So small and so weird

Several of my prior posts have noted a curious fact about French: for a Western language, it has some peculiar barriers to entry. For example, I wrote recently about how the most common greeting in French contains two sounds not found in English. This is why I always emit a little gargling sound after saying Bonjour.  I have no idea whether I'm fooling anybody with my "bonjouxhhh," but it doesn't get me funny looks, so I count it as progress.

Here's another: two of the most common stock phrases in the language contain certain words whose meaning is very hard to discern. And neither consists of more than two letters. What a poke in the eye!

Suppose you need to tell a French person that there is a bird in his or her hair. You'd say Il y a un oiseau dans votre cheveux. The first part of that, Il y a, is how you say "there is" or "there are." The il means "he" or "it." The single-letter word a means "has," which you learn fairly early in your French career, so its single-letterness is not all that offensive. Important! Here, a is not to be confused with à. À is a preposition that means generally "to" or "at." As far as I can tell, they're pronounced the same.

So far, we have "it has," as in "It has a bird in your hair." What's "it"? Well, it's general, and it's just how you say the phrase. The "it has" in il y a is no more or less arbitrary than English's "There is," Spanish's hay, or German's Es gibt ("it gives").

But what's that y in that phrase? Certainly not "and" as in Spanish. When you ask your French teacher, in the early days of French studies, what y means, he or she will get this funny facial expression and suggest talking about it when you're older, just like your mom and dad did when you asked where babies come from.

Here's a related mystery. When someone says Merci to you, the polite response is Je vous en prie. OK, let's take that one apart. "I you in... um, what?" So you go to the dictionary and find that prie is a form of the verb for "ask" or "request." All right, now we have "I, you, in, ask." If you thought maybe the reason nobody will tell you what y means because it's dirty, your mind is reeling at this point.

Now let me reel you back in. What I've just learned is that y and en (a different en, not the "in" one) are examples of a category of word we don't have in English. They are like prepositions in that they take the place of something previously said, but unlike the garden-variety prepositions, y and en must take the place of entire prepositional phrases.

Y always takes the place of à plus a noun. So, if a French person asked you if you wanted to go to Nîmes  you'd say Oui! Allons à Nîmes! or, more likely, just Oui! Allons-y! By the way, if you go to Nîmes, take some dang Febreeze. The place is a mess.

Similarly, en always takes the place of de plus a noun. The verb prier uses de to indicate the thing being asked for. So the entire stock phrase Je vous en prie, when deconstructed, means something like "I beg that you will do it." But really it means "You're welcome." Never mind how.

I feel so much better now that I know where all these dinky little words come from! Well, there's still one out there that's bugging me. I understand that, in some Slavic languages, z is a word. I can't even get started with that one.

The Un-Cola

Even before I knew any French, I knew le, un, and une. Unfortunately, I was murdering all their pronunciations. In the case of le, this is particularly tragic. French plurals are (usually) so easy! Just say les ("lay") in front of the word that there's more than one of, and yer done! But I picked up this horrible habit of pronouncing le (singular) as "lay", probably because of Pepe le Pew. This bit of self-sabotage may take me years to undo.

Usually, saying un when you mean une, or vice versa, doesn't result in a gaffe or result in the guy at the store handing you the wrong thing. It's just like a neon sign advertising the fact that you are not a native speaker. What's so bad about that, anyway? Maybe I should treat it as a blessing in disguise.

Une is hard to say because it is the characteristic French u sound, one that must be said with one's lips rounded to a preposterous degree. For me, at least, un is hard to say because it sounds so un-French. The u vowel here is very close to the slack-jawed English one. In fact, as a mnemonic, I am now envisioning a hyphen between un and the noun that follows. If, in un verre de vin, I say "un-verre", I get a glass of wine. Not its opposite, whatever that would be (a good question for many of France's 20th-century philosophers).

Cue the Muntz laugh

Here in Montpellier, we just chatted with some German visitors, and we blew their minds by speaking German and French. That's us, baby, shattering global stereotypes of Americans two Helmuts at a time.

Thanks for the Memrise

A friend of mine recently pointed me at Memrise, an online learning system. Hey, if Jonathan Safran Foer, who is extremely cool, likes it, who couldn't? Memrise is part of the burgeoning trend of "gamification," which in general I think is pretty awesome. Imagine a Zynga game that left you with tangible benefits instead of virtual rutabagas. Memrise offers communities, each organized around a domain of knowledge: French, the monarchs of Britain, Pokémon, etc. Community members make up and share mnemonics, preferably cornball ones, for learning nuggets from their domain. Then the system drills users on the mnemonics and gives out rewards for mastering them. The rewards are the social kind: you know, like getting to be Mayor of your local Applebee's. You know, the kind of reward that actually works. The cost-efficiency of social rewards is terrifying, and it's about time somebody tried to harness it for good rather than evil.

