When in French (15 page)

“Pope Francis!” Jorge says.

Claudia and I exchange a look.

“Or the Internet?” she ventures.

Claudia and Jorge begin debating the events of 1994–2014 in a sort of unfollowable Sprench. I remember that I hate working in groups. Technically, we're all speaking French, but each national faction mangles the language uniquely, as though we're a bunch of convalescents, each with a different injury, trying to partner up for a ballroom dance. The paradox of foreign language classes is that they isolate you with perfect precision from the population of which you're attempting to become a part. A French class is, by definition, the one place where you're never going to find a person who speaks French.

Eventually I jump in.

“Definitely the Internet.”

Jorge really wants to talk about the pope.

“Corruption is everywhere in Argentina,” he says, in English. “But Francis is a good man.”

“D'accord,” I say, giving up.

Dominique clears her throat and asks which group would like to share its conclusions. No one volunteers.

“Spring,” she says, gazing at snowdrifts melting on the eaves outside. “Emotionally, it's not always easy.”

She decides that we'll go around the room.

“What personalities have made the biggest contribution to the world?”

“Mandela, Obama, and Jobs.”

“What food product have you discovered for the first time in the past twenty years?”

“Foie gras, sushi, and goji berries.”

Before dismissing class, Dominique suggests that, as a learning aid, we paper our apartments with Post-it Notes, each listing the French name of the object on which it's stuck.

“Be creative!” she says.

Before the end of the term, she announces, we'll each be expected to give an oral presentation.

“It's a test, yes, but also a psychological experience.”

 • • • 

D
ESPITE ITS PRETENSIONS TO CLARITY,
French can be trying.
Vert
(green),
verre
(glass),
ver
(worm),
vers
(toward), and
vair
(squirrel fur) constitute a quintuple homonym, not even counting
verts
,
verres
, and
vers
(you don't pronounce the final
s
in French). Folklorists have argued for decades over whether Cinderella's
pantoufle en verre
might have come about as a mishearing, on Charles Perrault's part, of
pantoufle en vair
. The subjunctive is a wish. Gender's a bitch.
Le poêle
: a stove.
La poêle
: a frying pan. A man's shirt,
une chemise
, is feminine, but a woman's shirt,
un chemisier
, is masculine. Imagine everyone you've ever met looking exactly alike, and then, four decades
into your acquaintanceship, having to go back and try to figure out who's a man and who's a woman. And then, to make matters more complicated, some of the men are women and some of the women are men.

French isn't actually exceptionally difficult. In fact, it is becoming ever easier, as large languages are wont to do: one linguist found that every verb created since 1950 uses the regular -
er
ending, making it easy to figure out that the past participle of
zlataner
—to dominate, like the football player Zlatan Ibrahimović—is
zlatané
. The Malian language Supyire has five genders (humans, big things, small things, groups, liquids), while the Australian language Ngan'gityemerri has fifteen (males, females, groups, animals, vegetables, body parts, canines, trees, liquids, fire, strikers, digging sticks, woomeras, two different types of spears).

It is a truism of linguistics that every language is equally complex. This is true in that every language is complex—“When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam,” the linguist Edward Sapir wrote in 1921—and in that no language is any harder or easier for a native speaker to acquire. The !Xóõ language of Botswana has a hundred and twenty-five consonants (including seventy-eight clicks), but no !Xóõ-speaking child grows up thinking that !Xóõ is too hard to learn. For non-native speakers, though, some languages clearly present more of a challenge than others. Which ones those are depends on the language with which you begin. A colleague who grew up speaking Mandarin moved to America when she was eight. She recalls feeling exasperated in her middle-school French class: “Most of the vocabulary sounded similar, and as someone who had just struggled to adjust to English, I couldn't believe that French wasn't regarded as just another dialect of
English.” For her, English was a vexing thing to speak aloud. As Charles Ollier pointed out,
fish
might well be spelled
ghoti
(
gh
as in
tough
,
o
as in
women
,
ti
as in
mention
). Recently, the Facebook page of the European Commission's interpreters featured a post entitled “This is why we love (and hate) the English language!” It included a poem called “The Chaos,” by the late Dutch anglophile Gerard Nolst Trenité:

Dearest creature in creation,

Study English pronunciation.

