Language Learning II

Since making small-talk with strangers is not one of my talents (nor for the French either), I'm not getting much practice in speaking apart from chat with shopkeepers. But Harry Potter has saved the day. It's perfect in many ways -- I already know the story, yet it's still exciting enough to read that often I can forget I'm reading French and just tear along. The translation, according to my teacher, is very well-regarded. I was given the excellent advice to read in French but not to look up any words in the dictionary -- terrific news for the naturally lazy among us, but also I'm finding that I'm actually learning vocabulary, instead of writing down the words, looking them up, writing down the definitions, and instantly forgetting every bit of it.

The one downside to Harry Potter is that my vocabulary is getting very deep in magical terminology, but I'll take what I can get.

Chris is reading his favorite mysteries in French (continuing his binge of Ruth Rendell novels) and they're having the same effect. Today he was able to explain to our class that porter atteinte means to put a black mark on someone's reputation, something he had figured out from the current Rendell book. I gnashed my teeth like Hermione Granger at being shown up so dreadfully, but was secretly impressed.

There's general agreement that it takes children about six months to get a language when they're immersed in it -- they can do it so quickly because they absorb the structures of the new language instead of learning it by thinking it through and translating, the way adults do. The first indication of this was that after about six weeks here, the children started using double negatives in English for the first time. "I don't want none of that," Julian would say, and Nellie would add, "I don't never want any!" We were a little choqué. But all they were doing was imitating the French structure of negatives, which requires two words to complete, such as "Je n'en veux pas!" (I don't want any) or "Je n'en veux jamais!" (I don't ever want any).

Nellie went through a phase of saying French words and phrases out loud, randomly, with no particular meaning intended. So she'd walk through the living room and say, "C'est interdit!" but not because she was telling us something is forbidden -- she was only practicing making the sounds, getting the connection made between her ear and her mouth. Now she's begun speaking in French sentences, can understand Astérix if I read it aloud, and is reading short, easy-reader type books in French herself.

Needless to say, she is very pleased that for once, the youngest person in the family has the advantage.

Julian has always disliked any kind of learning curve. When he does something, he wants it to be correct the first time. At home, when he forgets to say he doesn't understand, he understands nearly all the French Chris and I are capable of speaking. At school, my spies tell me he has begun saying words and phrases in French -- but to us he denies all. 

Nellie and I have begun an ongoing debate over pronunciation -- she corrects mine all the time, because she is learning with the accent of the Southwest, which often stresses the last syllable like Italian does. The effect has carried over into her English, so she says things like, "Stop-pah! I'm coming-ah!"I wish I knew what the accent equivalents would be in the US...when she speaks in Paris, will it be the same as someone from Mississippi going to New York City?

I find all of it -- the accents, the weird way our brains accumulate vocabulary (or not), the way sometimes it feels like jumping into a canoe and whooshing effortlessly downstream on the river of French, and on other days, inexplicably, I'm unable to find words in any language -- all of it is deeply interesting and entertaining to me. Even though I'm finding the experience not simple to describe.

I woke up early, in the dark, and lay in bed looking at whatever planet comes up at that hour in the left side of my bedroom window every morning. I was thinking about what makes a place feel like home, and about how, and I suppose everybody does this, we chase after bits and pieces of how things were when we were children to make ourselves feel at ease. 

Our car has been in the shop since Saturday a week ago (unhappy gear box), but aside from the second installment of Harry Potter in French, there's nothing I need that I can't get by walking into the village. Yesterday was market day, and Chris and I strolled along buying vegetables from the vegetable woman and sausages from the butcher, and a few delicious-looking stinky cheeses from the cheese man. We loaded up on clementines, kiwis, apples, and pears. Then swung by the tiny épicerie for some chocolate and Badoit water. It is an immense pleasure to do this without having to get into a car. 

A few blocks from where I grew up in Richmond, there was a little grocery store almost exactly the same size as the épicierie, and when I was old enough to cross streets I was often charged with walking to Mr. Johnson's to pick up something we needed for dinner. Usually the streets were empty, except for someone out walking the dog. I could give all my attention to the soft red bricks of the houses along the way, to the cobblestones of the alleys, to the drippy branches of the elms overhead. I would squeeze down the crowded aisle to Mr. Johnson himself, in a paper butcher's hat, and ask for whatever my mother had ordered.

