Parler En Ma Propre Voix

I've not posted much this term about French class. The third-year class has two sections offered back to back. The noon to 1pm section is a lively little group of about a dozen. I'm so glad that most of them will return next term. 

Because we are required to talk to each other so much (duh, it's a language class), we know each other much better than we do other people in our other classes. Sometimes better than other students in our own home departments. And of course our grammar and vocabulary are constantly expanding. These have combined to produce two interesting results. 

First, in those few minutes before class begins, as people arrive in ones and twos from their other activities, we chit chat with each other about events in the news, about our other classes, what we did during the weekend, even banalities like the weather. In French. We don't even think about what we are doing, it just seems normal.

But the second result, the one that I find kind of exciting, is that as our ability to create more sophisticated sentences is improving, we are speaking in our own voices. In other words, we aren't just parroting sentences from our grammar books. I've listened to Anne and Will and Evan talking about freshman physics in English. I know what kinds of jokes they make and how this one speaks in short sentences and this one speaks in more complex ones. And even when run through the meat grinder of French grammar rules, I can now hear those same patterns when they speak French. I know that I am doing the same thing. Our own voices, but in French. 

That is very cool.

Madame McC. assigns us a variety of exercises in which we can practice different aspects of the language. We have written assignments that are often based on a particular grammatical component, such as writing about a defined topic using only the subjunctive. We have been reading short stories and we have to answer questions about them both in writing and orally. And three times each term, we have to "listen to something in French and write about it".

That last assignment seems pretty open-ended, and boy, is it ever. One girl watches interviews with Canadian hockey players and writes about a different one for each assignment. Another watches episodes of "My Little Pony" dubbed into French for each of her assignments. My friend Melodie watches full-length French movies on NetFlix and writes a synopsis of each one. Others watch news reports about current events. There is no defined limit to the length of what you can watch, and while there is no defined limit to what you write about it, most of us cough up about a page, somewhere between 300-600 words.

As for me, I dabbled a bit in a gastronomy program, and last term I watched one full-length film (Le Placard; fantastically funny). But my speciality has become short films (les courts métrages) that I find on YouTube. 

My criteria are simple: less than 20 minutes long so I can watch it three or four times, no violence, no animation. I don't need subtitles although those are nice.

Because the assignment is so incredibly broad, I even chose one short film this term that had no dialogue of any kind! It was made by a French director with French actors so it technically was French. I chose to retell the story then explain what I though it meant. For the last listening assignment due this term, I decided not to discuss the story told in the film at all but to focus on the language used by the two main characters--plenty of slang, profanity, and less offensive but "common" expressions that also get the Académie's panties in a twist (for example, expressions like that last phrase right there). My appreciation for the versatility of "putain" has increased exponentially.

Short films are like short stories. It sounds easy but making/writing a good one is extremely difficult. Lots of people try and fail, utterly fail. It is important to develop the characters quickly. And it helps if the ending is a surprise. I think that I've managed to choose some particularly fine examples of the art of the court métrage:

• Rien à dire
• Je suis mobile
• Le métronome
• On s'embrasse

I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!

Telling Tales

Upon receipt of the bit of writing below, my French professor wrote in the margin (in French) "You could write French stories." I'm preening, that's for sure--that's quite a complement from Madame M. who is extraordinarily exacting about our grammar. The assignment: write a story about two animals using the three main past tenses (I ate, I was eating/did eat, and I had eaten [before something else happened]). Obviously we have the same three tenses in English but we don't make quite the same big deal about them as the French do.

I chose to retell the fable of the frog and the scorpion (it's antecedent could be this Aesop's fable). You probably know it. Sometimes the frog is a fox or another animal. The frog carries the scorpion on its back across a river, and halfway across, the scorpion stings it. As they are both drowning, the frog asks the scorpion why he did that, and the scorpion replies "I had no choice, it's in my nature." Grim, yes, but I thought it was an appropriate tale since in the novel by Sartre that we are reading for class, everything that happens is predestined.

To puff it up to a length somewhere between 250 and 300 words, I had to embellish the story with background details that aren't usually in the fable. But that's the very nature of storytelling, isn't it? 

L'histoire de la grenouille et le scorpion

Il était une fois un scorpion qui vivait dans un tas de feuilles séchées qui étaient tombées des arbres à l’automne dernier. Près de les des arbres il y avait une grande rivière. Elle s’étendait si loin que le scorpion ne pouvait pas voir l’autre rive. Au bord de la rivière dans les joncs où l’eau était plus tranquille vivait une grenouille verte.

Un jour, le scorpion est allé à la rivière. Il a découvert la grenouille qui était en train d’attraper des mouches et de s’admirer dans l’eau. Le scorpion s’est présenté avec beaucoup de politesse. La grenouille a retourné la salutation.

Il a dit à la grenouille qu’il voulait lui demander de l’aider. Il avait besoin de traverser la rivière parce que le jour précédent il avait reçu une lettre de son frère qui vivait sur l’autre rive. Il était très important pour lui de traverser la rivière pour voir sa famille.

La grenouille réfléchissait à sa proposition. Pour traverser la rivière, le scorpion devait être sur son dos. Elle lui a dit que s’il la piquait, elle mourrait. Et le scorpion, il noierait.

