Birdsong doesn’t reject the role of biology. Language acquisition, he tells me, is directly affected by the levels of both dopamine and acetylcholine, neurotransmitters that play critical roles in the brain in everything from cognition to emotion and that, like testosterone, decline with age. This was the last place in the world I expected to hear about my declining testosterone, but in fact, Birdsong sings, “The function of testosterone in language is undeniable. Word retrieval and rate of speech are highly dependent on testosterone levels at a given moment. So from morning to afternoon, rate of speech, word retrieval, and fluency can all be a function of testosterone level, in men and women.”
In other words, learning French isn’t just mental; it’s biological and hormonal as well. And the same hormone involved in sexual performance is giving me grief in learning French! I mean, really, who knew?
I take it all in: being too smart for my own good, loss of ability to detect unique French phonemes, first-language interference, loss of synapses, decrease in processing speed, and plummeting levels of dopamine, acetylcholine, and testosterone. It seems the odds are stacked against me. Heidi Byrnes had been so encouraging about using age to play to our strengths, our very maturity, but the science doesn’t seem to be on my side. I ask Birdsong if there are any data on fifty-eight-year-olds acquiring a second language. Not a whit. Too many adult learners get discouraged and quit early on. Well, not this one, I tell Birdsong, who in response throws me a lifeline of hope. Look, he says, there’s no denying that older people have a poor success rate in learning second languages, but what characterizes the late starters is the wide variability that is not seen among children. Some adult learners end up doing very well.
Even Elissa Newport, who started the brouhaha over the postulated existence of a second-language critical period, isn’t ready to write me off.
“Do I have a fighting chance?” I ask her.
“Yeahhh!” she says encouragingly. “But honestly, I think you’ve got to live in the country.”
By which she doesn’t mean on a farm. Well, that’s not about to happen anytime soon, but the message I’ve taken away from both Newport and Birdsong is that learning French is certainly possible at my age, but difficult.
I’m going to have to turn it up a notch. There is, however, one other little issue vying for my attention, which is related not to my middle-aged mind but to my middle-aged body.
TWO WEEKS AFTER MY surgery, I feel a few rapid beats. They pass. They return. I try to will my heart back into rhythm, which is about as effective as willing my brain into understanding the French evening news on TV5Monde. With Anne safely at work, I come up with the creative idea that intentionally speeding up my heartbeat might break the AFib, so I start racing laps in the pool. Anne comes home to find me in AFib—and wet.
“You did what?” she says, incredulous. “What if you—” She can’t bring herself to finish the sentence. “Have you called NYU?”
“I’m hoping it will break.” The thought of going down there for another jolt is . . . well, I guess it’s enough to have sent me alone into eight feet of water with a fibrillating heart. Anne hands me the phone.
“What’d they say?” Anne asks when I hang up.
“Merde.”
She doesn’t laugh.
“Cardioversion tomorrow morning.”
I’D THOUGHT THE EIGHT-HOUR surgery I’d endured was the end of my heart saga, but it turns out to have been only the preface. In the six weeks following the surgery, I’ll be shocked out of AFib three more times, turning the Double-O brand above my heart into the Olympic rings, each jolt leaving my chest feeling like it’s been struck by a battering ram.
I am as low as I have ever been, checking my pulse a hundred times a day, wondering whether each blip means another date with the DieHard, if not Jesus, and questioning the decision to have had the surgery in the first place. Finally, when I’m rushed to the hospital in the midst of my fourth postsurgery arrhythmia, my blood pressure resembling the score of a high school basketball game, Dr. Chinitz is waiting. His steady, dry hands grasp mine. “Let’s get you fixed,” he says. He nods to a nurse, and I’m wheeled into surgery for my second—and I trust my last—ablation.
RECUPERATING AT HOME a few days later, I’m cheered by a sweet e-mail from Sylvie.
Hello Bill :)
I can tell you that I was worried about you, for your heart!!! i hope and pray that your doctor get all the gremlins now and you have a new heart who will take the good rythm, the rock’n’roll rythm!!