I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.

I will keep you, Suzy, busy,

Make your head with heat grow dizzy.

Tear in eye, your dress will tear.

So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,

Make my dress look new, dear, sew it!

The poem went on for 104 more lines.

Linguists have attempted to make an objective assessment of the relative difficulty of languages by breaking them down into parts. One factor is the level of inflection, or the amount of information that a language carries on a single word. The languages of large, literate societies have larger vocabularies. One might think that their structures are also more elaborate, but the opposite is true: the simpler the society, the more baroque its morphology. In Archi, a language spoken in the village of Archib in southern Dagestan, a single verb—taking into account prefixes and suffixes and other modifications—can occur in 1,502,839 different forms. This makes sense if you
think about it. Because large societies have frequent interaction with outsiders, their languages undergo simplification. Members of relatively homogeneous groups, on the other hand, share a base of common knowledge, enabling them to pile on declensions without confusing each other. Small languages stay spiky. But, amid waves of contact, large languages lose their sharp edges, becoming beveled as pieces of glass.

Another way to try to rate the difficulty of languages is to consider their unusual features: putting the verb before the subject in a sentence, for example, or not having a question particle. Coders analyzed 1,694 languages for twenty-one semantic quirks to create the Language Weirdness Index, anointing Chalcatongo Mixtec—a verb-initial tonal language spoken by six thousand people in Oaxaca—the world's hardest language. The most straightforward was Hindi, with only a single unusual feature, predicative possession. English came in thirty-third, making it a third as weird as German, but seven times weirder than Purépecha.

According to the US State Department, French is among the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn. It requires an estimated six hundred hours of instruction, versus eleven hundred for Pashto or Xhosa and twenty-two hundred for Arabic or Mandarin. Thanks to the Normans, who invaded England in the eleventh century, somewhere between a quarter and half of the basic English vocabulary comes from French. Modern-day English speakers, in fact, are able to read Old French more easily than their French counterparts, due to the persistence of forms of words that have disappeared from the latter language:
acointance
,
plege
. An English speaker who has never set foot in a bistro already knows an estimated fifteen thousand words of French.

The challenge, I'm finding, is figuring out which ones. Is
challenge
, for example, something else entirely in French, or just a matter of Coopering out a “shal-longe”? Certainly a native English speaker has an easier time in French than one of Mandarin, but the availability of cognates can lull him into a false sense of security, a tendency to imagine he's making himself clear when he's not. He doesn't know what he doesn't know. His misplaced confidence throws his interlocutor, who might take more care with someone he recognized to be blatantly out of his depth. As much as I felt for my colleague, having to conjure French out of nothing, I envied her the purity of the blank slate.

French is not a hospitable environment in which to try your luck. The thing that's tough about French is the thing that's exemplary about French, which is that French speakers across the board are language nuts. Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow write, “Debates about grammar rules and acceptable vocabulary are part of the intellectual landscape and a regular topic of small talk among francophones of all classes and origins—a bit like movies in Anglo-American culture.”

American politicians play golf or sing in barbershop quartets; French statesmen—who cultivate a sort of spiritual innumeracy in contrast to the spiritual illiteracy of their American counterparts—moonlight as men of letters. (Charles de Gaulle was famous for resurrecting obscure bits of vocabulary.) It took Olivier three weeks and a working group of twice as many relatives to settle on the French text of our wedding invitation, which read, in its entirety, “Together with our families, we request the pleasure of your company at a wedding lunch.” The ideas of excellence and failure are so intimately linked in French that what passes for a compliment is to say that someone has
un français châtié
—a well-punished French.
Olivier has fond memories of watching the grammarian Bernard Pivot, a national celebrity, administer the
Dicos d'or
, a live televised tournament—the Super Bowl of orthography—in which contestants vied to transcribe most flawlessly a dictated text.