Le scorpion a protesté. Il ne pourrait jamais faire mal à son amie ! Il a insisté. Il a supplié. Il a même pleuré quelques larmes.

Avec un soupir, la grenouille a accepté. Le scorpion est monté sur son dos et la grenouille a commencé à nager.

Au milieu de la rivière, le scorpion l’a piquée. Comme ils se noyaient, la grenouille lui a demandé pourquoi il avait fait cette chose-là. Le scorpion lui a répondu qu'il n'avait pas de choix, c’était dans sa nature.

Creative Inspiration: Poultry Nutrition and Sartre

I’ve been expending quite a bit of creative energy lately on French class. We have substantial writing exercises due every week. For example, for four of those assignments this term, we have to watch a movie or a news show, anything we choose as long as it is in French then write something about it. Yesterday I watched a rather touching short film on YouTube (okay, I had to watch it three times, but at least it was short) then pounded out an essay in a couple of hours. If I were to write in English for a couple of hours, I could easily break the 1000-word mark. In French, I end up with about 350 words. Still, I now have several verb tenses and a handful of conjunctions at my disposal so it isn’t 350 words of “Sally sees Spot.” 

For my first “écoute” I watched a half-hour show about raspberries and strawberries. I can’t bring myself to listen to half an hour of news from Syria in French; it’s bad enough to get it daily in English. The fruit show was quite amusing. It is part of a semi-regular series on TV5 Monde. The famous chef narrator highlights gastronomic specialties from different regions of France. Besides interviewing a raspberry farmer and a strawberry farmer located in this particular region, he interviewed the director of a cooperative that packages up all the “fruits rouges” from the area and ships them all over the place. The chef also spent far too much time interviewing a woman who makes perfume, somewhat pointlessly I thought since she admitted that it’s very hard to make perfumes using fruits like strawberries as raw materials since they don’t have much oil in them. They nattered on, and on and on, about how the scents of the “fruits rouges” could “evoke memories of childhood” with their “clear, ringing notes.” I was howling with laughter. The French can Frenchify anything, bless their hearts. I expected one of them to drop the Proust bomb at any moment but they never did. 

We are also reading a book this term, Les jeux sont faits by Jean-Paul Sartre. Yeah, that Jean-Paul Sartre. The title has an idiomatic translation. It means, the die are cast. Sartre originally wrote it as a screenplay, and it was in fact made into a movie in 1947. Each chapter is a short, self-contained scene. The sentences are fairly short and contain lots of interesting action verbs that describe what every character is doing at every point. “He shrugged his shoulders, picked up the pen, and signed the register.” “He turned away from her, headed across the room, opened the door, and exited the room.” It definitely reads better in the French. I pulled out over 300 new vocabulary words in the first 40 pages, most of them verbs. While the story is meant to illustrate some points of Sartre’s philosophy (death is absurd, one’s fate is predetermined but one must always struggle to overcome that, etc.), we don’t talk about that in class. We focus mainly on the grammar and the general story itself. I quickly developed a system: I do the first reading with only a pencil to underline things I can’t figure out from context, I do the second reading with a dictionary, sometimes two dictionaries, often looking up dozens of words per page and making extensive margin notes (yes, I write in books, I believe that the concept of the book is sacred but any individual book is not particularly so) then I set the book aside for at least a night (to take advantage of latent learning) before I do the third reading where I try my best to read it at a natural pace with understanding. I might even read sections out loud for the third reading. That’s a tremendous amount of effort but it ensures that I not only understand what’s going on in the book but I understand the grammar. 

All that thinking and listening and reading and writing and talking in another language keeps my brain warmed up for working on my thesis. For example, in the first half of October, I read 52 papers on poultry feeding trials in which they fed the birds some form of omega-3 fatty acids. Not a typo: 52 papers. As a result, I can clearly articulate what prior work has been done, what the knowledge gaps are, and what my own feeding trials accomplish with respect to the gaps. I meet with my thesis committee for the first time in a couple of weeks and I have to make a brief presentation to them. I needed to get all that sorted out.

Poultry nutrition and Sartre make for odd bedfellows but the combination seems to be working well.

Jetez un oeil à ce site!

I recently stumbled across a blog written by a French veterinarian. He writes short fictional pieces about his interactions with clients and their pets but he also posts details on new regulations for the handling of horses to be slaughtered (for meat) and political demonstrations by French vets and vet techs (vétérinaires en colère!) protesting laws restricting their ability to use antibiotics to treat their patients. This is related to EU laws restricting the use of prophylactic antibiotics on production animals (I could write an entire post on that topic alone but will restrain myself today).

I was quite excited to find the blog for a couple of reasons. Particularly in his fictional pieces, his language and tone are conversational. Compare that to the stiff French used by Le Monde. I try to read one or two articles a week from their site. When you combine the formal language with a grim news story, it can be a real slog (although this morning there is an article on the front page about the growing small-scale pot cultivation business in France; at least not so grim). The French vet uses the verb "tweeter" (pronounced "tweet-ay"), meaning "to tweet" as in post on Twitter; the sun would have to burn out before the venerable Le Monde stooped to using that...even though that is how regular people talk. So I'm finding it easier to read the vet blog without referring so often to my dictionaries. I can read his pieces out loud to practice phrasing, the natural pauses that you make when you speak. Reading Le Monde articles makes me sound like a robot.

