Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart Read online

  She sighs, and I feel the air deflating from me. “The difficulty you’re going to have is you will essentially find no materials out there.”

  There are a number of self-instruction products available, I point out, not mentioning by name a certain yellow box that has been sitting on my desk, unopened, for three months.

  “Yes, but you see, for reasons that make a lot of sense, they have to go on the behaviorist approach, what they call communicative language teaching. Every one of them markets themselves like that. ‘We teach communication, and you will hear native speakers, situations in which you will learn how to function.’ ”

  That actually doesn’t sound so bad to me, and Byrnes acknowledges, “There’s a lot to be said for that, for that will in fact enable you to do those sorts of things. By the same token, for us as an academic program, that kind of approach actually creates its own flat feeling because you come to see language and language learning in this purely instrumental way.”

  I’ve heard enough presenters here to realize that they all consider learning a language from computer software comparable to learning the guitar from Guitar Hero, a bias you might expect from academics. Thus I take Byrnes’s warning with a grain of postgraduate salt and instead focus on the positive as she rushes off to attend the next session. I am not a deficit learner. I don’t feel foolish when I screw up. I am a confident adult, and most of all, I know who I am.

  Don’t I?

  First-Person Shooter

  Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.

  —LILY TOMLIN

  I make my way silently through thick undergrowth, part the vegetation, and spy my target: a young couple camping in the woods, alone. Or so they think. I edge closer. They hear a rustle and, surprised, look up at the intruder. My heart quickens.

  “Bonjour! ” I say into my microphone. “Je m’appelle Bill.”

  “Bonjour! ” they reply on the next slide.

  Welcome to Rosetta Stone, the world’s most popular language-learning software, whose ubiquitous yellow boxes are a familiar sight in airports, shopping mall kiosks, bookstores, and 2 a.m. infomercials. The reward for reaching the end of each unit, for having endured hours of dreary four-panel screens of very un-French photographs (all their language courses, from Farsi to French, use the same set of photos), is a slide-show vignette that thrusts you into situations where you “engage” with the characters in the story. The idea is a noble one; after all, this is why you’re learning a foreign language—to interact with people—and to drive home the point, Rosetta Stone shoots all these photographs from your perspective.

  Unfortunately the resulting effect is less “you are there” than “first-person-shooter video game.”

  This initial vignette is utterly creepy. Are the Rosetta Stone developers unaware that they are closely mimicking a scene from every teenage slasher movie ever made? It’s just bizarre. Continuing the stalker theme, the next vignette casts me as a young man picking up an attractive woman on a bus. Seriously. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it resumes where the Rosetta Stone ads leave off, their message being that language class is really just a huge singles bar, which is how, at the end of unit 3, I find myself at a we-are-the-world party full of beautiful people of so many ethnic persuasions it rivals the famous Star Wars cantina scene. Of course, I don’t know a soul and—worst of all—can’t make any conversation because (and I grant that this is a backhanded compliment to Rosetta Stone) the first-person-shooter realism of this uncomfortable scene has locked out every word of French I’ve learned!

  This is absolutely confidence-shredding, and as I stand there, my hand extended for a greeting with the charming hostess while she waits for me to say my lines, all I can think of is that this is exactly what’s going to happen when I go to France in just a few weeks, that I will forget everything under pressure, and stammer and sweat and make a complete ass of myself. What are they expecting me to say here? Give me a clue!

  Clues are few and far between. Because this is an immersion course, with no English explanations or translations, I sometimes find myself spending as much time trying to figure out what they want as learning French. Right now, it’s taking me so long to come up with something that a message pops up asking if the microphone is working. Okay, okay! I try to focus on the dialogue, my sweaty virtual hand still extended in the camera frame while the woman, a smile frozen on her face, patiently waits for me to say something and consummate the greeting.

  Just then, Anne walks in and sees the screen.

  “Am I interrupting something?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “I was just looking at the itinerary. Are we allowing enough time to catch the train to Normandy?”

  Being a physician who needs to keep upwards of twenty appointments a day, my wife is, shall we say, attuned to scheduling, whereas I am attuned to efficiency, meaning I’m averse to waiting. “Pas de problème,” I say. “La . . . la gare est . . . est”—below, how do you say “below”? I had this a few weeks ago, “above” and “below,” which are maddeningly similar, but that was, well, a few weeks ago. The hell with it. “Not to worry. The train station’s right below the airport.”

  The question Anne ought to be asking is, have I learned enough in just three months of self-study to see us through ten days of biking in the French countryside, a trip we’d planned a year ago. I shouldn’t have let Rosetta Stone gather dust on my desk all spring. It’s been just . . . I don’t know . . . hard . . . to begin. Before tackling French I wanted to acquire some cultural insight into the people who speak the language—I guess you could call it Georgetown’s gestalt approach without the language part—so I set for myself a course prerequisite: La Belle France, Alistair Horne’s history of the country, which runs a whopping five hundred pages, although it feels not a page over a thousand. Then I tackled an excellent book on the history of the French language, got inexplicably waylaid with research into the actual Rosetta Stone,* and spent weeks investigating (and buying) other language software, which also sits unopened but will be ready when I am. And of course there was the SLRF conference, the planning beforehand and the recuperation afterward.