Pivot's competition was inspired by the
dictée
de
Mérimée, a moment in French history to which you will find no English analogue. On a rainy day in 1857 at Fontainebleau, the royal country estate, Empress Eugénie asked the author Prosper Mérimée to concoct an entertainment. Mérimée gathered the party. He handed out pens and paper, instructing the guests to jot down the composition he was about to read: “Pour parler sans ambiguïté, ce dîner à Sainte-Adresse, près du Havre, malgré les effluves embaumés de la mer, malgré les vins de très bons crus, les cuisseaux de veau et les cuissots de chevreuil prodigués par l'amphitryon, fut un vrai guêpier,” he began, declaiming three more paragraphs.

The guests handed in their papers, and Mérimée tallied the results. Over the course of 169 words, Napoleon III made 75 mistakes, Eugénie 62, and Alexandre Dumas, 24. The winner of the game was Prince Metternich of Austria, with 3 faults. Dumas, auto-chastising, turned to him and said, “When will you present yourself at the Academy, to teach us how to spell?”

 • • • 

M
ONDAYS, WEDNESDAYS, AND FRIDAYS,
we have Luisa, a stout Venezuelan Frenchwoman with cantilevered gray curls. Luisa speaks quickly and correctly. She does not welcome questions. Every morning, she greets us—she's a
vous
woman—with what I come to think of as a Duchenne scowl.

Class opens briskly. We turn to chapter 2, “Come to My House!” The topic of discussion is cohabitation.

Luisa zeroes in on Satomi, the Japanese academic, who has yet to utter a word.

“Tell me about your living situation, Satomi.”

“I live with my husband,” Satomi says quietly. “He's American.”

“Is he an ideal roommate?” Luisa asks.

“Yes, but sometimes he uses my toothbrush,” Satomi says, daring to elaborate.

“That's an intimate violation!” Luisa barks.

Satomi withdraws like a slap bracelet.

Luisa turns to Scotty, the Alaskan.

“Scotty, what are the qualities of the ideal roommate?”

“They have to be nice,” Scotty replies.

“And, for you, what is nice?”

“Friendly?”

“Friendly seems a little extreme,” Luisa says, her eyebrow jerking up.

Scotty thinks for a moment.

“The ideal roommate shouldn't smoke?”

Most of the class nods in agreement. But there is sniggering from the corner, where the Italians sit en bloc.

“Yeah, maybe for you,” one of them says. “You're not
our
ideal roommate.”

Carlos, the Spanish bellboy, chimes in.

“Not someone bipolar.”

“No!” comes the cry from the Italian corner. It's Cristina.

“I'm an artist,” she says. “This concerns me. One day, I'm happy. One day, I'm not. I was living in Norway. I was a little depressed. I didn't want to talk to my roommates, and they were the type of person that if they asked, ‘How was your day?' you had to say, ‘I took the bus, I ate a sandwich.' After a week, we had to have a discussion about the fact that I wasn't very
communicative. But their view of communication was exaggerated.”

“Listen, it's a matter of respect,” Carlos replies, fingering a black cord that he wears around his neck. “If you have a bad day, you don't have to put it on the other person.”

Carlos is right, but he's driving me nuts with his inability to stop actually answering the questions, rather than merely demonstrating his ability to do so. When he's lost for words, he throws out filler—
tout ça,
tout ça
—until he regains his bearings. He desperately wants us to know what he really thinks: that there is a lot of oriental influence in modern home decor, that bougainvillea is a beautiful flower, that the owners of pit bulls are not well educated. You say tomato, he says the problem these days is that when you ship food, it lacks vitamins. Tugging on his choker, he rambles on about the importance of positive thinking
et tout ça
until it's time for our coffee break.