Friendly, Sylvie
Her note not only makes me laugh but prompts me to dwell on the likelihood that her grammatical error—“a new heart who” instead of “which”—stems from the fact that the French use the same word (qui) for both people and things, for “who” and “which.” Finally, something that’s simpler in French than in English! I put on the headphones and resume where I’d left off a few weeks ago, with the passé composé.
Merci, Sylvie.
* Fans of French cinema will be familiar with François Truffaut’s movie The Wild Child, based on the true story of a feral child, a boy who was discovered foraging for food outside a French village in 1800. The arc of his story is remarkably similar to Genie’s; he, too, was not able to acquire language.
Glazed and Confused
“Je suis a stranger here,” I said in flawless French. “Je veux aller to le best hotel dans le town.”
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year,” 1924
Six o’clock, Saturday evening. The elevator doors part, a woman steps out, and I enter the empty elevator. The woman stops suddenly, looking every bit as puzzled as if she’d just been dropped off on Mars, then looks plaintively to me for help.
“Not the lobby yet,” I say. “Eleven.”
“The eleventh floor? This is where I got on. I haven’t moved!” She has been standing, unaware, for a full minute, in a closed but stationary elevator. I see the glazed look in her eyes and instantly understand. She recognizes the same punch-drunkenness in mine and laughs. “Language-immersion class?”
“French level two. You?”
“Level one.”
This is French on the Go, the weekend immersion foreign language program run by the New School, formerly known as the New School for Social Research—aptly named, for by the time it’s all over, I’ll feel a bit like I’ve been a subject of social research, having spent Friday evening, all day Saturday, and half of Sunday in a classroom in Manhattan (conveniently located a few blocks from NYU—just in case) where using your native language is strictly forbidden.
I had entered the class on Friday evening with trepidation, still haunted by my classroom experience with Madame D—— forty years ago, not to mention my more recent brush with her online progeny, Mademoiselle D—— . Sixteen hours trapped in a room with only three other students and an instructor: this is the type of thing that a poor teacher or one difficult student can make or break. When I see Marc, le professeur, though, I relax.
He’s clearly French, possessing the kind of skinny you hardly ever see on American men anymore, and dressed in tight jeans, a narrow tie loosed at the neck, and unlaced work boots. His scarf has been draped over a chair in the front row, and his tightly cropped hair and beard are the same length, giving him a certain je ne sais quoi. In short, he is perfect, authentic, hip, and most of all very, very French. I am definitely going to learn some français this weekend.
“Bonsoir,” he begins. After handing out materials, he introduces himself, speaking slowly and deliberately, the way you’d speak to an infant, so that we can follow him (let’s face it: if he spoke in a normal tempo, we’d all be lost). He says he was born in Rome. Cool! A true Continental man—how glamorous! He does look a little Italian, come to think of it. I’m liking this homme more and more. Born in Rome, most likely raised in Fran—“Rome, New York,” he continues, interrupting my thoughts. What? That unglamorous former factory town in Upstate New York?<
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I’m amazed; this guy is more French than de Gaulle! How does he pull it off? Marc explains that after college he lived in France for several years and that he still returns frequently. I’m guessing very frequently. Consider this: One of the students is from Philadelphia, and Marc has to ask whether it’s spelled Phile- or Phila-, precisely the kind of confusion that might be exhibited by a Frenchman. Later in the weekend, he struggles to come up with the English word for—he pantomimes because, remember, no English is allowed here—that leather thing you wear on your hip to hold a gun. “Holster?” I offer, almost enviously. I want to be Marc, to be mistaken for a Frenchman, to think, eat, be skinny, and most of all speak like a Frenchman.
Marc has each of us introduce ourselves and explain why we’re here. Two middle-aged students are brushing up before vacations. A high school senior, heir apparent to a renowned local wine store, is preparing to spend the summer apprenticing at a vineyard in Burgundy. I’m the last to speak, and as I’m the only one in the room not already holding a ticket to Paris, I simply say, “Je veux parler français.” I want to speak French.