It is the same now in Villamblard, a quiet walk to get food. The walk starts with the cemetery across the street, where almost always someone is going in to put flowers on one of the graves. I always look at the iron words at the gate that say Priez pour vos morts (pray for your dead). Once in the village, it's the textures of the buildings that get my attention -- many are of a particular kind of local limestone that gets somewhat crumbly at the edges, and the color is warm enough that it doesn't look grim even under the ever-gray November light. 

Yesterday, the vegetable woman dropped a shallot and muttered, "Merde!" Then, seeing a wizened old lady waiting to be helped, apologized. I stifled a laugh, the old lady cackled, and turned to me with merry eyes, and the vegetable woman was laughing with us too. It sounds like a small thing -- it is a small thing -- but almost always, the tall Americans are not allowed into the jokes of the village. People avert their eyes, not out of coldness, but out of respect for our privacy. So a laugh with the old lady was a great step forward, socially speaking. We exist! And apparently we know what merde means.

Qine!

Last night we and the rest of Villamblard met in the Salle Culturelle for the annual school fundraiser -- qine! We bought our cards for 1.50 euros and managed to find a table wedged into a corner of the big room. It was past 9:00 (or 17:00, the 24-hour clock I will never get used to) but as the French stay up late the room was filled with kids of all ages.

Not just kids, everyone was there. Grandmères, grandpères, teenagers, everyone. It's a wonderful thing about a small village, that when there's an event, any event, everyone shows up for it. In three long rows of tables sat all of Villamblard, hoping to get lucky and win a canard gras (a fat duck), or a bottle of wine, or a ham, or hair products, or a coffee maker. Down the row I could see, people were drinking Cokes and beer. Smoking not allowed.

Many of the adults were playing big cards with four or five smaller cards on each one, with big glittering heaps of multicolored chips at the ready. Qine is a kind of bingo, with each card having three lines of numbers to fill. After the start of a new game, the first person to fill one row yells "Qine!", the person calls out the numbers so they can be checked for accuracy, and they get a prize. Then the game continues until someone gets two rows, and then three, for the biggest prizes. (Admittedly it took us until the end of the night for the rules to be entirely clear.) Since numbers are not exactly my strong suit in any language, one card was enough for me. I was kind of hoping not to win so I wouldn't have to call out my numbers in front of the entire village, and I was not disappointed.

When someone yelled Qine! and turned out to have made an error, the crowd was merciless. Jeering, booing, taunting, wild cackling ensued. 

When we described the game to Julian at dinner beforehand, he was suddenly motivated to learn his French numbers. They are, for the computation-impaired, not so easy -- 70 is soixante-dix, or sixty-ten. 71 is soixante-et-onze, or sixty-and-eleven. The same thing with the 80s and 90s -- eighty-two is quatre-vingt-deux, or four-twenty-two, and 97 is quatre-vingt-dix-sept, or four-twenty-seventeen. At first Julian was asking Chris for the translation the second the number was called out, but then Chris started answering more and more slowly, and Julian began shouting it out himself -- correctly, and faster than I was translating it myself. Studious Nellie was working her card by herself, not minding numbers at all.

Sometime after 10 I sneaked out to go to bed, leaving the other three feverishly qine-ing. The report I got is that Julian filled his second row, Chris shouted Qine!, but it turned out that he needed two complete rows, not the second row complete. 

The crowd was kind.

In the end, no duck for us. But the children got to drink some Coke and stay up really late, and Chris and I were happy to be part of the village, even if once again playing the role of the Hapless Americans.

Les Vacances II

For some reason Nellie and Julian were not interested in lounging around the hotel room, reading and drinking coffee. So we walked. And walked. And walked. Chris got his old New York rhythm back and led us (speedily!) from our hotel on one end of the 7th arondissement to the Eiffel Tower, on the other. Just looking up at it from underneath made my stomach lurch, so happily for me the lines to go up were long enough to discourage Julian. So we hopped on the Batobus and cruised down the Seine to Notre Dame, where the kids had by far their favorite time in all of Paris.

Fascinated by the architecture? A religious experience? Mais non -- the pigeons, of course! 

