One of my French co-workers told me the other day that "first you understand French, then you speak it."
I told him I hoped so, because in the past couple of weeks I've started to understand a dangerous amount of French. Dangerous because there are times when I think I understand what I'm being asked and start answering a question nobody even thought about. Nothing makes you feel as small as the looks you get when you start talking about the weather but then realize you were asked about the time.
Dave and I have several French teachers, depending on the day we take lessons and who is available. Several speak very quickly and with the southern accent I've come to recognize. Down here, one doesn't ask for vin (wine) by pronouncing it "vah", but instead by saying "vahng". The same holds true for bread (pain - pronounced here as "pahng"), and discussions about tomorrow (demain - said "demaing"). Until lately I've been learning Parisian French - without the g's. If you've studied French in school, or heard it in movies, I can almost guarantee you that it's Parisian French - crisp and precise. Or as crisp and precise as a language that doesn't pronounce the last 14 letters of most of its words can get. Here in the south, there's a sort of twang, in addition to the normal nasality that I still can't bring myself to attempt.
One of my teachers is named Eddie, and he wants me to talk a lot. It doesn't seem to matter much what I talk about, as long as it's in French. I still don't know whether he speaks much English, since when I get stuck for a word the only thing he lets me do is define it for him in French. Then he attempts to figure out what I'm talking about and gives me a French word for it. Whether it's the right French word or not is still questionable in my mind, since the whole exchange hinges on my ability to define things clearly enough in the first place. A cranberry, for instance, I described as a small round berry, very red, very acidic, from which Americans make juice and sauce for Thanksgiving. I could have been describing a holly berry for all Eddie knew - why did I think telling him about Thanksgiving would help? They don't celebrate it here, and they don't have any cranberries either. After a long while, I suspect Eddie wound up giving me the word for gooseberry and left it at that so we could move on.
Despite the Great Cranberry Confusion, Eddie and I persevered in discussing American foods. You try explaining beef jerky to someone who's never seen it before. "It's beef, dry, in slices, with a Japanese sauce which calls itself teriyaki," I said. Eddie looked at me like I was from Mars. My grammar was flawless, but my topic was incomprehensible. I finally had to pull out the stash I brought back from California and let him sample some. "It's hard to chew!" he noted. Yeah, I guess I left that part out. I don't think beef jerky impressed him at all, although my American cats were all over him for a taste.
The jerky tasting led to a reasonable set of questions - "When do you eat this? Is it a breakfast food? Do you do something with it?" I explained that it was a snack, something for between meals (I've never heard of anyone sitting down for a meal of beef jerky - unless said person was in college, and then, well, what can you expect? If you or any of your loved ones have had a real meal that contained beef jerky, I can only say I'm sorry to hear that). The snacking reply brought a puzzled look and the question-cum-statement "Americans eat between meals a lot, don't they?"
Well, yeah, I guess they do. "Why?" he asked. Oh my. And this is where I get stuck in so many of these conversations. The French have a sort of expectation that there is a reason for everything. It's ingrained culturally that there's a right way and a wrong way to do things. So if Americans eat between meals, and French don't, there must be a reason for that. But I'll be darned if I know what it is.
"They're hungry I suppose," was my lame reply. I felt like I'd let down the home team since I couldn't justify our behavior.
Another day we started the lesson with Eddie asking for a recipe that I like to make (we got on a food jag one week). I knew we were in trouble - I can't keep straight the difference between braising and sautéing, or grilling and broiling when I speak English. I had no hope in French. I picked the easiest recipe I could think of that doesn't come out of a box: Vanilla Salmon. Caramelize about 3 sliced red onions in a pan, add ¼ cup of currants, a splash of red wine, ½ tsp or so of cinnamon, a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg and cook until the currants are soft and puffy. Remove from the heat, spread in a baking dish. Bury 2 vanilla beans in the onion mixture, place 2 salmon fillets on top, skin side on the onions and bake uncovered at about 250 until the salmon is done. Remove the vanilla beans and serve.
Problem? I was missing the words for pan, currants, splash, nutmeg, puffy, to spread, baking dish, beans and skin. That's rather a lot, so it took an achingly long time to just describe the ingredients. Think about it for a minute - how would you describe nutmeg to someone, particularly when the vocabulary you possess to describe it is at about the level of a three year old? Exhausted, we eventually did get through the ingredients list, although if Regis were to ask me right now how to say "baking dish" or "nutmeg" in French, I'd have to use one of my lifelines.
The mathematical effort came when I remembered that the French don't measure stuff the same way Americans do, so talking about a cup of this or a teaspoon of that makes no sense. Even after I pulled out my measuring cups ("They're pretty!" Eddie exclaimed) and spoons ("What is this T-S-P and T-B-S-P?") there was still general confusion. And I felt abandoned by the gods when we got to the temperature for baking. Converting Fahrenheit to Celsius would have been irritating enough (and something I can't do without a calculator and a reminder of the magic formula, although my husband can do it in his head, which is one of the reasons I married him), but a lot of French stoves just have numerical settings, not temperatures. Do you set something to cook at 1 or 3? Who knows?
90 minutes later we'd struggled through the entire procedure. Even so, I don't think Eddie is going to run home and try to make Vanilla Salmon. After all that effort on my part to teach him the recipe, he told me that it sounded too sweet for him, and as a change of subject, wanted confirmation that Americans like sweets.
Yes, they do, I replied, resigned. But the English like them even more, so there. Maybe it comes from being a former colony?
I know when I'm grasping at straws. But what I take for granted as normal, those things I never even thought about at all before now, I'm suddenly called on to explain. What's a cranberry? Why do Americans eat between meals so much? Why do they nosh on sweet things so often? Did any of them ever really think Tattoo on Fantasy Island was funny? I just don't know and even if I did, I probably don't have the vocabulary to say it.
Sometimes I try to counter these questions with some of my own. Why does everybody here drive like Mario Andretti? How can so many people look me right in the eye on the street and then proceed to walk directly into me? What's the deal with burning the pizza all the time? And hasn't anyone heard about curbing their dog?
And you know what happens when I make these queries? I get the quintessential French reply - hands upturned, lips slightly pursed, they shrug. "C'est normal," they claim.
Maybe my co-worker's maxim about speaking French can be turned around with regards to understanding French culture. Perhaps if I act French, then I will understand the French. If I start driving like a lunatic and walking into people at the mall I might begin to understand the appeal. Come to think about it, there is something attractive about the idea of crashing down the street without concern for oncoming pedestrians.
So long as I'm not snacking while I do it. That would be a dead giveaway.
- KNP March 26, 01