“C’est tout? ”
No, that isn’t all. I say in bad French—for I have picked up some French in the past nine months—that I want to spend summers in France, to go to French plays, watch French movies, read French newspapers. Maybe even retire to France, sitting in cafés and listening to the local gossip. I want to understand the menus, bargain with the vendors at the Paris flea market. And that’s not all. My imagination now running faster than my French, I stammer that I want to play pétanque, I want to . . . to . . .
“Surfer le Seine! ” Marc chimes in, with a Gallic wave of the hand.
“Oui! Je veux surfer le Seine! ”
I don’t know whether that’s a French idiom or just Marc’s colorful metaphor,* but it’s a wonderful image I’ll embrace as my own.
A student asks a question in English and is gently reprimanded as Marc explains, in slow, simple French, why we won’t be speaking any English in class. French is not a translation of English, he says. It is not English that has been coded into French and needs to be back-coded into English to be understood. French is French. When French people say something in French, it is not that they really mean something in English; no, they mean something in French. You cannot simply replace a French word with an English word. To understand what a French word means, you have to understand les circonstances in which it is used.
Take the simplest of French words, bonjour. Now, virtually every French course or textbook in the world will tell you that bonjour means “hello” and leave it at that, but Marc, using us as props, convincingly and with great agility demonstrates how it is not quite “hello,” “hi,” “good morning,” “good day,” nor “ahem, I’m here,” although it can be any of those things. Well, what is it? It’s something French people say when they meet someone, and instead of searching for the English equivalent, you should observe how it’s used to understand its meaning.
When I want to say something in French, I think of what I want to say in English and then convert that into French. But such translation, I’d previously been told by David Birdsong, is self-limiting. You must remove the mental middleman of translation, for your brain cannot translate back and forth fast enough to keep up with a conversation. To achieve fluency, you need to speak—and think—like a bilingual, to switch languages, not translate between them. When you see a bird, you must think oiseau, not “bird . . . in French that’s oiseau.” Of course, easier said than done.
Marc’s French is superb and also quite different at times from the French I’ve been learning, far more colloquial. A number of times during the weekend—for example, when I ask a question using the textbook method of reversing the noun and verb to turn a statement (“You have a pen”) into a question (Avez-vous un stylo?)—Marc tells me it’s perfectly correct French . . . but very formal. Nobody in France speaks that way in casual conversation, he says. Instead, simply voice the statement with a rising inflection that implies a question: Vous avez un stylo?
Class moves quickly, and I try to stay with it and not worry about absorbing every little detail, but one particular idiosyncracy brings me, and by extension the class, to a dead stop. Marc writes the following phrase on the board: Plus de gâteau!
“How do we say this?” he asks in French. More cake? Come on, this is easy even for the beginner class down the hall. Anyone with a casual familiarity with French knows that the final consonant of a word is generally silent (except when the next word begins with a vowel). I read the phrase aloud, pronouncing plus with a silent s, so that the word sounds like “ploo,” rhyming with “clue.”
Correct? Well, Marc explains in French, with some terrific body language, that it depends on the situation. If I’m in a restaurant and, like many others that evening, I’ve ordered a slice of cake, the waiter might run into the kitchen and cry, “Plus de gâteau! ” to the chef, pronouncing the s in plus, so that it sounds like “ploose.” But if there is no more cake—the cake is gone, finished, kaput—the chef may respond, “Plus de gâteau! ” Silent s.
“Un moment,” I interrupt. “Ploose” de gâteau means more cake, but “ploo” de gâteau means there’s no more cake? Whether or not you pronounce the s reverses the meaning? It reminds me a bit of the word personne, which can mean either “person” or “no person (no one),” depending on the context.
“Exactement! ” he exclaims.
This is exactement why French is such a pain in the derrière.
Given enough time, Marc says, you’ll pick up the nuances.
