As MJ and I descend upon the City of Light this Thanksgiving weekend in lieu of celebrating the exclusively American Thanksgiving holiday (really taking a risk that Covid-19 shutdowns won't extend from Austria to all of Europe) I suddenly swelled with a burst of inspiration to refresh my French language skills, which have been dormant since my last AP French class in high school, more than 16 years ago.......ever since then it's been bits and scraps of French sprinkled through my life: a jeopardy question about the French word "avant-garde" here, a football wide receiver named Pierre Garcon tere, watching Midnight in Paris (great Woody Allen movie, perhaps his best) there. My adult self probably should have warned my high school naive self that applications of French just doesn't come up that much in my adult life, especially living in Los Angeles, where Spanish is king for second languages and as I moved further and further away from Canada, where it could actually be useful in cities like Quebec. I also found that watching movies/ videos with French subtitles was so very helpful, whereas dragging through 6th period French class (I liked the high school French teachers, but it's hard to keep any teenager's attention, even in 2004-2005 without Iphones) just didn't have the same effect. Lupin on Netflix was the one that I found to be quite entertaining while providing enough dialogue to practice listening skills.
I'm thankful (as we get closer to Thanksgiving) that I did learn French; it laid the groundwork for at least some working knowledge of French, and gave me confidence that I could acquire other languages starting from scratch later on, like Japanese and Korean......I also have found that Spanish and French are great second languages for high school students..... they're sufficiently similar to English that it's not tedious, and learning new words and the feeling of getting smart (kind of like the adrenaline hit of getting a question right on Jeopardy) reinforces continuing to learn. And both Spanish and French have rather easy vocabularies.....it's not hard to remember "un chat" is a cat, or "garcon" is a gentleman (like the Beauty and the Beast villain) especially since there are references to French culture and language in so much of society. It's the non-Romance languages that have nothing in common with English like Arabic, Chinese (all the Asian langauges), Hindi, Sanskrit, etc. that present the biggest challenges and put up the largest barriers to entry. Beyond the surface level, though, French grammar is quite a bear to understand with all the tenses and conjugations as well as memorizing which are masculine and feminine nouns (I never got the hang of these) and pronounciation is particularly tricky, as I've never properly rolled "R's" in my life.
Anyway, I actually doubt I will use any French or have to learn any French to survive the (grueling!) 3 days we'll spend in Paris, but it might be cool to understand the metro directions, for instance, or someone chatting at a restaurant somewhere (if we can even get into any restaurants with the Covid restrictions) or just learn the French names of the touristy cites. (Île de la Cité).
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