Les aventures francophones

Well, I'm still in love with the French Canadian radio station. It's gotten to the point where I actually want to learn French! I think I must be brainwashed by this borrowed bilingual nation of mine. My French is really nonexistent. I like to say that I know two phrases in French:

Bonjour, comment allez-vous?

and, should that go well for me:

Je t'aime beaucoup!

Of course, I do know a teensy bit more, from the 6-9 weeks of French I had in 7th grade (in which I learned silencio!), and, of course, ballet (plie, tendu, dega je, glissade, tambe, renverse, jete, etc., etc., etc.).

And there are a few things I've learned from the radio:

Je suis tambe de toi (which I figured out because of the context and my ballet background!), vous ecutez a radio cils, la sol radio communitaire Francophone de Columbie Britanique, etc. (You'll have to pardon my spelling.) And I've even gotten to the point where I can tell when they're giving the weather report, though not necessarily what the weather will be. Sometimes I parrot these things to people who speak French. (Like my new French-Canadian friend!) They tell me that my pronunciation is very good. I assure them that it's only because I'm mimicking the radio or the French movies I've seen, and that if they were to hear me try to pronounce something on my own, it would be laughable.

Like the letter R. Why is the letter R so impossible to pronounce in any tongue but the native?? The French R is no exception. I only just learned how to roll my Rs last year, after 27 years of R-rolling disability. And now I'm supposed to figure out a sound which is "best approximated as a dry gargle"?? That's very ambitious...

In my toying with the idea of learning French, I decided to start with the library. (Since, really, the radio and ballet will only get me so far). Really I wanted a language program like Rosetta Stone, which is supposed to work really well, but I hoped to get such a thing for free. Unfortunately, our library does not have a computer French course. However, the Forestry Centre librarian, who is a dear lady, was very excited to tell me what options are available.

Apparently there's a French class that runs in the Forestry Centre. It's adjourned for the year, but I'm welcome to join it with them in the Fall. Actually, she's encouraging me to, since if they don't get more people, it might be canceled. I'll just have to teach myself courses 1 and 2 in the meantime. Which shouldn't be so bad since course 1 is all about introducing yourself and your profession and course 2 is about objects likely to be found in the workplace. And that's it.

My reservation, however, is that not only will this be French Canadian French, rather than French French, but, more importantly, this will be French Canadian Bureaucrat French. I'll get to learn things like:

le directeur general
l'analyste
le superviseur
le chef de projet
le ministre
le fonctionnaire

Hmmmm. Certain to come in handy, no doubt. But I don't really want to learn French that will be functional in a bureaucracy. I want to learn French that will be functional.

So I decided to set off on my own. Still feeling like a cheapskate, I got The Berlitz Self-Teacher book. It was only $12! Canadian! And very highly rated. :)

So far I've gotten through the first 6 lecons, though I've been bad about studying my French for the past couple of weeks. I've decided that French is a very difficult language. Particularly the pronunciation. Sometimes you pronounce letters. Sometimes you don't. And for a word, which letters you pronounce can depend much more on the words before and after it, rather than on the word itself. How do they expect a poor, dense American to cope!!!

Oh yeah, I can also say:

Je suis la Americaine gauche! (Just in case it isn't obvious.)

Big nerd that I am, I've started to view languages in a Landscape Ecology perspective. At least as far as pronunciation goes, with the sentence as the landscape. All of the languages that I've studied before - English, Spanish, Japanese - are relatively straight forward. Local patch characteristics are what matters. The pronunciation of a word depends on that word (patch). French, on the other hand, is heavily influenced by the landscape context (surrounding words).

That nutty French...