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.

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.

The bloom is off the Rosetta

I owe everybody a post in which I compare various language learning programs such as Fluenz and Rosetta Stone. This isn't that post. Instead, my jumping-off point is the historical Rosetta Stone itself.

I suspect most folks reading this are familiar with the story. Napoleon's troops in Egypt found a stone inscribed with the same text three ways: in ancient Greek (known), in Egyptian hieroglyphics (not known), and in an alternate Egyptian script (known). The parallel text gave researchers their first toehold into the decipherment of hieroglyphics, thus paving the way for many Scooby Doo mysteries.

I've been wondering recently: just how parallel were those supposedly parallel texts, anyway? Here in Europe, where multilingual texts are everywhere, it seems fiendishly difficult to say the same thing in different languages. For example, here near the Mont Blanc tunnel, a major European truck thoroughfare, signs in French, German, Italian, and English are all over the highways. We often drive a very steep grade where signs in each language advise truckers to use a low gear-- except for the German sign, which says instead Gehen Sie zurück! "Go back!" Fortunately, one does not see jackknifed German trucks littering the valleys, probably because all the truckers these days are Polish or Slovenian anyway.

Either Gehen Sie zurück here is an error or else a German motoring term I am not familiar with. But you find plenty of instances where texts differ in ways that seem intriguingly intentional. Our family spent last weekend in a hotel in Italy, in which placards gave emergency instructions in Spanish, French, German, Italian, English, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. I'm not competent to say anything useful about the last three languages, but the first four advised guests to remain calm in precisely the grammatical spot where English speakers were directed to "keep quiet!"

Do Italians think Anglophones are loud? Louder than, say, the klaxons? I daresay the words for "quiet" and "calm" in various languages fill out a kind of cloud of meaning, and the translator happened to select an English word from one of the outer precincts of the cloud. But it is still very easy, and a lot of fun, to see the specter of linguistico-cultural nationalism.

I have never found a purer example of non-parallel parallel texts than a lowly placard I once saw in a U.S.-based airliner lavatory. The English said, as it always does, "Please use your towel to wipe the basin for the next passenger." There was a French "translation" below, but even with my then much weaker French I could readily see that it was not the same text at all. It read "The washbasin is a shared resource. A simple coup of the towel keeps it presentable for everyone."

This took my breath away (to be fair, the condition of the lavatory made that easy). The French translator could have provided a word-for-word translation of the English; but this anonymous philosophe determined that, in place of the English speakers' appeal to be nice to a randomly selected fellow passenger, Francophones were more likely to be moved by an invocation of civic virtue.

What are we missing between the lines of that Rosetta Stone, anyway? There must be something hiding in there, some epochal secret, probably about ancient Greeks' personal grooming.

Clocked again!

The second most disconcerting thing that happens to me regularly here in France: I'll say Bonjour to a stranger, and he or she will immediately reply in English. How do they know? It's not as if I am wearing sweatpants and a University of Illinois baseball cap.

After I spent several weeks befuddled, somebody finally clued me in. Diabolically, French loads into its most routine and commonplace greeting not one but two sounds that don't occur in English. It is a perfect shibboleth. There's the nasal o in bon, of course, and then there's the French r, which is less a consonant than a phlegm-clearing maneuver. Each of these sounds takes a lot of practice. The o, in particular, benefits from practice in front of a mirror. Whenever I think I am rounding my lips enough, I am not.

(An aside: It feels invasive to have to use my lips this much in speaking. Dang it, I've got boundaries!)

The #1 most disconcerting thing is, of course, when strangers address me in English even before I've opened my mouth. Yikes. I really do try hard to avoid giving out blatant clues that I am American: when in public, I don't wear shorts, chew gum, or display firearms. Maybe I should start smoking.

How many is "ont"?

Every language has a fleet of small sub-languages. Examples: how you count, the names of days of the week and months of the year, how you name relatives, and so on. Counting is especially important, because everybody loves buying stuff, and that means a trip to the marché.

French markets often feature extremely elaborate motorized stalls that fold themselves up hydraulically and turn themselves into a truck, ready to head to tomorrow's market in some nearby town; these often have digital cash registers, a boon for monolingual tourists. But at simpler stalls, it's up to you to understand prices quoted orally. I'm not a big fan of endless flashcard drills, but for numbers I make an exception. When there are ten people in line behind you, rapidly comprehending six euros quarante-neuf centimes is a good skill to have.

My French language CD-ROM (about which more in a future post) made a clever point: the terms for 30, 40, 50, and 60 all end in a "t" sound, which makes them distinctive. Actually, I learned that the hard way. The first few times I heard something like cinquante neuf euros, I heard it as cinq ont neuf euros. How many is "ont"? Is that... eight?  Wait, eight is huit. Is "ont" some kind of wacky "dozen"-like quantity word?  Auuugh!

