-fee” for accès sans fil à l’Internet. The world has changed greatly since France ruled during the Enlightenment, but one thing hasn’t changed: language follows economic power. Thus I may love French, but when I have grandchildren, and they’re ready to study a foreign language, I’m going to advise them to learn Mandarin Chinese.

  Le Social Network

  We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the Internet.

  —The Social Network, 2010

  FIFTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD WRITER LIVING NEAR NEW YORK CITY SEEKS PARTNER FOR FRENCH CONVERSATION.

  My heart has been shocked again—Anne confirmed that it took two jolts to restore my rhythm this time (I had suspected as much because they must’ve shifted the electrode pad slightly after the first, unsuccessful shock, leaving a second, slightly offset brand on my chest, making me look like a steer on the Double-O Ranch), and then a few weeks later the fluttering bird of AFib has nested in my chest once again. For good, apparently, say my doctors, who try to reassure me that my future arrhythmic life will be just fine, once I get used to it, although I’ll be on Coumadin and beta blockers the rest of my days.

  Perhaps, but I’m a long ways from being used to it, so I’ve made an appointment with a cardiac electrophysiology specialist in the city to discuss treatment options. In the meantime, I’ve posted my profile on MyLanguageExchange.com, having just read that Rosetta Stone, Fluenz, and all the others are obsolete, headed the way of the dinosaur. The asteroid said to be wiping them out is social media, specifically, language-networking sites like the one I’ve just signed up for. These all work roughly the same way. For a nominal fee or even nothing, you search for a language partner who speaks the language you want to learn and who wants to learn your language. Then you can converse on Skype, either using exercises provided by the website or just chatting freestyle. Some sites take a crowd-sourcing approach, where everyone can see and correct your work. In either case, no intimidating classrooms, no sadistic teachers, no huge costs. Just mano a mano language sharing: you scratch my tongue, I’ll scratch yours.

  In theory, this sounds great to me. It must to Rosetta Stone as well. They’ve responded by cutting their price by half and buying out Livemocha, the largest (and most expensive to consumers) of these sites. I save the MyLanguageExchange profile and head to work. Over the weekend, I’ll do some outreach and see if I can find a compatible partner.

  No need. The very next morning I receive un bonjour—the site’s mechanism for letting you know when another member wants to contact you—from a French woman named Sylvie. She’s interested in beginning with e-mail correspondence, not Skype, which suits me fine. Sylvie writes, “I can teach you french to help you a lot to improve your level and i’d like you help me to do the same, because i’m on the intermediate level and i’d like speaking currently english.” Looks like we are definitively on the same level. I follow the link to her profile. Let’s see . . . lives an hour south of Paris, is a mostly unemployed twenty-five-year-old model and heavy-metal rock musician.

  A perfect match.

  I write back, in French, which takes forever—nearly two hours for a short note—because I look up and double-check everything, using Google Translate, a website called Word Reference.com, and a good, old-fashioned dictionary. I tell Sylvie a little about myself, asking that she correct my French, and offering to correct her English. The next day she responds affirmatively, and just like that, I have a French pen pal! I can’t wait to tell Anne.

  “That’s great,” she says. “Tell me about him.”

  HAVING JUST COMPLETED MY first true writing exercise in French—an e-mail to Sylvie—let me say that, while I hate to be diacritical, typing all these damn accents is a royal pain. Sylvie’s French keyboard has all the accented letters (often in places where you expect to find other characters, which can drive you fou if you’ve ever tried to write in English on a French computer), but for me to add diacritics requires a laborious “Insert . . . Symbol” followed by a hunt for, say, the é. Yes, I know, I can write macros and reassign keys, but spare me: I can’t be expected to learn French and how to use a computer at the same time (and I’m a computer guy!). Especially not with the speed with which Sylvie is replying. I’ve barely sent off my note when an e-mail pops up, and Leçon 1 is under way.

  The first mistake is about conjugation for this sentence: “je propose que nous commencer. . . .” this sentence needs to conjugate the verb “commencer” because with the personal pronoun “nous” the sentence is like this: “je propose que nous commençions” (conditional). In a second point, we don’t use “très plus difficile” in the same time, it’s better to tell “beaucoup plus difficile” :) but it’s not an important mistake.

  Sylvie’s corrections may bruise my ego, but they also lend credence to the social-networking language model. Sylvie is a good teacher. Her corrections far exceed the length of my original notes, for I have errors in every sentence. My genders aren’t even correct because I didn’t think to look up the nouns that I “knew.” Yet Sylvie seems not to mind correcting my French and to have plenty of free time to do it. Having graduated from college as a business major several years ago, she’s still looking for her first full-time, permanent job. Youth unemployment is a chronic problem in France, as I’ve learned from watching TV5Monde (some programs are subtitled in English), and French businesses have taken advantage of the situation by using “interns”—who often graduated years ago—in ways that would make even American corporations blush. It seems that corporate power is very much alive in the idealistic, socialist state.

