My Franco File: On Not Learning But Possibly Learning French

I have always assumed I could never learn a new language–what with the  F in junior high German and the mercy D in Ancient Greek in college.  In Montreal,  as E pronounced her French with a Parisian ease, I pronounced “Merci” like "Mersey" or maybe "Manganese."  The waiters spoke English to me immediately and stopped just short of asking me what part of Texas I was from.

But Montreal worked its quasi-European charms. Standing in Renaud Bray,  the predominantly Francophone bookstore, I felt with a special intensity the pressure and the possibility of the unread.

Then at dinner one night, we talked about how cool it would be to find some pretext to spend a year in the city and how we envied the students at McGill.  Of course, I assumed E would perfect her French and I would just rely on the kindness of English-speaking Montreal. But E pointed out that, no, I underestimated myself: I would learn French and I would learn it the way I learned English.

At about age three, my mouth struck a local sidewalk at great speed and my enunciation has never recovered. Phonics was torture as I hissed and mumbled and slurred my way through my own damn language.  But through sports magazines and junior encyclopedias I  learned the mute English of the page, the screen, the radio, and the Big Chief tablet.  I valued writing not as self-expression or even other-expression but as a calm, forgiving, energizing space in which I could finally master (sort of) what had always been fumble and frustration.  I learned English bumpily, but I learned it.

Even the idea of going through this again feels painful–waiters would wince, ticket takers would glare–but if the result would be a second language, the language of Montaigne and Rimbaud and Collette and Sartre,  in its untranslatable percussions and nuances, it would be worth a season in heck. If that year in Montreal ever materializes, we will seize it.

Comments

[keith]

I liked that post, mon petit chou.

I also think you effortlessly verbalize things the way I think them and that is a skill I would love to have.

The more I read of your stuff, the more impressed I am!

[K]

Thanks, Keith. BTW my answer in Montreal should have been very very north Texas. Winona.