Part of my french classwork has been in learning sayings and proverbs. Par Exemple: << Ce ne sont pas tes oignons >> = Those aren’t your onions = It’s none of your business. Or << Mettre la charrue avant les boeufs >> = To do the plowing before you have a mule = To do the secondary before the primary matter. And my idiomatic expression of the hour << Quand on parle du loup on voit la queue >> = When you speak of the wolf a tail soon appears = our equivalent of “Ah, speak of the devil!” if someone appears whom you were just talking about. The crucial difficulty in the delivary of this line is the correct pronunciation of the “ooo” sound in “loup” and then the abrupt, simple “k” sound of deceivingly long “queue.”
It was quickly discovered upon my arrival that I have tremendous difficulty in one of the most fundamental french sounds, that should come naturally to an english speaker, but is nothing more than the simple “ooo”. Soon, goon, moon, spoon; nous, fou, tu, coup! Simple. But for whatever horrible reason, the nice round O becomes a very nasal “ue” and thus utterly transforms the meaning of the word. (Don’t worry, I begin every morning saying “nooos, nooos, nooos, nous, nous, nous” in desperate attempt to say it correctly.) For those of you who don’t speak any french “nous” is how one says “we”, and as you could guess, is used very frequently in conversation. SO, at this point whenever I try to say, “nous” I am in fact saying “nu” which translates very simply in to “naked”. For your general knowledge (and to explain my error) you should also know that a fairly crude way of saying “ass” is “cul.” (Pronounced “cue”). All this adds up to that pivitol moment when in sharing my proverb over pleasant dinner table conversation, instead of saying “When one speaks a wolf one soon sees the tail” I instead delivered something that sounded a lot closer to “When one sees a naked person, you soon see an ass.” Delivered to the general hilarity of all as I sat there fully realizing that my “ooos” were still less than sub-par. I am now the newest subject for my host’s daughter to practice her speech therapy.
Learning a new language is far from a passive process. I begin every morning with my dictionary and a notecard where I list new words that I heard the day before, looking up a verb that could come in handy, and adding all the useful words that I come across as I flip through dictionary. I then spend the first hour of the day writing and rewriting my list before carrying it around in my purse to glance at during a free moment of the day. At this point, the nouns are most useful for me to identify the object of which I speak, and any new verbs are stashed away to translate when I hear others speak them. It’s much harder to spout complex “verb” sentences in a new language without previous reflection. As of now “faire, aller, sortir, être” (all those simple action verbs that you lean in the first two years of french class) are painfuly over-used. I’m still in slow process of working verbs like “s’empiffrer”= to stuff oneself, “renifler”= to snuffle, “s’embrouiller”= to be confused, in to my spoken vocabulary. To say that it’s hard and often frustrating is an understatement.
I have moments where I can exultantly spout of what I want to say and understand everything of which my host mother has just ranted on about. I have other moments where I honestly think becoming “fluent” is a lost cause and I can hardly get the most simple sentence out of my mouth. At this point, I utter muddled, weird sentences to the amusement of all, with an accent that I’m told sounds a bit like the British goose in Disney’s “AristoCats” I have very few delusions about looking smart or glamorous.
