La France, or Things I Used to be Good at

We are going to France this August for a week. Jack and the kids decided on this, and I agreed. We haven't decided yet where we are going to go or what we are going to do when we get there, but we have plane tickets.

When we go, I'll be five months past my knee surgery, which has a nine month recovery period. I will have to get into good shape, and pronto. When Jack and I went to Paris in 2004, we took the elevator up the Eiffel Tower, and we walked down. All of the steps. Right now, I can get down stairs if I use the "up with the good, down with the bad" method. I'd have an easier time getting up the Eiffel Tower than down at this point, which is really weird. My family also wants to visit Mont Saint Michel in northern France. I have been to Mont Saint Michel when I traveled to France before. I recall there are about 900 steps, give or take a few hundred. For a vacation focused on culture and history, it is going to be a fairly strenuous.

The best part of any trip if that it gives you something to look forward to. I know several parents who have withheld information about their kids going to Disney World or whatnot. I can understand some of that logic--parents might not want their three year old asking every morning for two months if today is the day they get to see Cinderella, followed by the meltdown when the little girl hears the disappointing news.

My kids are old enough to be part of the planning. Both kids are taking French in school, and the Boy has taken a new interest in doing his French homework. I studied French for seven years in middle, high school and college, but that was ages ago. I went to France for three weeks when I was a junior in high school and stayed with a family in Caen, Normandy. My conversational French exploded during that trip, and reached its peak when I was a freshman in college. I used my French a little bit (un peu) in my first job out of college, but not enough to keep me fluent.

At the library yesterday, I picked up some Pimsleur French language CD's. I listened to one CD in the car, and another while I eating lunch yesterday. These are "listen and repeat" lessons, where I have to practice both listening and speaking in French. In 2004, I remember asking at the airport train station in reasonable French, "Pardon me. We would like two train tickets into Paris." The answer came back to me was a flood of nonsense. Jack didn't help when he repeated in French what the woman said to me which I didn't understand in the first place. Oy. Long story short--I can speak French better than I can understand it, and that can cause more problems than it solves. I tried phrasing my questions in such a way that they begged a yes or no answer, but that didn't help either.

That was twelve years ago, and in those twelve years, I've used almost no French. When I plugged in the disks, I was surprised at how much I remembered. I could do and understand the listen and repeat exercises! After about the fourth lesson, I noticed interesting themes of sample conversations.

1. You go to a restaurant and ask if they have beer or wine. You ask a man how much money he has in both euros and dollars. Beaucoup?
2. A wife asks her husband for money and then they argue whether or not a pair of shoes are expensive. (Spoiler: He thinks they are; she thinks they aren't.)
3. A woman gives a bellhop 100 euros, and then haggles him about the price of a newspaper.
4. A man asks a woman if she wants to go to dinner. She said that sounds nice, but she has plans for dinner with her husband. The man then asks the woman if she would like a drink. He offers wine and beer, but she wants tea. Then their spouses show up.

I am not making this up.

I was concentrating so hard it took me a while to figure out that the plot line of this soap opera language class was messed up. With that realization I also began to realize how much real French I forgot. These are the grammar rules that distinguish a true speaker of French from an wannabe. In 2004, I told a waiter that I heard his restaurant had the best cassoulet in Paris. He was delighted I spoke French, and was pleased that I was looking forward to the bean stew. Then he very kindly and patiently corrected my use of "best." I got an "A" for effort and a "meh" for execution. I wanted to say I read Hugo and Flaubert in French in college, and now I barely order a meal in a restaurant, but I didn't.

I don't remember the gender of many (okay, all) nouns. Wine (vin) is masculine and beer (biere) is feminine. I would have guessed the other way around. The gender of alcohol was not a main part of my seventh grade French class. I don't remember which verbs are self-reflexive. I forgot there were such a thing as self-reflexive verbs. And I never really bothered to learn how to conjugate vous, the plural of "you," which doesn't exist in proper English. In improper English, it might be youse, as in youse guys or y'all.

I was listening to one of the CD's in the car between working out and running an errand at U Village. In the car, I heard an addition lesson, which was harder than I thought. Dix et trois font... (fill in the blank.) The first few were easy, but after the tenth one, I had to work hard to keep up. I had to translate each number, add them, and then translate the sum back into French. It was hard and the speaker was fast, but I got most of them right.

I was feeling pretty proud of myself when I got out of the car and overheard a woman talking on her cell phone in French. Of course, I understood none of it, which was a bucket of cold water on my renewed language skills. But at least now I can ask a random guy to buy me a drink at a bar. If things go well, I can ask how much money he has.