Flirting With French (13 page)

The chief limitation with the Google approach is that it is all done on their server farms, requiring an Internet connection. IBM has taken a different approach. “We envision that speech translation is something that you carry with you all the time,” Bowen Zhou says to me as we sit in his IBM lab. “Think of where you are when you’re doing speech translation. You are often in a foreign country, far away from home, maybe in the middle of nowhere. You may have no Internet connection, or if you do, it may be expensive. He pulls an off-the-shelf smartphone out of his pocket and places it in airplane mode, disabling its cellular and wi-fi connections. “This is my everyday phone,” the Chinese-born Zhou says, “with our program loaded on it.” Then he presses the volume-up button and says something in Chinese. A moment later I hear a natural-sounding male voice say, “I enjoyed my stay in Tokyo and I
really
like this meeting,” putting emphasis on “really,” while the words appear on the screen
.

Zhou hands me the phone, and I ask for a coffee, which he confirms is correctly translated into Chinese, and then he says something in Chinese in return, and we have a brief conversation, not perfect, but not bad, with the smartphone as intermediary. Although I never do get the coffee.

The speech recognition is impressive as well and improves with use as it learns your voice. Harkening back to my days as a computer programmer, I wonder aloud, “How on earth did you squeeze all of this onto a smartphone?”

“It comes with a compromise,” Zhou says, explaining that they have intentionally limited the vocabulary and scope in order to do a limited thing well, instead of trying to do everything for everyone. The software, which was first deployed in Iraq under a Defense Department contract, is strong on military and infrastructure language, but weak on, say, sports.

Zhou encourages me to challenge the device, so I say, “Time flies when you’re having fun.” This isn’t quite as cheeky as it may seem; I chose the phrase “time flies” because, surprisingly, my French pen pal, Sylvie, with her limited command of English, had used it in a recent note. The software recognizes my English correctly but doesn’t know the idiom. Zhou says the Chinese it returned is too literal a translation, as if time had wings, but is otherwise correct and understandable to a Chinese speaker. Undeterred, I give it the acid test. “Fruit flies like spoiled peaches.” He shakes his head. It translated it as fruit flying through the air. Apparently it hasn’t been trained in entomology, either.

For comparison, I later speak both sentences into Google Translate on my smartphone. It also has trouble with fruit flies, spitting back something about fruit flies being like peaches that have been spoiled (as in, treated too well).

But my fruit-fly example was a trick question, and I feel a little bad. Almost forgetting I’m talking to a device, I sympathetically say to Zhou’s phone, “Learning a language is hard,” unintentionally throwing another curveball, as it interprets “hard” not as “difficult” but as the opposite of soft.

“If you look at where we are today,” Zhou says, “machine translation is a glass with half water,” inadvertently illustrating one of the challenges of machine translation and the twenty-five thousand English idioms to be learned. “In only twenty years, we’ve come a long ways.” Just how do they fill up that glass of water? “The key here is using context,” Zhou says, “looking at words beyond the sentence boundaries”—to know, for example, whether the sentence before “language is hard” was “Gypsum is soft” or “I’m studying French.”

Another tack IBM is taking with translation goes in a different direction entirely. They want to make the computer more interactive, to introduce a dialogue assistant (will they call it HAL?) that will say, “I don’t understand which sense of ‘hard’ you intend. Please explain.” Zhou sees the computer as a third, interactive party in the translation process.

I ask Zhou, as I did earlier with Jeff Chin at Google, how many years we are from the kind of machine speech-to-speech translation that realizes the science fiction dream, that will allow people like me to live in Paris or Prague without years of study, followed perhaps by days of embarrassment and misunderstanding. Unsurprisingly, neither will commit, but I recently learned about a demonstration at Georgetown University in which Russian was machine-translated into English. The results were so remarkable that front-page coverage in the
New York Times
and other prominent newspapers and magazines included predictions from linguists that within five years the problem of machine language translation would be solved.

The date of the
Times
article was January 8, 1954. I was nine months old.

Bah, Ouais!

It’s great you can come here soon bill, me and my fiancé will be very happy to meet you in Paris :) I thought if it is possible to go for a walk in Paris, or doing shopping together :) if you want or what would you like to do in Paris? there is a lot of possibilities down there.

—E-mail from Sylvie

Katie and I are both packing for trips, and it’s hard to tell who’s more stressed out. “I’m going to Ghana in a week and I don’t speak a word of Twi!” she says.

“Yeah, well, I’m going to France in two weeks and I barely speak any French.”

“That’s not true, Dad. You’ve learned a lot of French since the last time I was home. Besides, you’re going to France to
study
French. And if you think French is hard, you ought to try Twi.”

