Let’s be truthful. Ashley and I don’t really want to learn how to speak French. We just want to pick up enough so that when we return to the States, we can pepper our conversation with well pronounced French phrases and respond when someone else who knows we lived there points to something in French and asks, “What does that mean?” If we can answer correctly, then our time living here will not have been for naught. If we can’t, it will be embarrassing -- for other than impressing your friends back at home, what’s the point of living abroad? Even so, I have actually managed to pick up a few things already -- which, at the risk of treading into David Sedaris territory, I'll share with you now:
- Same to you. The French are exceedingly polite, so when you’re, say, getting off an elevator or exiting a store, your fellow passenger or the person behind the counter is bound to say something like Bonne journée (Have a good day) or Merci, au revoir (Thanks, see you again). All you need to do is repeat back what they’ve said, and append à vous (to you) if you want to be formally polite, or à toi (to ya), if it’s appropriate to be less formal. Which, if the person is a total étranger, it probably isn’t.
- Bon bons. Being so polite, the French wish one another well on occasions both big and small. In addition to bonne journée, there’s bonne soirée (have a good
- Self-evident truths. The French are smart -- after all, they invented "democracy, existentialism, and the ménage à trois," as Jean Girard reminds Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights. But sometimes people say things that are so obvious that the only proper response is, in effect, “Duh!” In the U.S., such axioms include “You know, you really do get a lot of fries when you Super-Size®.” In France, it’s things like “Now that lunch is over, the proper thing to do is have coffee,” or “Those fifteen minutes of sun this morning were a welcome relief from the grayness of this Parisian winter.” The phrases to use in response to such truisms are bien sûr (certainly) and mais oui (but of course). You’re not seconding what’s being said. You’re saying, “That’s so obvious, you didn’t need to say it in the first place.”
- Expression of metaphysical doubt. Beyond these few a priori truths -- coffee follows lunch; winter in Paris is gray -- lies a vast plain of existential uncertainty. “When will our cartes vitales, providing proof of our health insurance, arrive?” “Why is there a dollar sign and a pound sign on my French keyboard, but no euro sign?” To these and so many other questions, the only answer is Je ne sais pas (I don’t know). When said properly -- with a preceding “poof” of your lips and a slight shrug of your shoulders -- it suggests more than that the answer is unknown. It suggests that we are feeble beings subject to indeterminate forces far larger and more powerful than us. That is to say, it’s unknowable.
- So sorry. When all else fails -- and more often than not, it does -- apologize: Desolé(e), je ne parle français (I’m sorry, I don’t speak French). Sometimes I add très bien (very well) to the end of the phrase, pretending to myself and to the person who has just mistaken me for a French-speaker that I actually do know the language, just not well enough to answer the complicated question that he just asked (even if it more likely was something along the lines of Où est la bibliothèque?). An American friend of ours adds J’ai seulement vécu en France six mois (I’ve only lived in France six months), even though she’s been here several years. If you’re female and you’re writing the apology, you add the extra “e” to desolé so that it’s properly in the feminine (the gender of French nouns and adjectives being the thing that vexed David Sedaris most about la langue). But if you’re writing the apology, then you probably have access to Google Translate, which is a Godsend and yet another reason why it’s not necessary to learn French for real.
As an added bonus, I notice that I've started to use more English -- as opposed to American -- words. More often than not, we refer to our "flat" rather than to our "apartment." When I go to lunch with friends at work, we meet at the "lift," not the aforementioned "elevator." And when I called Ikea to get information about returning a sofa slipcover, the rep didn't understand when I said I wanted to "mail it back," but did when I said I wanted to "put it in the post." So it's safe to say that, regardless of whether I actually learn any French, I'll be insufferable when I return to the States.
-- MBB
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