Backstory: Years ago (decade ago?), I learned how to be politely conversational in French: Hello, Good-bye, Thank you, Pardon me, May I have one croissant, please? That got me through my first trip to Paris with some grace. I returned home and enrolled in intensive language classes at a school where the instructors were all native speakers, so in addition to conjugating verbs, I learned correct pronunciations (depending upon my teacher’s home region) and some idioms. I loved it. I loved the intellectual challenges, the exercises, the conversations with my classmates.
I was able to put much of what I learned to good use when my husband and I returned to France for our honeymoon, getting us around unfamiliar villes, finding the salle de bains, ordering excellent vins. Since then, I’ve had good intentions to return to my studies, but funds dedicated to other projects and limited free time caused me to leave this on the to-do list.
This nudge, then, is my effort to rekindle that passion and maybe convince myself that now is the time to register for a brush-up course.
What Happened: I thought about what might be pithy or funny or useful. What do I say most often? Sadly, it’s “What do you want for dinner?” And “Dinner’s ready!” So I picked:
Qu’est-ce que vous voulez pour le dîner?
and
Le dîner est prêt.
After confirming spellings on a couple of online sites, I listened to audio snippets of both. Then I began doing my best Juliette Binoche impressions out loud. It was easy-ish, and fun, although I felt a little bit like an idiot walking around saying these things, practicing my pronunciations. Pretty sure I muttered them out loud while out running errands one morning, but whatever. It’s San Francisco; I fit right in!
What struck me the most was how this was acrobatics for my mouth. It went beyond tongue-twisting, and took far more focused work that my usual “Whadayawan fo dinneh?” Like learning a new piece of music, I broke each sentence down into parts, practiced those individual parts over and over, tweaking each time. Gradually, over the week, I strung together the parts until I could say the whole thing fluidly, without having to think about what I was doing or translating it in my head while I said it.
The Ah-Hah: This nudge was challenging. And it was fun. It reawakened a tiny section of my brain that has been ignored lately. This week’s experience hasn’t quite been enough to get me to pull out my bag of workbooks and brush up, or to sign up for a class, but we’ll see. C’est la vie. (That’s life!)
P.S. The school where I had such wonderful teachers years ago is the Alliance française de Pasadena. If you live near there, check out their website here. If you live elsewhere, they have chapters around the world, which you can learn more about here.
