Category — French language

I often feel an affinity with the French language, and some words in particular make perfect sense to me, are more natural to me than English words. Take, for example, the verb “parler”, which is “to speak”. “I speak” is “je parle”. Of course I parle. You parles, we parlons, they parlent. There’s more onomatopoeic sense than in “I speak”. But then I hear some words that completely confound me even after I find out their translation. Words that seem absurd, such as “pétoncles”, which is “scallops”. Why on earth is there a word like “pétoncle”? And then there’s the ungainly “soutien-gorge” for bra.

I suppose this ridiculous, almost-anger-type reaction must be an expression of culture shock. It’s surprising what you can be bothered by, even after almost five months. For example, the other day in the supermarket I was shopping for salad, and had in mind a crisp, simple iceberg lettuce. Alas, iceberg lettuces are difficult to get in France, at least in winter. The French have incredible lettuces, actually, lettuces of all different shades that open up into a large, sprawling flower-type-things and that are delicious. But as I realised there were no icebergs, I gazed upon the bed of massive, sprawling, weirdly-coloured lettuces as if they were triffids. At my supermarket, they’ve got a machine that sprays a fine mist over the lettuces to keep them fresh, but to me, in my state of disgust, it seemed as if the lettuces were mutant animal-vegetables that required constant feeding by osmosis. One of the ways in which I’ve gotten over this horror is by discovering the most delicious salad in the world: mâche. It comes in tiny little florets, is dark green, and has a sweet and nutty flavour. It doesn’t exist in Australia, but it’s incredible, much tastier than the iceberg, and I eat it every day. It’s like praline chocolate disguised as a leaf.

A bit more on words: I’ve been having a wonderful time discovering and practising French expletives, such as “merde”, “enculé”, and the therapeutically onomatopoeic “putain” (you have to spit out the “p” and you let the “ain”, without pronouncing the “n”, extend in proportion with your annoyance or shock). And, if you’re really annoyed, you say “putain bordel de merde” (basically, whorehouse of excrement). It’s interesting that the two most common expressions of disgust or annoyance – “putain” and “bordel”, (“quel bordel” signifying “what a mess!” “what a disaster!”) —refer to, respectively, women prostitutes and brothels. Perhaps this reflects a historic taboo that encompasses sex, paid-sex, and perhaps a certain misogyny, that isn’t so apparent in Australia. Our primarily expletive – fuck – has sexual connotations but it is by no means gendered or indicative of particular modes of sex. On the other hand, I highly doubt that the common Anglophone derogatory expression “that’s so gay” would have a translation in French. Oh, but of course, Australia also has the dreadful “c**t”, which is much worse than “putain”, using, as it does, the vagina as a most offensive insult.

Despite the prevalence with which swear words, or “gros mots” are used, France is an incredibly polite society. Not saying “Bonjour” or “bonsoir” to the shopkeeper when you enter their realm, or to the other inhabitants of your apartment building when you see them, is considered rude. Of course, I’m speaking in particular here about the south of France. The politeness of Southern France is, I believe, well demonstrated by the case of drunken and lecherous men who approach you at night when you’re walking home. Whilst in Australia you can expect to hear a slurred “Hey, wanna root?” or “nice tits”, I’ve had one drunken and amorous man slur “You’re so beautiful” and another ask “Would you like to have a coffee with me?”. The intent is the same, but the expression is so different that it almost makes the experience a delight, if not amusing.

And, speaking of well-wishes, the French are delightfully exact with this pleasantry. Of course there’s “have a nice day”, used very often, but there’s also “have a nice start of the week”, “have a nice end of the week”, “have a nice end of the day” and “have a nice end of the month”. This might reflect a heightened awareness of temporal specificity, or perhaps it’s just a cute convention.

Another lovely thing here is that inviting someone, or being invited, to dinner becomes a real event, even if it happens on a Monday night. Any half-decent host will provide five courses: apero (basically, fancy nibbles), entrée, main course, cheese course (at least three types), and desert. And it’s customary for invitees to bring the host a bouquet of flowers, and / or chocolates and of course wine. But while guests show their gratitude with gifts, verbal expressions of appreciation of the food tend not to be as exuberant or extensive as they are in Australia, or at least this has been the case in my experience.

One especially great thing about living in a foreign-language speaking country is that, at least for a little while, it’s impossible to pick up on verbal cues that indicate social status. You have to work so hard just to figure out exactly what the other person has said that it’s impossible to read that person’s speech for signs of, for example, class, (non-)hipness, or (sub-)cultural affiliation.  And, to a lesser extent, the same applies to the visual codes of clothing. Because you simply have no idea, you’re freed from making those inevitable and often involuntary judgements about people based on subtle social codes, and you can simply take them for exactly what they say and do, they become simply human (the downside of this, however, is that sometimes it’s difficult to pick up on cues that tell you whether someone is a little weird, a little off, whether you should avoid them. These cues, too, can be very culturally relative.) Sadly, this ability to not judge slowly disappears as you learn the cultural currency.

And I imagine that it goes both ways, to some extent: it’s the markers of “foreigner” and “Australian” that will dominate people’s reading of you, at least for a little while, and which will completely obscure other kinds of pigeonholing, such as, for example, “elitist academic type” or “un-ironic, mainstream, reality-tv-loving type”. It’s a bit like an erasure of the social identity that you’ve built in your home country, and this is aided by the fact that sometimes (especially at the beginning, when you’re struggling with the language), you simply cannot expressive yourself as you otherwise would. Sometimes this is challenging and very destabilising (we work hard for our cultural identities), but it’s also massively freeing.