  It was, all in all, far more entertaining and less stressful thinking about learning French than actually learning French. And honestly, there seemed to be no rush. The Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department estimates that an English-speaking adult can achieve “basic fluency” in French with 480 hours of study. I’ve done the math: If I continue studying 2 hours a day, six days a week, I’ll be “basically fluent” in a mere ten months. Or less. Having had a few years of French in high school, I have a bit of a head start. In fact, just before cracking open Rosetta Stone, I’d taken an online college-placement exam to see where I stand, and while I didn’t do well enough for entrance into first-year college French, I missed by only a horse (cheval )—I mean, a hair (cheveu). A mistake anyone could make.

  The results from another test, however, are far less reassuring. Georgetown linguist Heidi Byrnes had cautioned me against swallowing the “cultural trope” that we baby boomers don’t have the memory to learn a language. Well, I thought, let’s put that one to bed. So I took a computerized cognitive-assessment evaluation recommended by a colleague. I should’ve let sleeping dogs lie, for my memory score placed me in the lowest 10 percent of my age group. Put another way, 90 out of 100 fifty-seven-year-olds have better memory skills than I do. Baby boomer? I’m a baby bust! And this doesn’t bode well for learning a new language, since what is language, after all, if not the ability to recall words and assemble them into meaningful structures?

  Speaking of structures, another bright idea of mine wedged me inside one that I’m not looking forward to revisiting. Inspired by the fact that I work in a psychiatric research institute, I thought it might be interesting to take functional MRI (f MRI) images of my brain while listening to French before I started studying the language and again after I’d learned it, six or ten o
r however many months from now, to see whether there was any indication, on a neurological level, of language acquisition, particularly in the areas of the brain associated with language. I’d feared I might be laughed out of the building when I approached the director of the institute’s imaging center with my armchair science, but Dave Guilfoyle, who holds a PhD in physics, thought the experiment interesting enough to indulge me, scheduling time in the unit when it was idle and developing a protocol to detect the effect of French on my brain.

  I can tell you right now the effect that merely being inside the f MRI scanner had on my brain: claustrophobia. I found myself fighting to remain calm inside the coffin-size tunnel of the machine, the pow! pow! pow! of the electromagnetic pulses so surprisingly loud that I felt like I was inside a jackhammer. Unable to move my arms, lift my head, or scratch my nose, my head encased in something resembling a high-tech football helmet, my right hand clutching the panic button, I took a couple of deep breaths as the first recording started playing through the headphones. Guilfoyle’s protocol consisted of several short clips of, in turn, English, French, and Japanese, with brief resting intervals in between, in order to give us three composite brain images to compare later: my brain while listening to my native language, to the language I would be studying, and to a language that is and would remain totally foreign to me—and let’s hope there’s only one of those.

  Which brings us back to Rosetta Stone Français, the first of several language-learning strategies I plan to employ. Having finally unwrapped the yellow box, I’ve been playing a fairly good catch-up game, running through it at more than twice the recommended pace of thirty minutes a day, then listening to the accompanying CD during my commute to work, followed by a French instructional podcast that I take along on my lunchtime walk—a solid two to three hours a day of French. Yet here I am, speechless at the door of my hostess as the program, baffled by my silence, again asks if my microphone is working. What on earth does it want me to say to this woman? How do I gain admission to this party?

  Anne, satisfied with the travel arrangements to Normandy, heads out of the room, pausing at the door just long enough to look back over her shoulder and say breezily, “Try bonsoir.”

  And she doesn’t even speak French.

  * The upshot: Inscribed in 196 BC, this famous stone, which, as we all learned in school, “unlocked the secrets of hieroglyphics,” is not a prayer to the gods or soaring verse, but the utterly mundane decree of a tax exemption (in three languages) for the temples, demonstrating that then, as now, nothing wins votes like a tax cut.

  William the Tourist Meets William the Conqueror

  A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

  —Yiddish linguist MAX WEINREICH

  Surely le conducteur sees us running with our suitcases across the empty platform and will hold the doors another five seconds. Juste cinq secondes! But the doors slide closed just as I reach them, Anne trailing a few feet behind. After all, this is France, where keeping the trains on time is an obsession on a par with cheese.

  But I’m from New York, where catching the subway is an obsession on a par with bagels, and with instincts honed from years of boarding the Broadway express, I reflexively (and recklessly, considering I’m on the eve of a ten-day bicycle trip) jam my knee into the rapidly closing gap. The doors hesitate, then briefly bounce open just long enough for Anne to slip in under my outstretched arm. Thankfully, improbably, we are aboard, sighing, then giggling with relief, until our fun is spoiled by le conducteur.

  “Billets? ” he requests. In the mad dash to the train, we’ve had to neglect one slight detail: tickets. Which is why the first words I say on French soil, before I can even catch my breath, are “J’ai une petite problème,” a bad omen. And even worse French. Problème is a masculine noun, despite the fact that it ends in what is to my mind a feminine-looking e, so I have un problème, not une problème, and one that is petit, not petite, because the adjective must agree in gender as well, so I’ve gotten three of out my first four French words wrong.

