La phonétique française

In recent months, an English friend and I have been exchanging examples of what we find to be amusingly vague artistic descriptions of French cultural events and performances, particularly as we've come across them in regards to the Marseille Year of Culture.  (You can find out more about this Year of Culture's happenings at www.aixcentric.com.)  My latest find is from the website of the French performance company that put on a huge spectacle (performance or show) in Aix last Saturday night.  The professional company Transe Express describes itself as inventors of imagination:

Transe Express play in open spaces to provoke the meeting of a public. Without limitation, the artistic mediums and modes of expression are the ingredients for our creators. Music, visual arts, prouesses, circus skills, fire, literature, metallurgy, opera, rock, dance, with a preference for theatre, found at the corner of each of our philosophical stones. Shock creations which at times invest a stage, non-conventional spaces but principally the streets ; Intriguing the public in their everyday lives ; Unique adventures to transform a city, to «dress» a strong moment of an era. The team is constituted of a hundred actors, aerobats, acrobats, bell ringers, dancers, percussionists, singers, string quartets, welders, technicians, forgers and others that make up the motley crew who regularly realises the project of the Company : Ephemeral creations or repertoire shows, close proximity, aerial or ambulating spectacles.

( see more, http://www.transe-express.com/en/company)

No, this isn't a bungled translation from French; it's meant to sound like this, and I've read many equally and strangely vague descriptions in French.  In a way, the language reflected the show we saw, which was really amazing, but also really hard to describe precisely.  (We've had other similar experiences last summer, see Les spectacles, July 2012).  This time, along the main boulevards in town, we saw floats of giant human dolls singing in opera-rock falsettos, acrobats playing the drums with their bodies, and giant mobiles of human musicians swaying under construction cranes in the night sky.

All of this floatiness, in how some French express themselves in words and actions is perhaps related to something else I only just realized concretely about the French language, and that is that French is not a phonetic language.  The precise sounds and pronunciations (and sometimes spellings) that I use as my guides, especially as these come from Finnish and even from German, should really be forgotten when it comes to pronouncing and trying to understand spoken French.  I took an illuminating course on la phonétique française (French phonetics) this year in which I learned rules about the sounds French words make.  One learns about the sounds themselves by learning how to use the lip and tongue in slightly different combinations, and then these sounds correspond to so many different spellings that it's hard to keep everything straight.  I don't have them down well yet, but I do better understand that I can swallow quite a number of letters in many words.  For example, for non, nom, n'ont (no, name, don't have), I can just drop the last letters when speaking, or I should listen really, really carefully to the context because these are all pronounced exactly the same (approximately: noh).  It all feels very loose and imprecise.  I even get tripped up on phrases that aren't homophones as there are plenty of rhyming sounds in French that can also trick unsuspecting listeners.  How about the radio story last week about the anti-gay marriage protests which were led by what sounded like Brigitte Bardot?  I thought her thing was animal rights?  In fact, yes, she is the former French hottie-turned animal rights activist, and it's a woman named Frigide Barjot, who is involved in the anti-gay rights protests...who has taken on this name as a pun on Mme Bardot's name, amusing herself and also obviously confusing foreigners trying to get a handle on French!  Here's what I think: maybe the lack of phonetics in French, all the many different spellings that come with the same sounds or almost similar sounds that change just a bit with little changes in one's lip and tongue positions, maybe all this looseness is somehow related to the floaty, ephemeral, gauzy, non-conventional, limitless fashions in which the French language mirrors and paints pictures in the sky, of adventures and breathtaking spectacles which capture our collective philosophical imaginations...?

Gum + butts

After nearly 17 months, my family spent the week after Christmas among other English-speakers in an English-speaking country.  What a relief to finally be seen as somewhat intelligent, to be able to make small talk or polite talk with some confidence and understanding.  (Today, I was back to being unable to do any of that, with neither the sales clerk at Monoprix nor the woman taking my order at Bechard's pastry shop!)  

However, language, even if shared or widely spoken, is not static nor is it unrelated to the culture in which it exists.  Britishisms are popular in the U.S. these days (I wrote about them briefly in Who is barmy over what? October 2012), but we still had our moments in London where we had to think twice, just like the French have to do when visiting Switzerland or Belgium or parts of Africa.  London signs noting "subway" do not lead to subway trains as we know them in the U.S., but to subterranean paths under a road to the other side.  We didn't mind "minding the gaps" and doors of the Tube once we got to the real Underground, because we could at least understand what was being said.  Our Beefeater guide at the Tower of London on the other hand was incomprehensible at times!

The British use English and speak of topics in ways that seem especially bold, direct, almost irreverent to our ears and eyes, and that too is cultural.  They aren't shy about telling you where to put your trash, gum and cigarette butts, for example.  (I wonder if such direct language might work better in France too where generally things are much more polite or even unaddressed, but where the current approaches to dealing with the dirty business of little French dogs or the ubiquitous cigarette butts obviously don't work well.  Why not try it? La poubelle est ICI-the garbage can is here!)  In regards to other kinds of butts, we were directed by acquaintances and guidebooks to check out the knickers and pants at Marks and Spencer, and we are now well-supplied in the underwear department.  And in stocking up on English-language reading material at Waterstone's bookstore, I found one of the past year's most popular British books, the feminist-memoir, How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran.  Her English is as lively, in-your-face, and 'skanky' as the stories she tells of coming of age in post-modern England. 