But another reason I'm glad I found the blog is that it gives me a chance to learn some French science words. To be completely fair, my instructor is not a scientist. She has us watch movies and read fictional excerpts and poetry, and she talks a lot about French culture, but if I want to make a comment in a class discussion from the perspective of a scientist, I struggle to find the words. Even little things like numerical quantities are not commonly part of our reading.

And the internet being the multi-tentacled octopus-thing that it is, the many links on the French vet blog will open up even more sites with new perspectives and new words.

(The title of this post is a phrase that translates directly as "throw an eye at this site" but translates idiomatically as "take a look at this site".)

Using My Right Brain

I have been thinking about how I can continue my French during vet school. It will take quite an effort but I am more convinced than ever that it is important to do so.

I've been taking large class loads each term that I've been here at OSU. French contributes a lot to that, accounting for 25% of my total credit hours. Still, the regular exercise of my right brain has proven to be amusing, distracting, and stimulating in equal measures.

Our most recent writing assignment was to submit a critique of the film "La Haine". We watched the film in class over a couple of days. Made in 1995, it is about the violence and racial issues in the French slums (banlieues) that have metastasized around every large French city. The film was made in a documentary style, although it is mostly fictional, and it was filmed in black and white. It is full of shocking violence and profanity and sadness.

As usual, the assignment was open-ended. I decided to do an analysis of the main characters in terms of classical epic tragedy/comedy: buffoon, anti-hero, thwarted hero, villain, and so forth. I won't bore you with my actual essay but I can tell you that I labored long over it. I was utterly amazed with the result--it was insightful, concise, and written entirely in another language. Since the beginning of this term, I no longer draft my assignments in English then translate. I write them from the start in French. The cognitive leap that my right brain has to make to do this is pretty amazing.

The profanity in the film was interesting. The French are so much more creative than we Puritan descendants are when it comes to swearing. A friend gave me a pretty fun French profanity handbook a couple of winters ago and I considered doing my write up on the cultural basis of the profanity in the film. Then I figured, I'd better not push it. That might be a little too philosophical for my poor rudimentary French.

This morning I finished writing our final essay for the term. We had to write about clothing. I know, that's a pretty open ended topic as well, and not one that I find particularly engaging. And we had to use the conditional verb tense at least five times. The conditional is an easy tense to conjugate and it isn't an unusual one, but when you have to use it, it can seem a little forced. I have been struggling with this assignment for a couple of days. I couldn't get enthused about the topic until I came up with the hook: imagine what an extraterrestrial would think about clothing (ah, there's the conditional tense!) if he visited Earth 500 years ago and then came back again today. My essay has the proper mix of humor and cynicism that I have maintained in all my writing assignments. The prof will love it.

In a metaphorical way, using my right brain for all this creative writing in French gives my left brain a bit of a rest. I'm stuffing all sorts of vertebrate anatomy and biochemistry and animal physiology things in there and it gets a little crowded and stuffy. Writing about extraterrestrials observing human clothing styles...that's a bit of fresh air.

Untitled

We had to write a poem for French class. Specifically, we had to use a certain grammatical construction and tense in our poem. And our poem had to be modeled after Le Message by Jacques Prévert. His poem is rather sad and dark; a rough and very poetic interpretation is that it discusses the loss of love but Prévert approaches that large theme in a rather prosaic manner using everyday things (chairs, doors, letters, rivers). Here it is in the French (translation here):

La porte que quelqu’un a ouverte
La porte que quelqu’un a refermée
La chaise où quelqu’un s’est assis
Le chat que quelqu’un a caressé
Le fruit que quelqu’un a mordu
La lettre que quelqu’un a lue
La chaise que quelqu’un a renversée
La porte que quelqu’un a ouverte
La route où quelqu’un court encore
Le bois que quelqu’un traverse
La rivière où quelqu’un se jette
L’hôpital où quelqu’un est mort.

Even without understanding the words, you can see how the construction of the lines is formalized and repeating. The last word, mort--it means what you think it does. Somebody is dead. Dark and sad.

Here is my poem:

Les jouets que mes chiens ont détruits.

Les coutures qu’ils ont fendues.

Les poupées qu’ils ont éviscérées.

La bourre que j’ai découverte dans le salon.

Les morceaux qu’ils ont poussés sur le lit.

Les jouets que les chiens ont aimés le plus.

Les laisses et les collets qu’ils ont portés.

Les heures que nous avons passées à marcher.

Les heures que nous avons passées à jouer.

La nourriture chère qu’ils ont mangée.

Les gâteries que j’ai faites.

Les jouets que je leur ai achetés.

And its translation:

The toys that my dogs destroyed.
The seams that they ripped.
The dolls that they eviscerated.
The stuffing that I discovered in the living room.
The bits that they pushed under the bed.
The toys that my dogs loved the most.

The leashes and collars that they wore.
The hours that we spent walking.
The hours that we spent playing.
The expensive food that they ate.
The treats that I made.
The toys that I bought them.

Oddly, I couldn't come up with a title for it (do you have any suggestions? It has to have multiple layers of meaning like Prévert's title). But the professor LOVED my creative verbs (éviscérer! détruire!). I was inspired in this by Prévert's use of se jeter, to throw oneself--what an interesting verb. It abruptly changes the tone in his poem. I also decided to stick with the "everyday things contain their own stories but are also part of larger stories" theme. But I decided to take a poke at the gloomy tone and made the first half of mine about the dogs tearing up their toys. 