That night, despite a long forced march home from Notre Dame that had my dogs barking, the children were very rambunctious at dinnertime. We were standing on the sidewalk near our hotel, Chris and I wondering whether they were in any state to enter a restaurant (the time a woman selling crepes out of a truck told me that Julian was mal elevée [badly brought up] still burns, and the last thing I want to do is incur any more French disapproval). Nellie was dancing frenetically and Julian running around behind to poke her -- you know, the Dance of 7 to 9 Year Olds. Then the door to the restaurant in front of us swung open, and a big man with wild gray hair tossed Nellie a champagne cork, threw up his arms and said, "Ohh, la danse!" and then he invited us in for dinner.

Figuring he knew what he was getting into, we squeezed into the tiny place, where at one table a man with an Irish accent was talking about politics, and some French men were at the bar drinking wine. The waiter knew some English but we insisted on using our mangled French which he graciously pretended to understand.

Céleri remoulade, roast duck in foie gras sauce, and crême brulée. Magnificent frites. Superbe.

The next morning we went to the Musée d'Orsay before the children were awake enough to protest. But we hit on the perfect way to do it -- we'd enter a room and immediately sit together on the benches in the middle of the room, and then look at the paintings on one wall, pick our favorites, discuss, then turn around and do the other wall. Hands down favorite with the kids was Van Gogh, with Monet as first runner up. It's kind of a shock seeing that many famous paintings, one right after another, many of which are so familiar because the prints are so popular. "Oh look -- that was in the Trigg's living room at the river!" "That was in my classroom in second grade!" And on and on.

 

The only shopping we did turned out to be in the museum gift shop -- Nellie and Julian got Victorian masks to wear, since it was Halloween after all. We're now the proud owners of a Van Gogh refrigerator magnet. And I got a copy of Ranelot et Bufolet, which is Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad in French. Nellie has just begun speaking sentences in French, so I think she'll be reading it any day now.

Les Vacances

School was out for nearly two weeks for Toussaint, so we went to Paris for a few days, taking the superfast TGV train.

Let's buckle right down to dinner, shall we?

 

The Brasserie Bourbon, where we ate our first dinner, instantly had me sighing with pleasure at the decoration. The banquettes were a mustard-yellow striped velvet. There were chandeliers a yard wide, with hundreds of muted crystals -- not shiny, nothing to glare your eyes -- and reddish-brown shades. The overall effect is muted, soothing, comfortable, elegant, cozy. 

The news was playing on a flat-screen TV. Sheila E. was belting out pop. None of it loud at all, nothing to discourage conversation. The other diners were a single woman with hair dyed very dark (Blonde is not a popular color for hair-dyeing here. They go for dark brown, or a kind of eggplantish color that takes some getting used to.) An Asian person of indeterminate gender in a futuristic motorcycle jacket. An elderly gay man, very chic with his cashmere cardigan and razor-short white hair. 

There was much visiting back and forth amongst the tables, much smoking, many kisses (in Paris, it's three pecks; in the Dordogne, either two or four). The Brasserie Bourbon seemed to be the neighborhood meeting-place, or perhaps there was a particular group that congregates there -- people who work at the nearby Musée d'Orsay, maybe? 

Julian, as usual, ordered a hamburger and frites. The cute waitress took him under her wing, delivering catsup without being asked (!) and calling him, "Le jeune homme" which had him rolling his eyes and smiling. Chris had steak in a roquefort sauce, which he whinged about being too tough, but when I glanced back a few moments later, the steak had disappeared. Nellie had roast chicken with mashed potatoes, which was fabulously tasty, but she was too interested in eavesdropping at the next table to finish. I had cassoulet, which was blindingly delicious. Each bean was a buttery, flavorful marvel. And how I wish I had written down the name of the wine I had a glass of, because it had a dark, mysterious ruby color and it tasted like a magic potion, full of the forest somehow. 

Paris in the fall was like a new place to me. No packs of tourists, no lines, the streets are calm and uncrowded, and there is a feeling that it has opened up a bit, that you can have more of its subtle pleasures, find more of its secret places, feel more at home than is possible during the summertime. The sky was often gray, but there is the occasional gold dome to light it up, or you turn a corner to see a block of buildings in the fading sun that stops you in your tracks, it's so lovely. And of course, cassoulet is a dish for gray skies and frost.