(Australian guest-blogger Romana Byrne has lived in France since late August 2011)

One day last month I noticed a poster in the Metro with this intriguing title: Le mec de la tombe d’à cote.  On closer inspection, I saw that it was an advertisement for a play,  so when I returned to my apartment  I searched on TickeTac to find the dates and some details. It was playing at a small theatre in the 3rd. I bought tickets for myself and a friend, and then went in search of the book. My French is not yet quite reliable enough to allow me to follow a play with full comprehension, so I always try to read the text first. I’d just done this with Dis-leurs que la verite est belle, which had given me nearly 95% comprehension when I attended the play, although fabulous acting and crystalline enuncation from the actors had played a role in that too.

But I couldn’t find a copy of the play about the graveyard mec, and was told by my local bookshop L’arbre à lettres that it only existed in the form of a novel, originally Swedish by Katerina Mazetti,  translated into French by Lena Grumbach and Catherine Marcus, and only recently adapted into a stage play. The book (pictured above) looked as intriguing as the poster for the play, so I bought that and tried to read as much as I could in the two days left until the evening of the play.

Although it is a comedy of sorts, it also contains some important truths about relationships, especially when two people are from different worlds–in this case two different occupational worlds. A newly-widowed city librarian meets a farmer from the depths of the country in a city cemetery (the farmer’s mother has recently died). That’s as much of the plot as I’m prepared to give away at the moment. The play telescoped all of the action beautifully, and the half-dozen characters in the novel were pared down to the two protagonists, who were seamlessly converted into French characters complete with French names. The acting was perfect (in fact all of the acting I have seen in the French theatre has been perfect–from Fanny Ardent and Patrick Chesnais in various productions, through to all of the relative unknowns). The only downside for me was that for the sake of verisimilitude the character of the farmer had to speak in a rural and slightly uncouth accent which marred my understanding somewhat (when oh when does one get to the stage of fluency in a foreign language that enables one to understand bad enunciation and thick accents? Maybe never, as I’m not very good at that in English either).

After the play, which my friend A-M and I enjoyed enormously, I put the book aside, and have only just had the time to take it up again. What a delight it is to return to it, to discover the twists and turns of the relationship, but now with the pictures of the two characters in my mind–she so thin and pale and refined, and Jean the farmer so honest and straightforward, with thick black curly hair and stubble, his check shirts and overalls.

The insights I am discovering, about connecting the self with the other, are gently humbling.

The book can be bought from Amazon France for a good deal less than I paid for it, and they ship to Australia for a reasonable rate.

My niece and I have spent the afternoon talking about ways to improve her French. She learned French up to year 12 level so has all the basics in place, but although she lives in the UK she doesn’t get over to France very often to practise. So I showed her the Radio France Apprendre page with its Francais Facile news bulletins. I’ve blogged about this before. Radio France produces a new bulletin each day, and whether I’m in Australia or elsewhere, I download the mp3, onto my computer. Then each week, I transfer the new half-dozen or so bulletins onto my iPhone, and delete those from the previous week. It’s great for listening to while walking to work, doing the housework, or whatever.

Another good method for revising French is via the ever-increasing range of audio-books, although these do need to be sampled first to make sure they are the right level for the learner. We found some great ones on Audible Books http://www.audible.co.uk/ called Alexa Polidoro’s Bitesize French lessons. There are a range of levels and we found one to suit my niece, discussing the 200-year anniversary of Frederic Chopin.

A French learning tool that I find indispensable is the Larousse English-French Dictionary I’ve bought for my iPhone. There are a number of dictionaries on the market, but this one gives a wide range of meanings of each word, plus a pronunciation guide (using the International Phonetic Alphabet—one of the most useful things I have ever learned!).

As well as a dictionary, if one doesn’t know any French at all, the Earworms Rapid French for beginners is ideal (available from audible.co.uk), focussing on basic phrases and lots of repetition. When you get to France, if you can say, ‘Je voudrais un café, s’il vous plait’ (the first phrase taught by the audio-book), you’ll find the waiters who speak even a little English will meet you at least halfway.

But the main thing that every first-time visitor to France needs to learn is to say ‘Bonjour Madame/Monsieur’ as soon as one enters a shop. It is the responsibility of each customer to say this first, because we are entering their domain, and it shows politeness and respect. The only exception would be a very busy shop, with the salespeople all engaged in dealing with customers.

Similarly, if asking passers-by for assistance, while you may start with, ‘Excusez-moi madame/monsieur,’ this should be quickly followed with ‘Bonjour’, and then by ‘Parlez-vous anglais?’ unless you feel up to asking for the actual street you are seeking, in which case you could say something like: ‘Les Champs Elysees sont ou?’

I’m hoping my niece will write a review of the Alexa Polidora lessons, so I can share it here. In the meantime, here are some other useful-looking links I’ve found…

Useful links:

Article on distinguishing between masculine and feminine nouns in French

http://learning-french.suite101.com/article.cfm/how-to-distinguish-between-masculine-and-feminine-nouns-in-french

Suggestions on how to learn French:

http://learning-french.suite101.com/article.cfm/suggestions-on-how-to-learn-french-and-some-sites-to-help

Podcast language courses:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewGenre?id=1469

Michael Thomas French language learning Audio books:

http://www.audible.co.uk/aduk/site/audibleSearch/searchResults.jsp?N=2100&Np=-37443&Ns=P_Total_Sold|1&BV_UseBVCookie=Yes&ms=1320

French flashcards app:

http://itunes.apple.com/app/gengo-flashcards-french/id305969342?mt=8

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.