(As an aside, I know the French take their literary arts very seriously, but I don't think a Frenchman would shiv me for taking liberties with Prévert.)

It was super fun to write. I had to use my dictionary a lot--but I learned a lot of new vocabulary in the process. Having fun with words in another language! That's progress!

Succés!

I finally wrote something original in French that contained no grammatical errors. Not one. And that's a BFD. Sadly, I consistently conjugate verbs incorrectly, leave off accents, forget to add an s to the end of adjectives modifying plural nouns, use the wrong article (that damned tricky de). Some of these are written errors that wouldn't necessarily be detected in conversation. But it is important to write properly.

For most of our exams, we have to prepare a short essay at home (the topic is assigned before the exam) and reproduce it on the exam without notes. We only have to write 100-150 words--that's not a difficult task. Remembering what I drafted up isn't the problem. It's the errors that creep in during the initial drafting. I'm learning to check for my most common mistakes.

For our first exam, we had to write about the one thing we would do if we went to Paris, using the future tense. Here is my essay:

Si je vais à Paris, je louerai un appartement. Il sera dans le 14ème arrondisement.

J’ai vu les musées et les monuments de Paris. Ils sont tous magnifiques … et tres bondés.

Quand j’sera à Paris, je voudrai vivre comme une Parisienne.

Au marché dans la rue Daguerre, je ferai les courses tous les jours. J’irai au marché pour des légumes, à la boucherie pour du porc, à la boulangerie pour du pain, à la fromagerie, à la patisserie pour des macarons, et bien sȗr au marchand de vins! Je n’oublierai pas un sac réutilisable.

J’inviterai mes amis à dîner chez moi.

Je découvrirai un café agréable. Le matin, j’y prendrai le petit déjeuner et observerai les passants comme une vraie Parisienne.

Here is a translation (it sounds sort of silly when translated but believe me, this is probably the most complex thing I've written in French yet):

If I go to Paris, I will rent an apartment. It will be in the 14th arrondisement. 
I've seen the museums and monuments of Paris. They are all wonderful ... and very crowded.
When I am in Paris, I will live like a Parisienne.
I will do my grocery shopping at the farmer's market on the rue Daguerre every day. I will visit the farmer's market for vegetables, the butcher for pork, the bakery for bread, the cheese store, the pastry store for macaroons, and of course the wine shop. I won't forget my shopping bag. 
I will invite my friends to my place for dinner.
I will find a pleasant cafe. In the mornings, I'll have breakfast there and watch the passers-by, like a true Parisienne.

Our next writing assignment? Write a poem (at least 80 words) using a particular grammatical form that we learned this week. A poem! Quite a distraction from cat skeleton and musculature or lipid metabolic cycles.

French Immersion

Despite the obvious pleasures of drinking wine and eating pork daily, my primary reason for going to Sancerre was to spend two weeks in a French language immersion program at Coeur de France language school.

The reviews for the school on tripadvisor.com were uniformly positive and while CdF could accommodate families, it seemed that they mainly catered to adult learners. I took an online test that helped determine my level of proficiency (intermediate, no surprise there). And after a bit of emailing back and forth with Gerard, an American who is co-owner of the school with his French wife Marianne, I was able to coordinate my travel schedule with a suitable course schedule.

I was also able to arrange rental of an apartment directly above the school which was quite convenient. Although the apartment was certainly atmospheric and charming, some of the other apartments in the village maintained by the school were nicer. But those will have to wait for the next visit!

The view from my apartment window at dusk.

Literally upon our arrival at the train station in nearby Cosne (pronounce "cone"), we were asked not to speak English during our stay. It was difficult to comply with this 100% of the time because there were people at all proficiency levels attending the school, some of whom had no French at all, so every so often we found ourselves quickly whispering important information to each other in corners.

The school has around 10 instructors, including Marianne. Marianne was the instructor for the two weeks of my class. I was in a class of 5 other adults, with four of them in the same class as me for both weeks: John and May from England, Nennia from the US, and Jean from the US. Being together for two weeks brought a lot of continuity to our learning and our ability to understand each other.

Our group met for four hours each day, alternating mornings and afternoons. I spent an additional four to six hours each day working on homework and readings and grammar exercises (I carefully read three TinTin adventures during the two weeks; they are excellent because they present short sentences, colloquial expressions, multiple verb tenses, and a rather advanced vocabulary, all accompanied by pictures to help with meaning). It sounds like a lot of work and it really was. I’ve never worked so hard on a holiday. But despite being serious business, it was also a lot of fun. 

My first dinner in my tiny kitchen (thank goodness I am completely used to tiny kitchens from living for three years in my hovel in Dhahran): pork chop pan fried with shallots and garlic and salt and served on a bed of greens, crottin du chevre, a bottle of Sancerre blanc, fresh bread.

I discovered too late that I could have also signed up for a couple of hours of one-on-one instruction each day. I think my speaking skills would have improved much more if I had done this. Another useful bit of information for the next visit!

