Category — French language

I’ve blogged before about Radio France International, and in particular their Apprendre (Learn French) section. I attribute my (albeit very quotidian) fluency almost entirely to this service—or at least to the way in which I make use of it.

It all began a few years ago when I was in the middle of my first longish stint living in Paris, and was bemoaning to an American friend that my French was not improving as much as I had hoped.  My friend told me that when she had first arrived a few years earlier, she had heard of a method (I forget its name) which works by training the ear to better understand French by playing a recording of someone speaking over and over again for several hours per week. So she had dutifully gone to this company, parted with quite a lot of money, put the headphones on, and sat there for a few hours a week. When I asked her what the recording was, she said it was mainly Le Petit Prince.

 Now I love Le Petit Prince, and have ever since I read it in my year 12 French class a million years ago, but I couldn’t see how listening to the same thing over and over would be:  a) very interesting, and b) would not be more efficacious if one listened to a variety of things, changing them every few days perhaps.

 I promptly went to FNAC and bought myself a tiny radio and headphones, and began listening to several of the Paris radio stations. I remember one of them—France Info—simply being news bulletins over and over, which was very good as I began to learn many new words over the course of a few periods of listening. The station France Culture was also interesting, with extended discussions on various topics.

I found that even if I did not understand much of the radio program (which happened for the first few weeks, and even later if I was tired or distracted), by the time I arrived at work and had to use a very mundane level of French for greetings and fairly routine things, I could understand everyone much better. Clearly this was something to do with my ear being ‘trained’ to be more receptive to French.

Back in Australia of course, I could not get access to the French radio stations. This drove me to the Radio France International website, to see what they had in podcast versions, and then I found their Apprendre section which is a treasure-house of learning experiences.  I love the daily Français Facile. This is a 10 minute news podcast, with a transcript so that one can even follow the text while listening. There used to be two Français Faciles each day until M. Sarkozy cut back the funding (the radio staff were on strike for weeks, and the Apprendre section was the hardest hit—a very dark period for me indeed!). But then they came back with one per day, and which I regard as pure gold.

There are several other types of podcast I use regularly from the Apprendre section of RFI, all in MP3 format.

Les mots de l’actualité : This is a short daily segment on a word taken out of the news bulletins and explained, its origins traced, and so on. The presenter, Yvan Amar calls this : une chronique pétillante qui éclaire en deux minutes un mot ou une expression entendue dans l’actualité  (‘a sparkling column which in two minutes throws light on a word or expression from current events’).

Today’s word is le deluge. These podcasts usually lasts 1-3 minutes, and also have a transcript listeners may read.

 My absolute favourite is La Danse des Mots, also presented by Yvan Amar. There are about  3-4 per week of these programs (some are repeats from the last year or so), each lasting about 20 minutes.

 Yvan Amar describes his program thus : Le français sur Internet, l’évolution de l’orthographe, le Camfranglais qu’on parle au Cameroun, et même ailleurs, l’explosion de la littérature francophone tout autour du monde. Des sujets qui montrent bien l’intérêt extrêmement sensible que l’on porte aujourd’hui à nos façons de parler.  S’interroger sur la langue n’est pas seulement une curiosité aiguë : c’est un révélateur du monde où nous vivons. (French on the internet, the evolution of spelling, Camfranglais, which they speak in the Camerouns, and even elsewhere, the explosion of French literaure all around the world : these subjects are well placed to show us the very noticeable interest that there is today in our ways of speaking. To interrogate the subject of language is not only a matter of keen curiosity : it’s revealing of the world in which we live.)

Rather than trying to describe the particular subject matter of this program, I suggest readers check it out themselves by looking at the range of recent programmes in the Danse des Mots archives. Depending on the type of cell phone you use, I think it’s possible to download the podcasts directly, but as my cell phone is rather last-century, I download the MP3s onto my computer and then transfer them with a cord connected to my iPod equivalent.

When I’m out, I always have my iPod with me, and listen while walking to and from work and while walking around during the day (so I clock up about half an hour of listening there), while riding on public transport, and also when I have to wait in doctors’ surgeries, or wait for any other purpose. All this exposure to French, just fitted into the spare moments in my day!

I’m certain all this listening I do is the reason I’m able to avoid my level of French going ‘backwards’ in the 6-9 month periods when I have to be back in Australia. 

When I was diligently poring over the canonical 17th century French novel La Princesse de Clèves last year during my French literature class in Melbourne, the last thing I would have imagined was La Princesse becoming a symbol of resistance to President Sarkozy.

Sarkozy seems to have borne a grudge against La Princesse for quite some time. The first sign of it, according to Liberation, was in February 2006, in a speech the president made in Lyon. He said that he’d been amusing himself by reading the exam papers for entry into public service administrative positions. According to him, either a sadist or an imbecile had put on the program questions on La Princesse de Clèves. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve often had cause to ask a clerk what they think of La Princesse de Clèves. Imagine what a spectacle that would be!’