  French speakers from other states have been contacting me as well. Francophones from Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, and other former French possessions are eager to partner up, but I’m being choosy and only entertaining bonjours from France. Besides, at the rate that Sylvie is writing her long, chatty notes, I’m not sure I can handle any more partners, especially since I’ve found yet another social media resource.

  WE GO AROUND THE table, briefly introducing ourselves in French, first names only, making this feel more like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting than a French Language and Culture Meetup.com gathering. When my turn comes, I feel as if I should say, “Je m’appelle Bill et je suis un francophile.”

  I was a little wary about attending, because “Meetup.com” sounds like a singles website, and the fact that previous meetings of this French Language and Culture group included a special Valentine’s Day event did nothing to dispel that impression.

  Well, if Meetup.com is really Pickup.com, this group had better hurry. Some of the members look like they may be touch and go to make it to the next meeting. A woman who has to be at least eighty sits opposite me, and a gentleman not much younger sits next to her. There are twelve of us in all, including the group leader, Gabrielle, a native of Belgium. (My assumption is that a “Belgian Language and Culture” group wouldn’t hold the same allure.)

  Directed by Gabrielle, we start conversing in primitive, halting French—all but one of us, a poor fellow who has been dragged here by his wife and doesn’t speak any French at all. He compensates by making bad jokes, getting up and taking pictures,
and generally playing the class clown.

  By acting out situations, we expand our vocabularies and have our French corrected by Gabrielle. She has a wonderful sense of humor and seems to be genuinely enjoying hanging out with a bunch of people who are mauling her native tongue. Away from the canned exercises of computer software, I find myself stymied by the amount of preparation and premeditation required to say even the simple sentence, “I’d like to take a taxi to that nice restaurant in the small village.” Having to solve a Rubik’s Cube of conjugation, gender, and word order before you open your mouth presents quite a barrier to fluid conversation.

  It reminds me of when I was teaching Katie to drive a stick shift. Just before shifting, you could see her lips moving, the wheels in her brain spinning as she thought through the steps: Ease back on the gas with the right foot; depress the clutch with the left foot; push the gear lever down, toward the center, and forward; gently release the clutch with the left foot while increasing the gas with the right . . . Darn, it stalled! Now, years later, she does all those things subconsciously. She “speaks stick shift.”

  My French engine stalls a number of times, but toward the end of the two hours I am able to express the fact that I bake bread at home, and from the other end of the table I hear, “Pain au levain? ”

  “You speak French!?” someone says to the class clown, incredulous.

  “Not a word,” he says. “But bread I know.”

  The last exercise of the evening is counting backward from twenty. We go around the table, taking turns. When my second turn comes up, all I have to do is say the simple, idiot-proof number “one,” un.

  “Auh,” I say with a bit of nasal inflection.

  “Auh,” Gabrielle corrects me.

  “Auh,” I say.

  “Auh!” she corrects, a little louder, apparently thinking I must be hard of hearing if I can’t repeat the simple one-syllable sound she is making, the shortest word in the French language. A Frenchman, a friend of Gabrielle’s who’s sitting in on the class, chimes in, trying to help me out. I try to imitate the sound, but to my ear I’m saying exactly what they’re both saying. How can I correct something that already sounds correct to me?

  The problem, of course, is my adult brain, which cannot distinguish between the sounds the native French speakers are making and the ones I am producing. This is compounded in older adults by another problem: We don’t hear as well as we used to. Even if we’re not hard of hearing, we don’t distinguish different sounds and frequencies nearly as well as when we were younger. Gabrielle perseveres, demonstrating the shape my mouth must form to say the nonnasal un. I finally get something close enough to satisfy her, but—once again—French is humbling, and my inability to say this simplest of words leaves me feeling a bit foolish as we adjourn for the night.

  It goes without saying, I leave without a date.

  Making Fanny

  I have sampled every language; French is my favorite. Fantastic language, especially to curse with.

  —The Merovingian, in The Matrix Reloaded, 2003

  Because getting an appointment with Dr. Larry Chinitz, the director of Clinical Cardiac Electrophysiology (and, according to his directory entry, a fluent speaker of Yiddish!) at New York University Langone Medical Center, is more difficult than getting an audience with the pope, I’ve come into the city early in case I get a flat on the way to the station, the train is late, or the transit workers, inspired by their French counterparts, stage a one-day strike.

  None of this happens, which is almost annoying because I hate being early, but I know exactly where to go to fill the time—a Parisian park that sits between Grand Central Terminal and Times Square. No fooling. Bryant Park, which has been described by the city Landmarks Preservation Commission as “a prime example of a park designed in the French Classical tradition,” features the green folding chairs and little round metal tables you see in French parks; Le Carrousel, where horses circle endlessly to French music; and, best of all, a boulodrome.