Four hours is a long time to sit in a class and Marianne used a variety of different activities to break things up. One activity that we did each meeting was to have group conversation. Marianne would usually initiate it by asking each of us to speak on a topic (what did you do on the weekend, tell us about your best vacation, describe situations where you’ve experienced French customs different from your own, etc.) then allow the others to ask each speaker questions. This free-form activity often led us into surprising conversational territory which sometimes we had trouble negotiating when our French wasn’t quite up to what we were trying to say.

By the second week, the five of us were getting pretty comfortable with each other and the jokes, made mostly at our own expense, were flying fast and furious. You know you are making progress in another language when you can make a joke and everyone gets it. After our group of five spent the weekend together drinking wine and gossiping, learning a lot about each others' lives outside of France in the process, we started teasing each other in class. Sometimes I think our teasing was maybe a bit too “English” for Marianne (even though it was all in French) but she remained calm when we started acting up.

We even established a few memes in our short time together. Jean watched "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone" five times in one day, all in French of course. So watching or reading something five times became our new standard, a true measure of learning. I created a meme for “rolling the dice” because I was always getting confused about grammatical choices which appear on the surface to be similar and small but which actually affect the meaning in big ways, such as que/qui, tout/tous, le/la, a/de/nothing with infinitive verbs, whether the "c" at the end of parc and porc is pronounced (yes in the first one, no in the second) and so forth. I’d invariably make the wrong choice and be corrected by Marianne so I’d shake my hand and open it like I was throwing out a pair of dice. (I also managed to successfully explain the related 50/50/90 rule to John entirely in French!)*

Freshly made crottins set out on wire racks in a cool room to begin aging.

One of the most interesting group conversations we had was prompted by Marianne asking each of us to select, read, then discuss an article with the class. We could choose the article  in any media or language that we wanted but we had to give our recap of it in French. Jean talked about the recent suicide death of a film director which spiraled off into a discussion of euthanasia and why people might choose suicide. Another woman talked about a study of the incidence of autism. From those two topics we spiraled off into a discussion about Lance Armstrong having his titles stripped from him, doping in sports, and whether immoral people can do truly good deeds or not. After all this serious stuff, I felt a bit bad about presenting the article I had chosen about the new model of Barbie that will come out in December of this year. But I only felt bad for a little while because I had invested a lot of energy into this assignment. What’s special about this particular Barbie? She was created by a transvestite fashion designer (Phillip Blonde) and looks eerily like him. How exactly does one know that a Barbie doll is a transvestite? You can't use the presence or absence of secondary sexual characteristics since Barbie dolls only have breasts. But you can use as evidence her extremely heavily made up face, her wildly spangled gown, and the words of Mattel itself. I used my iPad to show photos of this socially radical doll. And it turns out that there have been other bizarre Barbies: a pregnant one (with suspiciously Latina skin and hair coloring) and a Barbie with an accompanying yellow labrador doll, a pail, a scoop, and little plastic dog poops (crottes du chien). (Marianne commented dryly, <<Évidemment elle n’est pas française>> which nearly dropped us to the floor with laughter; even in a small village like Sancerre, dog shit is everywhere on the streets). Nennia continued the hilarity with her discussion of the naked Prince Harry photos from his Las Vegas excesses.

We had role-playing activities each class meeting as well. One of the more amusing assignments required us to confront our partner who was playing the role of an upstairs neighbor who was having parties every night and making too much noise. Marianne asked us to not script these conversations out but to try to deliver them spontaneously. Much silliness ensued since beyond agreeing on the general outline of our skit, we had no idea what the other was going to say!

Here are some of my favorite vocabulary words: gonflier, to inflate; noyer, to drown; une fourmi, ant (ants produce formic acid, dontcha know!); une chauve-souris, bat ("bald mouse"); il fait loup, it's humid; se balader, to take oneself out for a walk; les draps, sheets, bedding; parier, to bet or gamble; se tromper, to be mistaken (tromper without the reflexive pronoun means to fall)...well, I filled two notebooks with interesting words and grammar bits and I could bore you for quite a while. I'll just leave you with this gem, a very difficult French tongue twister: Les grenouilles fouillent sous les feuilles à Marseilles (the toads rummage under the leaves of Marseilles, which just doesn't have quite the same ring as the French version).

In fact, I would have to say that we spent a good part of each class laughing uproariously. I didn't expect this at all but I think that we got lucky and had a pretty good mix of people. I was quite shocked to find out that the others thought after that first week that I was too serious (maybe even a bit scary serious) so I tried to be more relaxed about everything the second week. I even managed to figure out how to use an idiom with an incredibly obscure meaning (it involved prunes which were entirely metaphorical). And John, May, Jean: I still most firmly maintain that the act of dreaming (rêver) is expressing an emotion, i.e., c'est un verbe de <> donc ce n'est pas suivi de préposition avec un verbe infinitif.

Bottles of Sancerre blanc from the mid-80s stored in a cave. They keep a few bottles from important vintages to see how they age and keep. It is unlikely that this wine is still any good but the bottles looked pretty cool.

The school brings in a decent amount of money to the village and the shopkeepers are certainly aware of this. A two week stay like mine was common; some people even stay for four weeks! During this time, we do a lot of shopping and eating in Sancerre. In fact, we were instructed to tell shop owners and servers in restaurants that we were students at the school. Not only was this a flag that we wanted to try to practice our French but it was also a more subtle communication that we were not fly-by-afternoon tourists.