Now, I’m no expert in French literature, but I have a hunch that La Princesse occupies in France a position a little like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) does in English, although a hundred years earlier. Both authors took their respective fictional traditions and made such innovations to the form, and especially to the rendering of human thought and feelings, that these books represented a distinct shift which gave birth to the form of the modern novel.

And that is probably why La Princesse is staple fare in French secondary schools. I wish I could say the same for Sense and Sensibility in the Anglophone world, but alas it is not so, except for students taking specialized literature subjects.

The topic must have continued to weigh heavily on Sarkozy’s mind, though, as he brought it up again in July last year at a teaching seminar, implying what a waste of time it was to have to devote any time to La Princesse, and telling how he himself had ‘suffered under her’. From the video, it appears he got a few laughs, although that may have been due to the stand-up comic quality of his delivery.

You don’t have to be French to know that to make fun of what a public service clerk may or may not think of a French classic is rather at odds with notions of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

In any case, this performance was one too many for the university lecturers who are already opposing Sarkozy’s efforts to ‘reform’ higher education (read: make it more like Anglophone higher education). On February 16th this year, lecturers and others opposed to Sarkozy staged several marathon public reading of La Princesse, one of which was outside the Pantheon. Readers took turns, one of them being the wonderful young actor Louis Garel, who starred in the 2008 remake of the story, titled La Belle Personne, set in a Parisian lycée (the film having been made in protest at Sarkozy’s dismissive comments).

I had to quit my literature class last year before finishing La Princesse unfortunately, but I shall persevere with her, encouraged by feeling I am—if only vicariously—part of the movement that seems to be gathering momentum in France.

There are even multiple Facebook sites in support of the movement, and the book is reportedly sold out in many bookshops. And according to an article in the UK Guardian on March 31, award-winning French writer Régis Jauffret is expressing his protest by encouraging every French citizen to mail Sarkozy a copy of La Princesse.

As my friend Marc Cogan commented in the previous post, the recent general strike had as its unofficial slogan Sarkozy’s comment, although this time directed back at him, “Casse-toi, pauv’ con” - “Bugger off, you sorry asshole.” Around two-thirds of the marchers were wearing this slogan in some form, and Marc managed to get a photo of one of them, wearing it stuck to her hair.

Statistics I heard on Radio France this week may help to put this in some context: over two million (7.8% of the population) are now unemployed in France, with youth being the hardest-hit demographic. This is much higher than in Australia, where we have over half a million, or 4.8%, unemployed.

I’ve just been listening to Yvan Amar’s Danse des Mots program on Radio France (about which I’ve blogged before), in which he interviewed Afghan/French writer and film maker Atiq Rahimi. Rahimi has just won the Prix Goncourt 2009 for his latest book Syngue Sabour (pierre de patience). Syngue Sabour is Persian - his mother tongue - for ‘stone of patience’. Rahimi took the idea of the ‘stone of patience’ from ‘a folk tale about a black stone that absorbs the distress of anyone who confides in it’, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune.

The Prix Goncourt has been running for 105 years and has been awarded to many great French and non-French writers. Among the former group are Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Marcel Proust.

The most fascinating part of the interview, for me, was when Rahimi talked about writing in French, his second language. He said that writing in French was liberating, but also imposed certain obligations. For example, he has to concentrate on each word, and also on the rhythm and sound of the words. He has to write and re-write, to check each word in the dictionary. In this way, it was like poetry, he said, because in poetry you must work on each word, each phrase, each comma. You have to be both precise and concise with each phrase, each image.

If you’d like to listen to or download the interview yourself, you’ll find it here.

I’m not in favour of beauty contests, but since no one seems to have managed to stop them, I will say that I think the new Miss France, Chloe Mortaud, is beautiful (am I the only one who thinks it ridiculous that it’s not Mademoiselle France?). There has been, however, a certain amount of ‘backbiting’ that would seem to be an inevitable part of such competitions (I do hope Aussie slang is understandable to my non-Aussie readers! If it’s not, please leave comments below).

To counter the gossip, Le Poste has interviewed Mademoiselle Mortaud, to give her the right to respond to the nastiness. Certainly not the most in-depth article of the week in the French media, I know, but one which gave me the opportunity to learn a few new phrases. At least I hope I have learned them correctly. Idiomatic expressions in a foreign language can be very difficult to get right. Please do correct me if I am wrong, using the comments section below.

First, there is the title of the article:

Miss France: “Je n’ai été méchante avec personne” = I’m not nasty to anyone.

Méchant/e = nasty, mean, bad, spiteful

Huer = to boo or jeer

Mettre en avant = to advance something, e.g. an argument

le côté = direction, way

metisse = mixed race

ringard = literally ‘fire iron’, so this sentence — ‘Certains attribuent un petit côté ringard à Miss France…‘ quite likely means : Certain people assign/impute a troubling side to Miss France [the contest]…