Flirting With French by William Alexander Read Free Book Online Page A

snobs living in the past, out of touch with the common joe.
    Well, I have news for the political masterminds behind these ads: French is Rosetta Stone’s second-best-selling foreign language (behind only Spanish) among the common joes of America. The official language of twenty-nine countries, it is spoken regularly by some 175 million people, not counting another 200 million occasional speakers and students. TV5Monde ranks behind only CNN and MTV in number of worldwide viewers, and France has the world’s fifth-largest economy. So let’s not count French out just yet. But all that doesn’t make it any easier to find a French course in the Mid-Hudson Valley.
    “The nearest night classes are in the city,” I tell Anne. “That’s a hundred-and-twenty-mile round-trip. For an eight o’clock class I’d be getting home at midnight. And I’ve tried weekly classes before. They just don’t work. Do you know a single adult who’s ever learned a language that way?”
    Anne meekly raises her hand.
    “That was
medical
Spanish. Doesn’t count.”
    “
Sí, cuenta,
” she protests. Perhaps it does count, but Anne speaks the most curious flavor of Spanish you’ll ever encounter. She can quite capably conduct a thirty-minute physical in Spanish, but put her in a Spanish restaurant and she can’t read the menu unless they’re serving stiff necks and joint pain.
    The truth is, the reason for my avoidance of a French class may lie less with geography than with psychology. Four decades later I’m still scarred from my classroom experience with . . . I dare not speak
her
name . . . Madame D—— , my high school French teacher.
    “Ma-
dame,
” as we called her, was an imposing figure, sporting a prominent mole on one cheek that rooted a single, prominent hair, and a glare that could melt a wheel of Brie. Discipline was rarely a problem in her classroom (a classmate who acted up was once literally dragged out of the room by her ear), and every French class was a forty-five-minute sentence to the Bastille. Her cumulative years of teaching may have done more harm to Franco-American relations than freedom fries.
    I’m sure there was more than one French teacher in the school district, but I always seemed to end up in Madame’s class. This was almost certainly due to some behind-the-scenes maneuvering by my father, who was a guidance counselor in the junior high school and thought he was doing me a favor by making sure I had the “best” French teacher, having himself never been pulled out of Madame’s class by the ear. This favoritism in turn made me a favorite of Madame’s—meaning I was called on a lot—even though I was a poor French student. My occasional stutter, which remained mostly under the surface when answering math- or science-class questions, became amplified to King George VI proportions under the lethal combination of Madame’s torture chamber and the inescapable fact that the main objective in this class was
to speak perfectly.
    No surprise, then, that I dropped French after my sophomore year, the moment I’d fulfilled the graduation requirement, to the consternation of my parents, who thought I might be torpedoing my college prospects.
Pas de problème:
I’d discovered that engineering programs, for which I was otherwise ill suited, generally didn’t carry a language requirement. Which is how I ended up a biomedical engineering major. After a disastrous freshman year largely spent unsuccessfully trying to get a picture on the oscilloscope, the school of liberal arts discontinued its foreign language requirement (while keeping its swimming requirement), clearing the way for me to switch my major to English, to the visible relief of my engineering professors and classmates.
    In other words, I chose a college major primarily on the basis of
not having to take French.
Then how on earth did I end up trying to make amends forty years later? How did my determination to avoid French become an equally strong