  A boulodrome is where one plays boules, although the French generally call their variant pétanque, maybe because boules, despite being a French word, doesn’t have an accent (although it does offer a silent s as compensation). Whatever you do, don’t call it “bocce” to a Frenchman’s face, even though it’s almost exactly the same game, but played with hollow metal instead of solid wooden balls; hundred-year European wars have been started over less.

  The courts are managed by La Boule New Yorkaise, and despite the fact that I’m a New Yorker studying French, this is the first time I’ve encountered the term New-Yorkaise. That’s what they call New Yorkers in France? I thought it described how we talked. Anyway, seeing that my retirement “package”—and I should really mention this plan to Anne one of these days—includes playing boules and exchanging gossip every morning in whichever picturesque French village I retire to, I figure I should start practicing the game now. As I arrive, an eighty-year-old who, I learn, emigrated from France fifty years ago, has just finished setting up the courts. I tentatively ask the old gent for a game, and he’s happy to oblige—oblige the way a shark agrees to babysit a young mackerel.

  “You have played a lee-tle before maybe?”

  “No,” I say, not wanting even to mention bocce.

  “In zat case, do you play for money?” He laughs at his own joke.

  I don’t, and good thing. Having grown up with backyard bocce at every family barbecue, I thought I knew my way around this game, but this guy is good, pétanque’s answer to Minnesota Fats. I never learn his name because, even though we’re in an American park, this court is clearly French turf, and I’ve read that in France it is rude to ask someone his name.

  This may be French turf, but Minnesota le Gros resists every attempt of mine to converse in French on it. I was hoping maybe I could kill two oiseaux with one boule, but I’ve run into a phenomenon I’ve experienced before: French immigrants, many of whom have worked hard to assimilate, don’t particularly want to speak French, at least not to me. I persist anyway, testing a phrase here or there, as he—grrrr—replies in English, but my ego gets the best of me, and I soon abandon trying to drag any French out of him. Besides, I feel especially self-conscious speaking French to a Frenchman, even one who is not reluctant, and not so much because I know I speak it poorly. The real problem for Americans and Brits, according to some linguists, is that the phonemes of French, with its rolled r’s and nasal intonations, sound so silly to us that when we pronounce them properly we feel like we’re doing an Inspector Clouseau parody, so we shy away from the correct pronunciations.

  I need to focus not on French but on pétanque, anyway, as Minnesota le Gros keeps the first game close, close enough for me to want a second game, and is generous with advice. It is a nice way to learn the game, I’m thinking, in this low-pressure setting so reminiscent of France, playing with an actual and quite gentil Frenchman. Until something unexpected happens. A passerby stops to watch. Then another passerby notices that someone else has stopped to look at something—a squirrel, a mugging, a rolling ball, it doesn’t matter—so he comes over to see what’s happening. Well, with two people watching now, there must be something really big going on, so others stop to watch—the surest way to attract a crowd in New York is to start a crowd—and the next thing I know, my very first pétanque game is an exhibition in Bryant Park!

  I personally would never stop to watch a pétanque match, but in France pétanque is a spectator sport, with championship play staged in large arenas and broadcast on TV. I’ve seen it on TV5Monde, and it’s about as exciting as watching pigeons roost, with half the playing time devoted to players huddling around the balls, arguing over whose ball is closer, and most of the other half to their studying the layout and swinging their arms back and forth a dozen times before finally letting the ball loose, like nervous golfers on a putting green.

  Le Gros notices the crowd and shifts into a higher gear, taking a 5 – 0 lead, although I’m in position to take 3
points and get back in the game. The object of pétanque, as with bocce, is to get as many of your balls closer to the little target ball, called a cochonnet—“piglet,” for some reason—than your opponent does, and you score a point for each ball that is closer than the closest of your opponent’s balls. By some stroke of fortune I’ve just placed my three boules reasonably close to the piglet, and as the crowd gathers, Le Gros crouches low with the third and last ball, his eighty-year-old knees nearly scraping the ground.

  Then without warning his metallic ball is flying through the air in a shallow arc, catching the sunlight, back-spinning like crazy, looking like a silver orb circling the earth. It strikes the piglet right between the eyes, making a crack that reverberates around the park, sending piggy—and itself—back to where the shark’s other two balls are. Score: Minnesota 8, moi 0. The crowd murmurs appreciatively at this amazing feat. I end up losing 13 – 0.

  “Ah, vous avez fait fanny! ”—you made fanny—Fats says with glee. So, that’s how you get a Franco-American to speak French: make him crow!

  “Fanny? Qu’est-ce que c’est, fanny? ” I never miss a chance to ask the question Qu’est-ce que c’est? or its even better variant Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça? for the confounding-looking phrase rolls off the tongue, is easy to pronounce (no r’s!), and sounds very French. But most of all I fancy that the literal translation of the simple question “What’s that?” is “What is this that this is that that?” And that qu’est-ce que c’est is repeated to great effect in the chorus of the Talking Heads hit “Psycho Killer.”