The woman who ran the charcuterie in particular was most charming to me (she saw me almost every other day), answering my questions about her terrines once I got a bit bolder and more confident that I could understand her.

One evening when I was out for a walk, I ran into Yvette. Imagine a typical little old French woman and you’ve got Yvette: small-floral-print dress, stockings, sturdy shoes. She was walking uphill and I was walking downhill. She stopped to rest on a bench and when I passed, I said “bonsoir, madame” because to pass by without speaking would have been considered quite rude, especially as we were the only people on that road at the time. Well, that was the only opening she needed. Yvette was off, chattering away to me about all sorts of things, only about half of which I understood. But I did get these bits from her: she was turning 85 in September, she has lived in Sancerre all her life, and during the war (the second one) when she was a girl, she was sent away with the other children to farms in the country. She also told me that there was a very large sweet pea vine at the end of a vineyard down the hill that I should be sure to stop at and get some wildflowers (les fleurs sauvages) for my kitchen table. When I told her I was a student at the school, her next question was to ask who my instructor was (I found this was the most often-asked question by the folks in the village). When I told her my instructor was Marianne and added that she was “tres formidable,” Yvette laughed knowingly then told me that Marianne had grown up in Sancerre and that her family was still in the area. It turns out that both Yvette and Marianne are well known throughout the village, each formidable in her own way!

This was a great holiday in many ways. I was kept busy every day learning and thinking and practicing French but I had ample time to enjoy the atmosphere and pleasures one would expect from a holiday in a village in the middle of France. I would recommend the Coeur de France school without hesitation...but you must be prepared to work hard!

Looking towards Chavignol village from the surrounding vineyards.

* The 50/50/90 rules states that given a choice between two equal (or equally likely) things or events, 90% of the time you will chose the wrong one.

Language Milestones

I passed a second-language milestone yesterday: I had my first telephone conversation in French. It was a simple conversation lasting barely two minutes. But necessary information was successfully exchanged.

Talking on the phone is without a doubt the hardest skill to master when you are learning a second language. All of the non-verbal clues that humans put into a conversation are missing.

My French is coming along well. Now when I'm reading, I rarely translate written French into English--as long as the material is simple, like the stories in Paris Match, a magazine I buy specifically because it is written using very simple grammar.

However, I do rehearse things I want to say, sometimes even writing them down to make sure the grammar is correct (and to make sure I selected the right verb and conjugated it correctly). And yesterday's phone conversation was no different: I practiced what I wanted to say a couple of times before I dialed. I still speak with far too many pauses and ums--I'm not quite at the point where my brain and mouth are synced.

But these little successes suggest that I'm on the right track!

Emergency Immersion

Nothing like a little crisis to hone one's language skills.

 While we were in Burgundy, my mother became very ill. As it turns out, she required surgery and ended up spending 6 days in the Centre Hospitalier in Macon, France. The details are not important here. My aim with this post is to thank the army of people who helped me and Judy get through that mess.

First and foremost, I want to thank Kim. She is a doctor and was monitoring my mother's condition and she was the one who said, we need to take her to the emergency room. And Kim stuck by my side for those very long 8 hours as we began our navigation through the French health care system. Kim was professional, focused, and calm. I would have been much more stressed if she hadn't been by my side for those first two days.

To give you some feel for our experience, the staff at the hospital, most of whom had no English at all, referred to my mother as "l'Anglaise," the English woman. The fact that the usually fastidiously polite French chose this name over Madame B. told me that having a foreigner as a patient was a pretty unusual event.

I also have to thank Madame Hala and Madame Rita, the two women from whom I've taken French lessons through Aramco Community Education. I've had over 100 hours of classroom instruction and speak only the barest of French. If they hadn't drilled me over and over in class, I might not have had the confidence to keep trying even though I was perfectly aware that I was barely communicating at all. Forget articles, forget gender, I was just trying to string together the right verb with the right pronoun with something like an object. I quickly realized that as long as my pronunciation was correct, I was being allowed all sorts of egregious grammatical sins. I did learn many new words, including lots of medical terms I never planned to have to know (le vesicule bilaire and the conjugation of the verb vomir [to vomit], for example), but some of them are quite useful, such as l'attestation de paiement (receipt).

We were so lucky to have an emergency room doctor with a bit of English who called in a specialist who has, as it turns out, quite a lot of English. In fact, I met the specialist's English teacher one afternoon! Dr. O. was kind, caring, and professional. His advocacy and support were amazing.

I have to also thank the ladies in the hospital billing department who spent hours with me while I was on the phone to Judy's insurance company, translating faxed documents from English into some sort of French that made sense to them.

Marc and Karen, the owners of Le Nid, threw open their house, their computer, and their internet connection to me, gave me a cell phone when mine was out of money on a Sunday, and even a couple of supportive hugs. They went far above the normal call of hosting guests at Le Nid.

Judy and her husband Dave's neighbors Karen and Greg deserve a mention too. Because Dave didn't have an email account of his own, I got their email addys and flooded their inboxes with flight reservations and other information that Dave needed to get to France.

Dave also gets a nod because I called when Judy was in surgery, waking him up and giving him about 30 hours notice of his departure for France. He managed to pull everything together and arrived in Macon more or less on schedule. Not a feat to be dismissed.