The article to which I linked above focuses on Memrise's use for picking up individual vocabulary words. This approach might be super for Lingala, which Foer wanted to learn so that he could hang out with Mbendjele pygmies, and it seems to have worked for him. But it would be terrible as someone's sole approach to French. French, I've discovered, is simply not a language of individual words. It is a language of phrases. For example, suppose you wanted to ask someone where he or she was from. You could, with Memrise's assistance, memorize the French word for "where," then the word for "are," then "you," then "from." So far, so good, right? But you could string those words together in any order you like, and you'd never in a million years get what French people actually say in this circumstance, which is D'où est-ce que vous êtes? 

On the printed page, that looks like a mouthful. But in fact it's only five syllables: "doo esskuuh voo-zett." Furthermore, you have to say it that way. If you said each individual word with a stop and a breath between each, as Foer probably did with his Lingala words when he arrived in the Congo, no French person would understand it.

I now think of spoken French as a language of phrases, not words. I learn a few stock utterances every day, in the market or at my son's school, and use them to string together thoughts. Je crois que... "I think that..." Peut-être... "Maybe..." Ça marche! "That works!"

Anyhow: I spent a little time exploring Memrise's primary French offering (implemented by a staffer), and, to its credit, its information design reflects French's orientation towards phrases. But I'm reluctant to jump in. Suppose I use their wacky mnemonics to memorize a few hundred more nuggets of French. I can see my brain now: those nuggets would be in there, but so would those mnemonics, rattling around like a bunch of loose BBs tossed into a gas tank. Would they actually help me with my main problem (understanding a rapid stream of French when it is spoken to me)? Or would they just be a bunch of virtual rutabagas? Right now I think it'd be the latter. But Memrise is plainly worth watching: their hearts are in the right place.

The progress of no progress

I've lived in France for five months now, and I am not yet Emile Zola. Yes, I am a bit of a perfectionist.

Perfectionism has retarded my language learning all my life, although only recently have I come to understand this. To learn a language requires making mistakes in front of real live speakers of the language: speakers who just might smirk, laugh, or call the police. The chances for humiliation are endless, and the fewer such chances you embrace, the less you'll learn.

My worst experience as a foreign language speaker occurred several years ago in Costa Rica. I was chatting, using my community-college Spanish, with a local man, and I was understanding maybe every third or fourth word he was saying. To cover my noncomprehension, I was keeping a foolish grin on my face. I'd devised this strategy some months before, and I was very proud of it... right up until the instant when it dawned on me that this kind man was telling me that his wife was terminally ill.

The me of many years ago would have thenceforth sworn off speaking languages other than English. But now it occurs to me: whatever faux pas I commit in French are unlikely to be worse than that one. Now I just plow ahead and try; I'm often misunderstood, and we try again. It's a constant battle to remember to say "Répétez, s'il vous plaît?" instead of just smiling and nodding; I would lose this battle more often than I do, but I try to hold in the forefront of my mind how I felt at the instant I heard my Costa Rican friend say cáncer.

I still think my French is terrible and am embarrassed by it every day. And yet, consider what I did this morning before 11 a.m., all in French and without a phrasebook:

• I advised my 4-year-old's teacher at his école maternelle that, yes, he'd peed before coming to school.
• I went to the boulangerie and bought two butter croissants and a loaf of bread (sliced please).
• I phoned a local doctor and made an appointment.
• I took a package to the post office and paid cash for the postage, even though the clerk told me the price orally (the register was on the fritz).
• I went to the town's municipal office (the mairie) and chatted with our local gendarme about a friend's minor immigration problem.

Not one of my interlocutors thought I was Zola, or Parisian, or French, or a non-bumpkin. None of these communications was hitch-free. But all worked, and nobody hit or arrested me, not even the police officer. These successes were based largely on one DVD plus some effort. Maybe there's hope that someday I'll parley-voo.

"Congété"?

I've been meaning to write up congété in my "Lampposts for Drunks" series, but I couldn't figure out what it meant. Finally I figured out that I was mishearing Quand j'etais... ("When I was..."). The ability to narrate past events is a key component of fluency, so now that I can say Quand j'etais un nul... I'm a bit farther down the road.

More lampposts for drunks

In an earlier blog post, I introduced my tacky concept of Lampposts for Drunks: phrases that stick out of a stream of spoken French, allowing one to grab ahold and, with luck, right oneself. Here are some more.

Parce que. This is the conjunction "because," and, to Anglophone ears, it sounds like "Pass kuh." (Strictly speaking, the phlegmy French r occurs before the s sound in there, but it is not prominent.)

Maintenant. "Now." Sometimes it's said with two syllables ("mahnt-nahnt"), and sometimes with three ("mahnt-uh-nahnt"). Nevertheless, distinctive.

D'accord. "OK." Resist the temptation to say D'accord all the time. It is easy, but can get you into trouble.

To continue another theme from earlier in the blog: I love how so many perfectly colloquial French expressions translate literally into rather grandiose English utterances. Parce que is literally "by means of this, that...". Maintenant: the time that one takes or holds (tenant) in one's hand (main). And d'accord means "of agreement." No wonder diplomats used to use French for all international treaties. All you have to do is crack a dictionary, and diplomatic language spills out like chantilly.