Daily Grudge: Learning French

Je suis désolé

I need to start this by saying my dearest friend on this earth, the woman with whom I am about to have lunch today, the person whose wedding I officiated, the first person I texted every time I found out I was pregnant, and the keeper of all my secrets, is French.

This is fine. Or as she would say, “[UNINTELLIGIBLE oui UNINTELLIGIBLE ca va SOMETHING SOMETHING].”

This Grudge is not about the French. It is about giving a twelve-year-old American child the option between learning French and learning Spanish.

When this choice was offered to me, a small idiot raised on the book Madeline and a vague idea that chocolate was better somewhere called Paris, I chose French.

I was promptly whisked into a world of total useless frippery. I was given a French name (I panicked and picked Juliette), taught the various nonsensically enumerated arrondissements in Paris, and instructed to memorize the language’s “subjonctif,” a grammatical tense that can best be described as “a passive aggressive stroke.”

This would all be absolutely fine is Paris (“LA PLUS BELLE VILLE DU MONDE!”) were the place I lived and worked (in either a discotheque or an aeroport), or, crucially, if anyone in Paris would speak French to me.

I acted as if both these things would definitely happen, and as a result continued to study French all the way through goddamn college. There was a point my junior year where I was having full debates about abortion policy and reading Marguerite Duras to the point where I was doing well in oral exams about her books.

The closest I ever got to living in Paris was staying with another one of my dearest friends (WHO ACTUALLY MOVED THERE FOR SEVERAL YEARS) for a week after I graduated. At a party in her cool apartment one night I attempted to speak what I thought was passable French to a very hot person named Simon, and he responded, flatly, almost pityingly in perfect English.

Years and years later, when my husband Simon* and I visited Paris to visit his expat grandfather, I attempted to speak French to his French wife. She spoke French back to me and she may as well have spoken Klingon.

It was then I realized: There is the French slowly and patiently spoken in American schools, and there is the French that actual French people speak. It was like being moderately proficient at playing the recorder and everyone around me was playing the (forgive me) French horn.

AND EVEN IF A NON-NATIVE SPEAKER HAD A CHANCE AT BEING CONVERSANT WITH THE PEOPLE OF FRANCE:

That is borderline useless and who cares. France is a small and racist country (that I am still obsessed with due to years of indoctrination-by-textbook) where the people simply will not speak French to an American. The French-speaking world is a tiny and expensive champagne bubble in ocean of other languages.

That I do not speak a word of Spanish in a country where a significant percentage of the population speaks the language is entirely the fault of a 12-year-old girl who was very enchanted by the movie Amélie.

Offering a student the choice between learning Spanish or French is like offering a drowning person the choice between a lifeboat or a baguette.

And the saddest part is, dumb little pastry-loving me would choose the baguette every time. “Ooooh,” I’d say as I sank into the brine, “You just can’t get a crunch like that anywhere but Paris.”

*Not really. I married another useless American but in the Amélie version, it’s Simon, who in real life was a “poet of abstractions” and extremely gay.