And I want to thank all of my friends who were with me in France. They shadowed me for almost three days before I was able to give them the slip (by getting up and leaving before they were up!). They came to visit Judy in the hospital the afternoon she was out of surgery when tubes were coming out of her in all directions! Now that is a group of good friends! These same friends also handed me glasses of wine in the evenings and even offered to play more Uno (not sure if they actually liked the game by then or if they were just being nice).

I barely remember sitting in the McDonald's in Macon using the free Wifi on my iPad to look for a hotel near the hospital while Duwain and Kim were struggling to get their locked devices to surf on the 'net. I know they were frustrated and jonesing for their email. Still, everyone kept a decently good perspective on the situation.

And Duwain, bless him, said, there has to be a silver lining to this mess: it may result in Judy being able to put a chronic health problem behind her entirely. And that is indeed how things are looking now. Oh, there are a few arguments still to be had with the insurance company. And my mother is still mending, by no means back to full health. But she is at home and doing well.

I am very lucky to have such good friends, both new and old.

Adventures Part 8: France -- Navigation and Language

Readers Note: All photos in this post were taken by DSL. I swiped them from her Flickr stream, which you can find here. She takes much better (and many more) pictures than I do, apparently.

"Bonjour, Gendarmerie!"

Navigation established itself as a theme of our trip from the day that I met DSL at the Frankfurt Airport and we picked up the rental car (a very nice Renault Scenic diesel). I had a giant, spiral-bound A-to-Z road atlas for France, a couple of regional maps, and of course, XMotion GPS software on my iPad. Both of us know how to read maps. I thought we were adequately armed with navigation information.

 

The regional map of Burgundy wasn't very helpful. DSL's caption for this was "This is what happens when maps don't work. You should have seen KDA an hour earlier." Smartass. The stupid map stayed like that for the rest of the trip.

Still, we managed to get lost every single day. Sometimes it was just a missed turn or exit, resolved by circling around and trying again. But there were some larger navigation mishaps such as the night we tried to find the hovel for the first time.

Our first night in the hovel.

The drive from Trier to south-central France took far longer than I had planned. It should have taken a total of 10 hours divided between two easy driving days. Instead, we were on the road for almost 8 hours the first day and nearly 12 hours the second.

Before we leave Germany, I thought I put up some photos since I didn't take many myself and the previous blog post was a bit light on images.

Me and my mother, Judy.

Trier at night. The Christmas Market hadn't opened yet but they were setting up.

Um. Words fail me.

 

KDA in Bernkassel-Kues, Germany. Pretty pastel paint on the buildings.

My mother and her husband Dave, Trier, Germany.

The Porta Negra at night, part of the original Roman wall and fortifications around the town. Our hotel in Trier was a stone's throw from this gate.

We managed to navigate out of Trier using some crappy printed Google maps, and find our way to Metz, France, and then to the Orange store in downtown Metz, all due to the excellent navigation skills of DSL (she did direct me towards an oncoming bus the day we arrived in Trier but we'll let that one go...). In the Metz Orange store, I purchased a microSIM for my iPad so we could use the Orange 3G network to get to the maps for the GPS software.

  

The cathedral in Metz. Metz turned out to have a very pretty old town center. That entire northeast corner of France is certainly worth spending more time in.

In the next day and a half, we managed to navigate out of Metz, south through Burgundy, and west to Limoges. By the time we arrived in Limoges, we were approaching 9 hours on the road for that second day. It was dark, cold, and we were both tired. I was navigating.

To be honest, I thought I knew where the house was--the address was in Saint-Laurent-sur-Gorre which was relatively easy to find on the map. It is a small village located a few kilometers southwest of Limoges. And in fact we made it to that little village without too much trauma.

  

This is a view of the entire "main drag" in Saint-Laurent-sur-Gorre.

And that's where luck, maps, and technology all failed us. Not because we had bad luck or bad technology. But for technology to work best, you do have to have a reasonably good idea of where you are supposed to end up. As it turns out, that is the one critical bit of information that we did not have.

  

This is the speck called La Cote. It's so small it doesn't have any stores. Not even a tabac shop. View is north from the end of the street where the hovel is located.

From Saint-Laurent-sur-Gorre, I had to revert to the instructions emailed to me by the ditzy absentee owner. And let me just put it all on the table: that woman couldn't navigate her way out of a wet paper bag. Words like "north" or "west" are not in her vocabulary. Tidbits such as "go 2 km down this road" were apparently just too much information for her to provide. Even comments such as "turn left at the sign for La Cote" were far too complex. She mentioned "landmarks" that had no signs and never mentioned the numerous signs that were actually there. Here are her directions exactly as she emailed them to me:

Continue to Saint Laurent going through the town on the main road. As you follow the road round you will see a Fire Station on your left and a School on your right. Continue up the hill past the gendarmerie and take the next turn on your left. This road leads you out of the village. Continue until you come to a crossroads and turn left. Carry on and take the second turning on your left (there is a house at this junction), our house is first on left down this lane leading you into a courtyard with a barn to the left or facing you as you drive in and our house is on the right hand side of the same courtyard.