Katie is preparing for a semester abroad in Ghana. Although English is the official language, Twi is the country’s most widely spoken language, and since Katie will be living with a family near Accra while attending classes at the university, she feels it’s the polite thing to be able to speak to her hosts (and others) in their vernacular language.

“It’s a tonal language.”

“What does that mean?”

She demonstrates, her voice rising up and down like she’s singing. “There are three tones, high, low, and medium, which are part of the pronunciation. A word that has one meaning in a low tone might have an entirely different meaning when said in a high tone.” She sings again.

That
does
sound harder than French.

“What’s your name in Twi?” I ask.

Katie looks at me like I’m crazy and makes a face. “Ummm, Katie?”

“
Moi, je suis Guy.
”

“
Bonjour, Papa Guy.
”

The name had been bestowed upon me a few days earlier at the latest gathering of my French Meetup group, this one at a member’s house in celebration of the group’s two-year anniversary. It was a pleasant but staid affair. Staid, that is, until Pierre, an advanced speaker whom I’d never met, strode in, filling the room with his
joie de vivre
. A large man with tousled hair who tossed down
vin rouge
at a Gallic pace, he looked at my name tag, which read “Bill,” and said, “
Ah, Guillaume!
” the French version of “William.”

But Guillaume was too formal for him. “
Quel est le
‘nickname’
pour Guillaume?
” he’d asked the room.

“Guy,” someone offered. Of course! As in Guy de Maupassant (pronounced “ghee”). As Pierre refilled both my wineglass and his, he’d told me, in French (this was an immersion party, of course), that I was in fact not Bill, but Guy. I needed to
be
French if I was going to
learn
French. “I’m a musician, a natural performer,” he said. “It’s easy for me. But you can do it, too.” His words echoed the advice of Catherine, my French Skype pal, who’d lectured me on the
plaisir
of being French. I thought also of Marc, the New School immersion teacher who put this theory into practice so convincingly I was sure he was French.

A few days later, with Katie fretting over Twi, and me over French, I have a chance to trot out Guy when Katie’s college roommate Chloé, a French exchange student, stops by for a brief visit. “
Je m’appelle Guy,
” I say, shaking hands, before continuing with the typical French greeting.

“Ç
a va?
”

“Ç
a va.
Ç
a va?
”

“Ç
a va.
”

This may sound to the uninitiated like we’re just repeating the same two words over and over, like a stuck record, but in fact we’ve had quite the chat.

“How are you?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“Pretty well.”

With a lexicon a third the size of ours, the French have learned to be efficient with language; thus you can Ç
a va
your way quite far into a conversation knowing only two words of French, and two-letter words at that! The downside is that the French person to whom you’re speaking can get lulled into a false sense of your fluency, as is the case with Chloé, who responds with something that sounds like
Merghiporxlhusxlahdogrationmcskeksé
.

This has the effect of peeling off my Guy mask, revealing William-who-doesn’t-speak-French. William humbly asks for a translation.

“I love your kitchen. I feel like I am in France! The colors, the . . . how you say . . . copper pots, the pottery,
la musique
.
C’est très français.
”

Well, I got that part right, at least, even if I still can’t pronounce
rouge.
Over dinner, I tell Chloé of my woes in learning French, figuring she’ll be more sympathetic than Katie. Word stress is not distinctive in French, I point out; the syllables within individual words are pronounced with near-equal emphasis, making them more difficult to pick up. For example, in English we say “in-
tel
-li-gent,” with a clear stress on the second syllable, a cue that helps the nonnative listener recognize the word. In French, it’s pronounced “
ahn-tel-le-gent,
” with a monotone pronunciation, giving near-equal emphasis to all four syllables before going on to the next monotone word, which may well be connected with a liaison. Generally, if any syllable is stressed, it’s the final one, but even then only lightly.

Chloé is, of course, unaware of this. She’s also baffled that I find the French numbering system difficult. “Eighty,” I say, “is
quatre-vingts
—four twenties! It’s multiplication!”

“But we don’t think of it that way. It’s just
quatre-vingts,
just a word you learn
.
”

Oh.

I should’ve known better than to complain to a Frenchwoman about the French language. “You want to talk about numbers,” Chloé says in her charmingly accented English, becoming animated. “English is much worse. You have these strange . . . measurements! I never know what is zee temperature here! Why do you go from thirty-two to . . . what is it, two hundred twenty?”

“Two hundred twelve.”

“For us, you see, water freezes at zey-ro and boils at one hundred. It’s easy!” She slaps her hand on the table.

No argument there. But she’s not done. “And I cannot cook here! Cups, ounces, pints, and tablespoons, and . . . what is zee other one?”