That last idea is not too far-fetched. In most Francophone countries, the way you say eighty is literally "four twenties": quatre-vingts.  To continue the lunacy, ninety-two is literally "eighty-twelve"... which, recursively, is "four-twenties-twelve": quatre-vingt-douze. Because eighteen is "ten-eight," ninety-eight is quatre-vingt-dix-huit. I am sure French did not devise this to kick the legs out from under my confidence, but it worked for a while.

I don't mean to suggest I've mastered French numbers yet, but I don't try to count up to "ont" any more.

Eight fun facts about France

1. O fellow Americans: Orangina, it turns out, is terrible. In France, Schweppes sells an orange drink called Agrum' (the apostrophe is part of the name) that is way orangier and way yummier. Oddly enough, you must ask for the drink by its complete name: Schweppes Agrum'. If you just ask for "agrum", the nice person behind the counter may ask you to confirm that Schweppes Agrum' is what you want, even if cans are sitting right there. The "u" has an "ooo" sound.
2. In English, correcting another adult's spoken English means "Shut up." On the other hand, when you start speaking French, almost every interaction with French people will involve them correcting you. Are they doing that because they want you to shut up? Unlikely; if they wanted you to shut up, they'd just ignore you. Instead, they've probably concluded, based on the fact that you are trying to speak French, that you want to speak French. Lunacy, eh? These corrections are offered in a positive spirit, and if one can hear them that way, they are gold.
3. Being in a country with a national problem of dog owners not picking up their dogs' poop really adjusts your feelings about the old "five-second rule."
4. Although France has a vast history of Catholicism, today it is officially a secular republic. But there are still peculiar protrusions of the faith into France 2012: the official France weather website will tell you, for example, which saint's feast day it is. I am writing this on St. Firmin's day, for example. He converted 3,000 people to Christianity and then was beheaded. Um, also, partly cloudy, rain in the afternoon.
5. One odd adjustment Americans must make abroad: coins. Sure, the United States has coins too, but mostly they are nuisances, except for quarters on laundry day. In France and other Eurozone countries (and Canada, the U.K., and Switzerland too), coins are real money, and people expect you to spend them. If you always proffer 20-euro bills at stores, people will look at you funny (once a guy at a wurst stand in Germany glared at me and said "Ich bin keine Bank"). You'll also wind up with a small fortune in the coffee can on your dresser.
6. I'm told France is McDonald's second biggest market worldwide. Is this because French people's appreciation of fine food is overrated? Or is McDonald's somehow haute-ier in France? No and no. I am not sure why "MacDo" is so big here, but I have one theory. Almost all French restaurants have a rather rigid daily schedule: for example, a restaurant may be open all afternoon, but all you'll be able to get until mid-evening will be coffee, ice cream, and crêpes. If, for some reason, your circadian rhythm happens to be off-kilter today with respect to the rest of the country, MacDo is there for you.
7. Chopsticks are called "baguettes."
8. Speaking of baguettes: an iconic scene of France is someone bicycling down a road with a baguette in the bike-basket. Once we Americans wrap our heads around the idea of someone having gone out for a purchase and not brought it home in a car, we have one question: "Why isn't that bread in a plastic bag? Isn't it going to go stale?" So, as an experiment, I put a baguette in a plastic bag.
   
   Normally, a just-bought baguette has a delicious crispy crust and a distinctive interior, neither too moist nor too dry. (That's why people buy them daily.) But my plastic bag distributed the bread's moisture evenly throughout the loaf. Now the crust was squishy, the interior was gummy, and the whole thing was unappealing. It seems that Monsieur le Boulanger has a few tricks up his sleeve. So I'll be going back tomorrow for another baguette.
   
   No, the first one was not free.

Remembrance of things

When you travel to France, you'll see signs like this everywhere. What does RAPPEL mean? Obviously, "slow down," right? Ummm...

It doesn't mean "straighten me up" either

After seeing RAPPEL for the thousandth time, I finally looked it up. It means "reminder" or "recall." Aha! Appeler means to call (as in Je m'appelle Brian, "I call myself Brian"), so rappel is literally "re-call." How elegant. And it brings us to an interesting point. In France, one of the responsibilities of a driver is to know, by heart, a table of the standard speed limits on various types of roads. That means, in turn, that a driver has no excuse for not knowing what the speed limit on a given road is. The word RAPPEL on a sign means "You should already know this; this sign does not indicate a departure from the previous regime." How admirably tough-minded.

There is a right way

Neal Stephenson has said that French culture possesses "an admirable stiff-neckedness that gave us the Jacobites, the metric system, the force de frappe, Airbus, and Arrêt signs in Quebec." Having spent several months in France now, I think that this observation goes too far. Hanging out in France is not like being penned up in some kind of sadistic etiquette school. People are perfectly willing to go with the flow, particularly in service of a reasonable objective. This is why waiters are so patient with my attempts at French, other than just being nice human beings: I have a credit card.

Why did French feel the need to coin a French word for e-mail, for instance? Were they just being stiff-necked? I thought maybe the latter, until I discovered that the word émail is already in use in French. It means "enamel." Hence the need for courriel.