DSL and I spent TWO HOURS driving in circles looking for the hovel. In the dark. After hours and hours of driving already. You can imagine how frustrated and tired we were. Main road? All roads were two-lane or smaller. Note the bit about "this road leads you out of the village"? We took every single road leading out of the village at least twice (there were about half a dozen of them). Was a "crossroads" a four-way intersection or just a turn left or right off the main road? Any of these were possible. We never figured out where the fire station was. We think we identified the location of the school during our second week passing to and fro through the village.

In fact, out of that entire paragraph of gibberish, the only landmark we could find was the gendarmerie. We would pick a road, drive kilometers out of St-L-sur-G, testing all possible turnings to see if they fit the "model", give up, and return to the gendarmerie.

In desperation, after two hours of this, I called the owner. Her directions on the phone were even more frustratingly vague. In the end, she called up some English guy she knew who lived in the area. He met us at the gendarmerie and we followed him back to the hovel.

This is an amazingly beautiful picture of the hovel taken after we returned from one of our day trips (more on those in another post). This was the only evening it didn't rain or snow.

As a result of that first traumatic evening, every single day as we drove through St-Laurent-sur-Gorre, we would sing out "Bonjour, Gendarmerie!" as we passed our one and only landmark.

 

We snapped this on our way out. This is the only picture in this post that I can claim.

We got lost at least two more times returning to the house in subsequent days.

The hovel is on the left. Another nice picture despite the grey skies. The owner should hire DSL to make publicity shots for her ad.

 

Another amazing shot of the back of the hovel. This was the only evening it did not rain or snow during our 11 days there.

Still, once we got in the groove, the iPad proved to be an invaluable tool. Orange has astonishing cell coverage across France, even in the country, and we used the GPS software on the iPad every day to make day trips to all sorts of amazing places in south-central France.

Even in the hovel, we could get to the Orange 3G network and check email. Both of us had our iPads with books and other entertainment loaded up. The biggest problem in the hovel was finding a working outlet to recharge the things. Lack of reliable internet connectivity, just like the lack of hot water, would have driven us out of the hovel much sooner.

Wine at hand, fire to the right, covered with down-filled duvet, reading an ebook on the iPad. Despite the fact that the kitchen and our bedrooms were colder than the inside of the refrigerator, this wasn't too bad.

"Ou sont les toilettes?"

I've been taking French classes through Community Education here at Aramco. DSL started the Pimsleur taped language program and I followed her example as soon as I realized to my dismay that the third French class wasn't offered last fall like I had hoped. I knew going into to this trip that my French was extremely limited. Still, I hoped that enthusiasm would help me past the rough spots.

And in fact, it did. I attempted to speak French in every conversation that I had during my stay there. Mispronounced, halting (I speak two or three words at a time then pause so I sound like I have either a speech impediment or a learning disability), limited to present tense or only one type of past tense, with only a few dozen verbs at my ready disposal (I know more but in the heat of the moment I'd revert to using just a few reliable ones)--the French people we interacted with were for the most part amused and quite pleasant about it all.

Limousin countryside. Nothing to do with language, just a pretty picture.

When I had interactions involving more than just a sentence or two, like talking to the B&B owners in Cour Cheverny over breakfast each morning, I found that the French were never shy about correcting my mistakes. And I was extremely careful to repeat the correction back to them to make sure I had it right. They'd beam and nod their head and we'd continue stumbling along.

Overall, I'd say the first immersion experience was a success. 

Baked chicken. Yum!

One of the secrets is context. If you sit down in a restaurant and the waiter comes up and starts babbling away in French, first, be flattered that he didn't peg you as a tourist the moment you walked in, or that he's at least polite enough to know that you are a tourist but will pretend otherwise for the moment. And second, you can assume he is talking about what you want to eat and drink. So I'd listen for a handful of familiar words and take a stab at a reply.

We spread wood out around the living room each morning in the hopes that it would dry a little by evening.

And the other secret is planning. I'd actually plan out what I wanted to say before I opened my mouth. This helped a lot during adventures such as negotiating with a neighbor down the lane from the hovel to buy a new allotment of firewood. He spoke not a word of English--just a country boy, really. Afterwards, DSL said, why didn't you stand there talking to him longer? He seemed to want to chat more. (I agree that he found us rather amusing.) But I was just so relieved to have actually accomplished the transaction that I figured, better stop while things were going so well.

 

Fruits of another successful language adventure: the box of firestarters I purchased next to the motor oil which we had used the night before.

I spoke French during the entire transaction to purchase an Orange SIM card for my phone in Blois. And DSL and I had a riotous time in the Marche de Noel in Aixe-sur-Vienne chatting to the various vendors. The honey seller in particular got quite a kick out of my poor, ragged French. But he really stumped me when he asked me if I liked Obama. Since I couldn't make any reasonable reply (I can handle concrete conversations about buying sausages or wine but not ones about philosophical topics), I asked him in return his opinion of Sarkozy (he wasn't very impressed with him).

Baked pasta layered with goat cheese and homemade tomato sauce cooked up with fresh basil, garlic, and onions. Yum!

Now I'm going to tease DSL a bit because she hardly spoke French at all during our three weeks galivanting around. In fact, one of the only complete sentences I heard her utter was when she asked a waitress where the toilets were.

This self-portrait of DSL just cracks me up. So serious! She put this caption on it: "Took this photo to prove I was there." Hovel is the second house back along the lane.

Such innocence. On our drive from Trier to Limousin. We had no idea what was in store for us.