“Teaspoon.”

“Teaspoon! What eez a teaspoon?”

“A third of a tablespoon,” I say sheepishly, as if I’m somehow responsible.

Her eyes grow large. “A
thir
d
! . . . How do you . . . you . . . remember all this . . . these . . . things?”

“Well,
you
must have to remember something.”

“Milliliters.”

Silence. That’s all.

“How’s the wine?” I ask, hoping she’ll say it goes down like the baby Jesus in velvet underpants, but she just says, “Very nice.”

“It’s Californian.”

“Your wine is not bad here.”

“So you like America.”

“
Bah, ouais!
” she responds, pronouncing
ouais
, roughly the French “yeah,” as “way.”

“
Bah, ouais? Qu’est-ce que c’est?
” I ask.

Katie jumps in. “It’s sort of like a hipster version of ‘Well, duh!’ Baaaaah, way!”

Hipster French? I must try that out in France.

I had misinterpreted Chloé’s distaste for the imperial measurement system as distaste for of America, but nothing could be further from the truth. “What do you like about America?”

“The people are more open, more friendly here. And there are more opportunities. I want to come back here to live after I finish school.”

No way, I tell her. I can’t wait to get to France, and she can’t wait to get out!

“What do you like about France?” she asks.

I rhapsodize about the food, the physical beauty of the countryside, the quality of the light in Paris, the culture, especially the films, the fact that the French value their heritage and architecture, while we, in the name of progress, tear down gems like New York’s old Pennsylvania Station.

She takes it all in, smiles, and replies slowly, so I can understand, “
L’herbe est toujours plus verte de l’autre côté.
”

She either said the grass is always greener on the other side or asked for a sidecar.

Botte
Camp

He can speak French in Russian.

—Dos Equis commercial featuring the Most Interesting Man in the World

I lean over and whisper, “
J’ai un petit problème,
” which, you may remember from my Gallic bicycling adventure, is loosely translated as, “I’m back in France.” This time,
sans
Anne and bicycle, for this trip is all business—the business of learning French. After a year of escalating study, progressing from self-study software and podcasts to social networking to a weekend class, I’ve come for what I hope will be the
coup de grâce—
two intense weeks at Millefeuille Provence, a total-immersion (
bain linguistique,
or “linguistic bath”) language school in southern France.

Upon my arrival two days earlier, I’d proved that one can in fact drown in a bath. I’d been met by a young man named Philippe, who’d given me my room keys, including a huge key of the old-fashioned kind that you’d more expect to find opening a cell at the Bastille than admitting you to a French-language school in Provence.

The bedroom and front door keys I’d understood, but when Philippe had tried to explain what this large one was for in slow, simple French, all I could do was apologetically say, “
Désolé, je ne comprends pas.
” Over and over. He’d tried a couple of different approaches and then finally said something that sounded like “eff-euh.”

“
Eff-euh?
” I repeated. “
Qu’est-ce que c’est, eff-euh?
”

“
She-mee? Vous connaissez she-mee? Eff-euh.
”

She-mee, she-mee, she-mee. I had that word in Rosetta Stone, damn it! What was
she-mee
?

“
She-mee? Comme physique, mathématiques. Chimie
.”

Oh, chemistry! “
Ah, oui! Chimie!
”

“
Oui!
”

“
Oui.
”

All this
oui
-ing was
oui
-derful, but what in the name of Napoleon’s ghost was the key for? The chemistry lab? Finally, out of desperation, he grabbed a scrap of paper and wrote down the mysterious “eff-euh.”

The letters “Fe.” The symbol for iron, as written in the periodic table of elements. The Frenchman who didn’t speak English and the American who didn’t speak French had found a universal language, the language of chemistry, to untwist our tied tongues. And more importantly for me, to unlock the iron gate to the school grounds. The gate, a heavy, Louis XVI – era model, had caught my attention on the way in, especially when it clanked shut—locked—behind me, making me jump. I didn’t see a sign overhead that read,
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE,
although the school’s strict rule is “Abandon all languages but French, ye who enter here.”

Millefeuille Provence accepts a maximum of eighteen students at any given time, to keep class sizes to no more than four, but I am lucky. This first week we are an intimate group of nine, and my classes will vary from two to three.

Over dinner I meet most of the other students, about half of whom, like me, have just arrived. The other half are about to begin their second and final week. The gang of nine includes James, an affable, young British financial consultant; a Czech banker and his wife, who are relocating to Paris for his job; a British energy consultant who has been living in Paris for three years; an Indian doctor working in disaster relief; and a Swedish woman whose name I’ll never remember, and even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to pronounce it, so I’ll end up just calling her (but not to her face) Inger Stevens, after the sixties actress best known for the television series
Th
e Farmer’s Daughter.
This Inger is a classic Swede, a tall blond who, come September, will be Sweden’s deputy ambassador to France.