And it’s mastering the nuances that make you sound really French. Of course, the odds of my ever sounding really French are pretty close to zero. My pronunciation, Marc tells me kindly, is atrocious. Apparently I have a particular problem with the nasal sounds. French pronunciation relies far more on the nose than English does. The French use the nose almost as a musical instrument. Perhaps this is why satirical drawings of Frenchmen (even by Frenchmen) often feature an exaggerated nose.
A 1958 political caricature of Charles de Gaulle sporting a larger-than-life proboscis (and his actual nose was large enough to begin with) caused enough of an uproar in France to be noted in Time magazine. There are several distinct nasal phonemes in French that come from expelling air through the nose rather than through the mouth. You can experience three of them, giving your sinuses quite a workout, simply by ordering “a good white wine”: un bon vin blanc.
Whenever things get dull, Marc throws up a short, humorous video in French that we discuss as best we can, but the most memorable clip is from the American TV series Reno 911!, that hilarious spoof of the police reality show Cops. Season 1, episode 7, opens with Deputy Trudy Wiegel listening to a French instructional tape, the classic kind of language-phrase tape that used to be popular, in her squad car.
“We have two cats. Nous avons deux chats.”
And Wiegel repeats, “We have two cats.”
“Everybody loves ham. Tout le monde aime le jambon.”
Wiegel repeats, with feeling: “Everybody loves ha-am! ”
And so on, and it’s not until about the third phrase that you realize she’s repeating the English, not the French. Wiegel is subsequently lulled to sleep by the tape (who hasn’t been there?) and is discovered in her garage with both the tape and the engine still running, which results in her being put on a suicide watch, much to her bewilderment.
Suicide may be lurking in all our minds by the time immersion weekend is over. I stumble out of the elevator for the final time and meet Anne, who’d been wandering through museums while I was locked up with French, for lunch at a French restaurant.
I do wonder how much of this intensive French will stick. Short term, there’s no problem. After seating us, the waiter (who is not French) asks if we need anything else. “Non, merci,” I reply reflexively. Anne is tickled, thinking that I’ve arrived, I’m speaking French—mission accomplished. Moi, I know I missed
that non by a nose hair.
I miss the next French word by a mile. The restaurant has a selection of cocktails, all in French. Côté voiture, I see on the menu. What the heck is that? I know that I should know, because voiture is “car,” and I’ve been drilled endlessly on côté. I remember côté is usually preceded by à, as in à côté, but for the life of me I can’t remember the meaning.
“Something car,” I say aloud. “Something car.” But what?
Meanwhile, Anne has abandoned the French and is reading the description: “Cognac, Grand Marnier . . . it’s a sidecar.” Anne may not speak French, but she does know her mixology.**
Over drinks, she casually mentions, “I had a patient with an accent problem last week.”
“Really?” I say, only half listening, still smarting over the sidecar incident.
“She had a small stroke and now speaks with a German accent.”
“Uh-huh.” It’s a fine sidecar, with sugar on the rim.
“She’s not German, has no German relatives, and has never been to Germany.”
I almost drive my côté voiture off the road. “Foreign accent syndrome! Do you have any idea how rare that is?” Anne has had an incredibly unlikely encounter with FAS, a mere hundred cases of which have ever been reported in the literature. The first widely reported instance involved a Norwegian woman whose head was struck with shrapnel during a German air raid in 1941. As bad luck would have it, she emerged from the incident with not just any foreign accent but a strong German accent, which led to her being shunned by her village.
Most cases of FAS are attributed to a mild stroke rather than trauma, but in some cases the cause remains a mystery. In 2011 an American woman woke up from dental surgery with an Irish accent. FAS cases have included language changes from Japanese to Korean, British English to French, American English to British English, and even Spanish to Hungarian. One American woman, born and bred in Indiana, developed such a distinctive British accent after a stroke that it was identified by linguists as a mixture of English Cockney and West Country. Now, she might have seen My Fair Lady a few too many times, but surely she wouldn’t know a West Country accent if she woke up with one. And the same was true not only for Anne’s patient but for most FAS victims, who have not had significant exposure to the accents they were adopting. How, Professor ’iggins, do you explain this?
Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart Page 13