On the other hand, direct or no, there are some less comprehensible customs and language usages in Britain that leave us shaking our heads (just as there are in France, the United States, in every society in fact).  I wondered about the labeling of trains within the Tube stations; these are either east- or west-bound (instead of consistently being labeled by their ending destination as they are in Paris), but it seems that some are actually traveling more northerly or southerly.  How to decide which one to get on, if you are in a hurry?  On another transportation point, having just mastered 'French driving', I found myself wondering, strictly hypothetically, would I be able to repeat that feat in another country...where the driving takes place on the left side of the road but on the right side of the car?  Wouldn't it just be easier, for drivers and pedestrians alike, native and foreign, to have everyone always look to the right then left, rather than having to tell people over and over that in fact, you have to look left at this crossing, and right at that one?

Leçons françaises

At the end of January, we will have been in Provence, and in France, for 6 months.  You might be wondering how our French is coming along.  From the start of school in early September, both the boys, and Allen and I, have had des leçons françaises (some French lessons), the boys at school, and Allen and I privately, at our home.  The boys were put into a special beginning French for foreigners class with just a few other students, and while they may have felt that progress was slow initially, at les réunions de parents d'élèves (parent-teacher conferences) in December, their French teacher seemed pleased with their progress (at least that's what I understood as the conference itself was in French!).  This week both boys remarked that they feel they have made a huge amount of progress in understanding French.  Some subjects, such as SVT~sciences de la vie et de la terre (biology and earth sciences) remain difficult, even for the native speakers, and some teachers are a bit more willing to make accommodations than others to beginning French speakers.  Overall, the school has been quite supportive of our boys, and what the boys learn there is being reinforced by the opportunities to speak and hear French elsewhere.  They can order meals for themselves, as they did today at burger joint with some friends after their early Friday dismissal, they can get themselves to and from their sports trainings, and they bring new phrases home to share over the dinner table: c'est pas grave (it's no big deal, or it's not serious), or ça veut dire quoi? (what does that mean?).

As for Allen and me, we are putt-putting along with our twice a week lessons at home with our French professor.  With her, we focus on dialogues in our French book, or we discuss a current event or something in our lives (like apartment-hunting or ultrasound terms), building our vocabularies and grammatical skills.  Thanks to what we have learned, we are now able to arrange occasional rides to the boys' games or tournaments with French families, buy some major appliances and arrange delivery to our apartment, order food, like a 4-kilo turkey for Christmas, from the local butcher, and renew Allen's residency card at the sous-prefecture.  I am pleased that I can now understand the automated voice commands on my mobile phone well enough to delete old messages!  Most telephone transactions remain difficult though, so I relied on a native French speaking friend to set up the utilities in our new apartment, and Allen's co-workers have also helped.  Because of his work, Allen has more opportunities to speak and hear French than I do, although English is spoken quite a bit at the office.  His French comes with a German accent (he spent 6 months in Germany as an exchange student in high school and speaks German well).  If you've read any of the French Tintin comic books in translation, Allen sounds like one of the Teutonic villains in Tintin's adventures, all of whom pronounce the soft French cee sounds as zee's.  

We haven't yet seen the new film, but the comic books, in the original French, comprise Jori's and my new favorite French reading material.  We can actually read and understand the stories, and for me, I appreciate the reinforcement of the relative pronouns or an imperative verb form that I have just learned (although it took a French friend to point out to me that Tintin is pronounced tan-tan in French, not tin-tin like we say in English!)


Going back to the German, I am finally at the point where my French vocabulary is big enough that when I'm searching for a word, I'm no longer thinking of the German equivalent, as I was when we first came in August.  In fact, a bittersweet thing has happened in that my German, which I studied in high school and at university for six years, is being replaced by French.  I have realized this over the past few months as I have had the opportunity to speak German with a soccer parent originally from Strasbourg, and a local wine salesman from Düsseldorf, and each time I meet either of them, I find myself tongue-tied, saying oui instead of ja (yes) and mais instead of aber (but), and fewer and fewer words in German come to me.  It's an interesting phenomenon because while the German is being undermined, my Finnish does not feel at all impaired.  Linguists have long noted that children and adults acquire second languages differently, and UW neuroscientists who study language acquisition suggest that second language learning early in life may affect the brain's flexibility in how it learns and uses languages and perhaps even stores them  (see for example, http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/bilingual-babies2019-vocabulary-linked-to-early-brain-differentiation).  Perhaps languages learned in early childhood, such as my Finnish, occupy a different part of the brain or are accessed differently, than languages acquired later in life, as German was for me.  If so, that space where the German is or was in my brain isn't very large or deep, as I seem to have quickly cleared it out for the language I need at my disposal the most right now.  That said, my bigger issue is having enough opportunities to speak a more sophisticated French.  Because I work at home, spending many hours each morning online working in English, I supplement my lessons at home with a weekly or bi-weekly episode of Coffee Break French (see http://radiolingua.com/shows/french/coffee-break-french/ ) or I listen to French radio while I chop vegetables or wash dishes, and I read the French papers online as much as I am able.  I am comfortable with and rather enjoy taking care of business with emails or sms-messages in French, but speaking and understanding spoken French is really where I need to improve.  Most days, the only spoken French I typically exchange is with vendors or shopkeepers, or sports coaches.   It's not terribly conducive to getting my French to the next level, as I'm ready to move on from passé composé (present perfect tense) and to be able to say more than avez-vous la coriandre aujourd'hui? (do you have any cilantro today?).  I'm also quite motivated to stay ahead of my kids, so I'm thinking about how to accelerate my language learning.

All in all, our language situation at this point, almost six months in, c'est bon (it's good).  We're managing fine, and for me anyway, I am quite inspired by the non-native French speakers around us who have mastered enough of the language to be able to manage more complex transactions (like setting up their own utilities or completing French tax returns?!), and by my children's progress.  Most of all, I am especially grateful to our French friends who include us in social occasions where we can experience French in its most natural settings, as it is spoken among family members over meals, or among friends celebrating events like fête du rois (Epiphany) last weekend.  Those are the places for real language learning.