Flirting With French by William Alexander Read Free Book Online

sixty-two.
    On the last day of our bike trip, as we’re preparing to return home, we finally meet the driver who’s been transporting our bags from hotel to hotel each day while we bike, a classic working Frenchman with a firm handshake and a Gallic twinkle in his eye. He asks where we’re from, and when we say the United States he nods gravely, smiles, and says, “
Courage!
” before taking his leave. Anne and I take it to be a reference to our country’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although for all we know he means much more. He might as well have been referring to my French. This trip has made it clear that I have a lot of work ahead of me. I’m going to have to buckle down, double up, get to it, if I am going to have any hope of learning French before fatigue and discouragement set in, leaving me roadkill on the route to Paris, just another statistic. Several of the French we’ve met during this trip tell us they’ve learned English as adults, making me wonder whether they have some secret, some technique that we’re missing in the States.
    Having lunch outdoors at a small café, I hear a vaguely familiar voice from, of all people, our French waiter, who speaks English with hardly a trace of a French accent. In fact, his English, if anything, suggests the eastern United States, where I’ve lived my entire life. He must have done some immersion study there.
    I tell Anne, “I want to speak French the way he speaks English.”
    He brings us the check. “Your English is perfect,” I say. “You’ve spent some time in the States, no?”
    “Actually, I haven’t.”
    “Really? How did you learn such good English?”
    “Watching Jerry Seinfeld.”

A Room with a
Veau
    He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.
    — FRANCIS BACON
    Back home, I’ve returned to my routine of watching an hour a day of TV5Monde, the international French-language cable network that rebroadcasts programs from France and other francophone countries. Anne wanders in from the kitchen. “What are you watching?”
    “A sitcom out of Quebec.”
    “Any good?”
    “It’s no
Seinfeld.
”
    For that matter, it’s no
Th
ree’s Company,
but I’ve been enduring it for one compelling reason, an oddity that Anne instantly notes.“It’s subtitled in French? Why? It’s
in
French!”
    “Not according to the French, it’s not. It’s their way of reminding Canadians they don’t really speak French.” Although you could’ve fooled me; to my tin ear it sounds totally French, aside from a few Anglicisms thrown in here and there. But the superfluous French subtitles make a superuseful learning tool for the student of French. And right now I need all the tools I can get. Anne, however, isn’t convinced of my new method.
    “Aren’t there any French classes around?”
    The hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Classes are a sore point with me for a couple of reasons. Back before the richest country in the world decided to start behaving like one of the poorest, you could generally find an evening “adult ed” language class at your local high school or community college. Such programs are an endangered species today, and if you can find any language class at all, it’s nearly always Spanish. Yet it wasn’t that long ago that French was a language that all well-educated Americans spoke, the language of culture and diplomacy, to the extent that treaties were drafted in French even when neither country was a francophone nation. French-speaking Jacqueline Kennedy was adored as the very height of sophistication. By contrast, in recent years unsuccessful presidential aspirants John Kerry and Mitt Romney were both victims of political attack ads based on the accusation that they—gasp!—spoke, as the
New Yorker
recently called it, “the language that dare not speak its name,” the implication being that they were socialist-sympathizing, snail-eating, effete pansy