These students are all learning French for business reasons. The final two members of our group, coincidentally both from Manhattan, are here for pleasure. Karen is a sweet, street-smart retiree in her seventies; the other student, a BlackBerry-addicted, iPad-addled attorney whose job is looking after her husband’s high-tech patents, which, I will learn, is a euphemism for suing everyone in sight. (Thus in the interest of staying out of court, I’ll not give even her first name. Or her hair color.)

When my turn comes to introduce myself to the group, I say, “
Je m’appelle Guy,
” determined to live as my French alter ego for the next two weeks, to leave the timid, language-hesitant, self-conscious, all-American Bill behind, no matter how challenging that is.

My choice of Millefeuille was a careful one. There are scores of language schools in France, but the majority of them are geared toward language vacations: a few hours of class in the morning to feel virtuous, and then you hit the beach and the shops. Well, there is no beach within a hundred miles of this highly regarded school, which caters to governments, businesses, and NGOs, and fewer shops—in fact nothing to distract you from the work at hand. What the neighborhood does have is lots of grapes, with vineyards in every direction as far as the eye can see. Millefeuille, which shares its space with an active winery, is in the heart of the Côtes du Rhône appellation (which means we’ll be drinking good wine with dinner every evening). I hang out in the garden with the other students for a bit, then retreat to my room in the eighteenth-century château, and am awakened in the middle of the night by a short arrhythmia. Unfortunately, Guy has come to France with Bill’s heart, which, after two surgeries and a half million bucks, is still keeping worse time than the antique clock in the hallway.

I’m sure it’s nothing, and I’d had a few of these at home, always while lying down, but I don’t appreciate that my
cœur
feels it necessary to remind me that I’m four thousand miles away from Anne, home, and my other home—NYU Langone Medical Center. Anne would’ve preferred I skip this trip, but knew better than to try to dissuade me from something I’m determined to do. While I turned down her backup plan—accompanying me—as unnecessarily protective and expensive, I did gratefully accept her backup of her backup plan, the quickest itinerary from Provence to NYU, which I have tucked safely in my wallet, with phone numbers.

ON MONDAY MORNING, AFTER
a typical French breakfast of croissants, bread, and yogurt, we new students undergo written and oral evaluations, after which the groups are made up for the coming week. I’ve done well on the written portion, but not surprisingly for someone who’s learned a language mainly via self-study, my oral skills are weaker. At ten thirty everyone gathers in the salon for a coffee break. It’s a break from class but not from French, for me a difficult half hour of trying to make small talk in French while scanning the front pages of
Le Monde
and
Le Figaro
for news of home. The only encouraging thing is that I’m far from the only one who cannot pronounce the name of the school; even the advanced students have trouble, making me wonder if “Millefeuille” (as in the pastry—it means “thousand sheets”) was chosen for its humbling unpronounceability. Near the end of the half hour, the diversion of watching one of the instructors trying to pry this word from the mouths of Czechs, Swedes, Brits, and Americans comes to a sudden halt when someone cries, “
La liste est affichée!
” and the salon empties as quickly as if she’d yelled, “
Feu!
”

La liste
is a color-coded chart with cards indicating each student’s grouping and schedule for the coming week. As everyone else rushes over to see, I follow tentatively. This has a real déjà vu feeling, and not in a good way, and after the buzz subsides I casually wander over to the list, hoping I made varsity. I am paired with James and Alyana, the wife of the Czech banker.

During our first class together, we are required to speak a few words about ourselves, in French, it goes without saying, and I learn that James has a good reason for being here. His employer, a prominent British financial firm, has offered to send him to INSEAD, the prestigious business school in Fontainebleau, to get his MBA, all expenses paid plus a stipend to live on. But there’s a catch: even though classes are taught in English, the entrance exam he must pass next week is in French. He has the highest stakes, yet remarkably, is the most relaxed and laid back of us all. “It’s an easy exam,” he says (all the conversation in this chapter, whether related in English or French, is spoken in French).

Perhaps, but in
Frenc
h
! I almost blurt aloud.

Soon after, we break for lunch. Because Millefeuille is essentially in the middle of nowhere, all meals are provided during the week, the quality varying from the sublime (Provençal fish soup) to the, well, surprising (eggplant with turkey—yes, the French eat turkey after they tire of duck breast and foie gras). We are always joined by one of the instructors at lunch, as meals do double duty as yet more immersion.