  All of this is moot because I should’ve avoided that phrase entirely. In trying to minimize this teensy problem of holding no tickets, I’ve done the converse, for this sentence means the opposite of its literal words. In French, saying there is un petit problème means there is un grand problème. To put this into an American context, picture your bookie approaching you in a dark underground parking garage in Hoboken with the greeting, “Hey, buddy, we got a little problem here,” and you get the idea.

  Safe to say, not a good start to speaking French in France. But it gets worse. With what little French I have learned thus far in three months of study, I feel just barely prepared to order a simple dinner or check into a hotel—not, however, to explain to a conductor that I’ve already paid for the tickets online with a credit card but did not have the time to pick them up at the kiosk because our flight was two hours late and it took forever to get the baggage and we just barely made the train and, yes, I should’ve listened to Anne, who warned me the connection was too tight. I do remember the word for “late,” so I say en retard a lot, but even though Rosetta Stone has drilled me ad nauseam on trains, buses, and planes, for the life of me I can’t remember the words for “flight,” “plane,” “run,” or “I’ll give you a ten spot to make this problem go away,” and even if I could, putting these words together into anything that resembles a narrative is far beyond my ability. So in the end I have to buy a second pair of tickets, but Anne and I are just relieved to be on the train and heading to what promises to be six glorious days of early autumn biking in Normandy and Brittany, followed by four more in Provence.

  It’s coincidental but apropos that we’ve chosen Normandy as our first destination in France, for it’s the Normans we have to thank (although I doubt the English would use that word) for the fact that even before tackling French I already knew a number of French words, in addition to petit and problème. How much of our vocabulary is shared with French? To get an idea, take a stroll through an English garden (jardin), where you may find a fleur in bloom, perhaps an insecte perché atop a rose, enjoying the soft pétales. Attention! Some of these plantes might be dangereuses, while others are quite délicieuses.

  A quarter to a third of all English words come from French, and good thing; otherwise, learning this language would be even harder than it is. Which brings us to the question, how did this similarity between the French and English come to be?

  THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE is largely the history of invasions and migrations, and this is certainly true in the case of French and English. The first known outsiders to inhabit ancient Gaul (approximately modern France plus Belgium, a slice of Germany, and northern Italy) were the Greeks, who began arriving on the French Riviera, the Côte d’Azur, by sea during the first millennium BC. Recognizing the potential for film festivals, topless beaches, and casinos, they established trading posts along the Mediterranean, bringing their language and their culture, and founding Marseille, the first city in France, in 600 BC. Being a seafaring people, they didn’t stray too far from the coast, keeping their distance from the Celts, who began to appear in northern and central France in the fifth century BC, and who get credit for founding Paris. The Celts continued expanding southward, however, bringing their language (Celtic) and culture, and a clash with the Greeks seemed inevitable until a far more powerful and threatening enemy appeared from the east: the Roman Empire.

  The overmatched Celts, whom the Romans referred to as Gauls, fought the good fight for 150 years, and it took no less than Julius Caesar to finally subjugate them around 50 BC. It is estimated that over a million people—one out of every five Gauls—were killed by the time Caesar declared, “All of Gaul is divided into three parts.” Caesar made that statement in Latin, naturally, and as Roman magistrates, engineers, and other Latin speakers spread throughout the Roman province of Gaul, the conquered quickly adopted the conquerors’ language. Latin was suddenly a prerequisite to getting ahead in life, w
hether you wanted the bread contract for a company of Roman soldiers or a job building an aqueduct. This was not the formal Latin of the orators, by the way, but common street Latin, known as Vulgar Latin, the Latin spoken by soldiers, merchants, and commoners. The French adoption of Latin is but one chapter in a story repeated again and again throughout history: the conquered learning the language of the conqueror (or sometimes vice versa), although it’s likely that neither party really thought of their languages as different. Since there were no grammar texts or classes, the differences would have been seen simply as regional peculiarities, and languages often became mixed.

  By AD 400 the Celtic tongue had vanished from Gaul altogether, but not without contributing its own unique flavor to Latin, which evolved into a dialect we call Gallo-Roman. A similar process was under way in the other reaches of the Roman Empire, producing, in addition to French, the Romance languages (so named because they are the languages brought by Rome)—Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan, to name the major ones.

  In France, Gallo-Roman continued to evolve as new invaders arrived, each group bringing a vocabulary indicative of its culture. The Vikings, or Norsemen (who became the Normans), contributed words related chiefly to naval affairs, while the migrating German tribes contributed over five hundred Teutonic words associated with the feudal system and hunting. Invaders, whether Vandals, Goths, Normans, Saxons, or Franks, tended to restrict themselves to distinct geographic regions, thereby creating their own versions of Gallo-Roman wherever they put down roots. Of these groups, the Franks, a loose collection of Germanic tribes originating on the east bank of the Rhône, played the largest role in the development of both France and French, contributing not only the first king of France, Clovis, but 10 percent of the words that survive today in modern French and the very name of the language itself: français.