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).

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.

"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.

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.

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.

Hey! You're a star!

In this post, I 'fess up that two people have been playing an outsize role in my consciousness of late, because they have come to serve as very important mnemonics for me.

The first is my friend Jae, who has babysat my son in Seattle. His name is pronounced the same as Jay, and I use his name to help me remember how to say j'ai properly. It is critical to do so because je means just plain "I", and j'y is a ghastly creature all its own (I'll write about it in the future).  These three commonplace utterances differ in sound only in the vowel. So I am grateful for all the help Jae can give me. Thanks, man!

The other important person: former San Francisco mayor, and current California lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom. I have a terrible problem with saying my s's as z's, for example, in the phrase nous sommes, "we are." Back in his mayoral days, he could be spotted at upscale San Francisco bars, seated alone, hard at work with a drink and the city's business spread out in front of him. This may be the most un-French evening behavior possible, so it makes him an even better mnemonic.

Jae, on the other hand, would never do that.

Parenting, the Game of Inches

Our four-year-old may finally be acclimating to France and French. He just asked me for a Nutella sandweeeech.

Lubricated in L'Hexagon

Any mnemonic in a storm, right? Mnemonics tend to occur to me when I am messing up. I was in a gas station a few weeks ago, trying to communicate that I was at pump number twelve... except I suddenly couldn't remember how to say twelve. Eventually, I wound up just pointing at the silver Citroën, at which point the clerk said "Ah! Douze!"

Yes, it's like "dozen." But the mnemonic that occurred to me at the time was that it's pronounced to rhyme with "booze." That, in turn, reminded me of how the French word for bottle, bouteille, is pronounced: "boo-TAY". Ha ha. I was tempted to give you a YouTube link there, to help you remember boo-TAY, but I would like to keep this blog wholly safe for work.