Students dribble in, food appears, but no one lifts a fork until the instructor wishes us
bon appétit,
the French equivalent of saying grace. One thing I’ve noticed about the French: they are always wishing you a
bon
something. When you enter a shop you are greeted with
bonjour;
when you leave it,
bonne journée
(have a nice day). In the afternoon, you may be wished a
bon après-midi
or its more loquacious cousin,
passez un bon après-midi.
Late in the afternoon, come some magical time that only the French know,
bonjour
becomes
bonsoir
when you come and
bonne soirée
when you go. In between, at dinner, you may be wished
bon appétit
before you eat and
bonne continuation
during. At the end of the meal, the waiter might wish you a
bonne fin de repas
or even (and this one is a little too clinical for my taste) a
bonne fin de digestion.

Then there’s
bon courage.
This is often shortened to just “
Courage
!
” with which we’re already familiar. I’m always a little thrown when I hear French people parting with this greeting, especially when it’s directed at me. This is the most difficult one of these
bon
phrases to translate, for, depending on the situation, it can mean anything from “have a nice day no matter what may come” to an ominous “good luck,” sometimes with a nuance of “good luck, pal—you’re going to need it!” I suspect in my case it’s usually the last, and I do need it. At the table I’m asked to introduce myself again.

“
Je m’appelle Bill,
” I say, greatly confusing the students to whom I’d previously introduced myself as Guy. But after the morning’s classes I’ve realized that the teachers know me as “Bill,” the binder they’ve handed me is labeled “Bill,” no other students have taken a French name (because we’re not—
bah, oua
i
s
!—in junior high school), and I feel silly about the whole Guy thing. It’s going to be a grueling two weeks, and Guy’s not going to be able to get me out of this fix by swinging down from a chandelier with a sword in one hand and a glass of
vin rouge
in the other, so I dismiss him.

In some ways these casual lunchtime and coffee-break encounters with the other students are more difficult than the classes, because we all speak French at different levels. Plus, the Slavs speak French with a Slavic accent, the Germans with a German accent, and so on. If you think it’s difficult to understand French, try understanding French spoken with a strong Slavic accent. Only Inger speaks what sounds to me like polished French. In fact, her French is so good I wonder why she’s here. (I’m told later that her ambassadorial position in Paris requires that her French be more than “so good.”)

There are five instructors at the school, all skilled, up to the challenges of teaching a foreign language
in that language.
This demands that you be a bit of an actor as well as a teacher, and the instructors can be quite entertaining as they mime words. But the material and the schedule are demanding. Feeling as though it must be near the end of the day, I sneak a peek at my watch to see that it’s only three o’clock, meaning that I still have
two
more classes to go.

When five thirty finally arrives, I’m a basket case. Fortunately, the school has a beautiful pool, so I grab my goggles and start swimming with a vengeance, trying to clear my head, needing to wash away the stress of my first day of language boot camp. Other students come and go until after lap
soixante-dix
I peek my head above water to see that I’m alone, save for one of the instructors, who’d been backstroking alongside my crawl. As she rinses off under the poolside shower, I remove my goggles, quickly check my pulse, and then attempt to compliment her on her lovely backstroke.

“
Vous avez une belle . . .
” Uh, I don’t know the word, so I mime a backstroke.

She completes the sentence:
derrière
something?

Oh, my goodness, no! I wasn’t admiring your buttocks!

She must see the panic in my eyes, for she repeats the words more slowly, though I never do really get them. Then she makes some swimmer’s small talk. One thing I have to say about Millefeuille: Every interaction with a student is viewed as a teaching moment. Even when you pass the chambermaid in the hallway, she doesn’t just say
bonjour,
she stops what she’s doing to converse with you: Where are you from? Are you staying here for the weekend? It clearly is part of their job, and a nice touch.

On the subject of chambermaids, back in New York a hotel chambermaid has accused one Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and presumed next president of France, of rape. Strauss-Kahn, who claims the sex was consensual, missed escaping the long arm of American law—it does not extend as far as France, which has no extradition treaty with the United States—by only a few minutes, having been hauled off a plane as it sat on the tarmac at JFK.

France is abuzz over
l’affaire DSK
and the indelicate handling of Strauss-Kahn by the New York courts, who have slapped this man of privilege and wealth into a cell on Rikers Island. This front-page news allows our resident lawyer, given her extensive experience with the American court system, to relish the role of expert witness, while providing the rest of us, teachers and students alike, with something to talk about during breaks. The something, however, will turn out to be the virtues of
Saint DSK
(whose rape charge has
elevated
his standing in France) and the unfairness of the American judicial system.