On va prendre le risque

I passed another great French milestone yesterday--I experienced my first French strike!

It's kind of funny--I don't remember EVER being affected by a strike anywhere else I lived, but France is rather notorious for workers strikes (admit it, you are), and it was pretty excepted that I should live through at least one during my time here.

Essentially, this is what happened: both the RATP and SNCF workers who run the RER A and RER B (like S-Bahn/distance trains) were on strike (from what I understand, they had to get extra training and wanted to be paid more because of it), so the RER B--what I take--was only running piecewise, with no service between Gare du Nord and Denfort Rochereau. This was not a huge problem for me, since I take the normal métro in the morning to get to the Gare du Nord and then go to the suburbs from here. However, there were also only 1 of 2 trains running on the line (or 2 of 4, according to some sources :P).

50% is not so bad, I thought, and left at 9:30 instead of the usual 10 AM to get to my 11:30 class. What I did not anticipate, however, is that they would be leaving from a different track. After running around the station, which, while quite well-marked for the actual lines, is not very well-marked for track numbers, I finally found where I was supposed to be departing from. I thought.

Everyone else seemed similarly confused. "Does this train go to Charles DeGaulle?" asked some tourists.

"Yes, we think so," responded one of our fellow passengers. Well, that's reassuring. Sort of.

Others continued to board. "Excusez-moi, mais savez-vous si ce train va à Charles de Gaulle ?" a man asked me.

"Um, je suis pas sûre," I replied. "Il y a quelqu'un qui a dit que oui, mais je n'ai rien vu personellement." (I'm not sure...someone said it did, but I didn't see anything personally.)

Another man got in. He addressed the man who had just spoken to me. "Est-ce que ce train va à Charles de Gaulle ?"

"Nous, on pense que oui, mais on ne sait pas," he replied. "On va prendre le risque." (We think so, but we don't really know. We're going to take the risk.)

This answer just tickled me. Once again, despite an utter lack of information and the potential for chaos and confusion, the French manage to keep a level head. Bravo :)

Auf Deutsch umgestellt

I know what you're thinking: for a blog about a person's time in France, there's an awful lot of German on here.

But that is what this post is about (or should I say, that is it about which it goes :P): my past weekend in Germany and the interesting and difficult language experiences I had.

First, the weekend was simply destined for success since I was visiting some of my very favorite people, who I had not seen for about 11 months. I think it is so encouraging how people who grew up on opposite sides of an ocean can still have so much in common (above all a sense of humor :)) But also our differences prove interesting; I wonder if I would have heard anyone talk seriously about a universal basic income even at liberal Brown University, or question the notion of "the customer is always right"--what now appears to me to be a distinctly American maxim. I also love filling in what seem more and more to be gaping holes in the English vocabulary (I want to petition Merriam-Webster to add "Fremdscham"--vicarious embarrassment--to the lexicon, joining the ranks of other useful German compounds such as "Zeitgeist", "Wanderlust", and "Schadenfreude".)

The weekend also made me realize--quite unfortunately--how much of my German I had forgotten. I'm afraid I'm developing a similar block in German which I developed in French after not using it for about a year. And what's worse, I'm not sure I ever got over the French block. I think the hesitation has three parts: vocabulary, structure, and grammar. The vocabulary part is easy to understand; the word just doesn't come to mind. But I think this is very closely linked to structure--I have learned to use the Latin-based words which happen to be cognates in my French conversation, while I (traditionally) avoid them when speaking in German in favor of something more standard for that language. Equally, I've been suppressing everything I consider uniquely German in order to avoid these vocabulary gaps in French (for example--taking something I just heard on TV--I'm not sure how to say something like ausgerechnet in French, let alone more creative expressions like davon krieg ich Augenkrebs [that gives me eye-cancer]). Avoiding everything uniquely German for the past couple of months has thus taken it's toll, leading to either bland constructions, or even something resembling French on occasion (such as es gibt meinen Vater, der bezahlen wird--same structure as a rather typical il y a mon père qui va payer [my dad is going to pay]).

The other great problem is grammar. As far as I can tell, I haven't forgotten the rules so much--I still know how to decline all the genders in all the cases--but I am far less certain what gender a word is. This puts strain on the already rusty mechanism which notes the preposition or other determiner, jumps ahead to the noun to check the gender, then returns back to the present in time to choose the proper article. This was obviously never perfect, and oftentimes I took an incredibly long time to learn the gender (I cannot tell you how many times I looked up "Visum" to see if it was "der" or "das"), or discovered after an embarrassingly long time that I had learned it incorrectly (for example "die" not "der" Ampel; "das" not "die" Interesse). But now it is worse, because I have now forgotten articles from words I once knew--therefore, I still expect to be able to decline the article properly, and only discover too late that I no longer know how.

Now, after four days in Germany, I am once again in German mode, something I am going to try to keep up until my very important trip to Berlin in a couple of weeks. But in a way that is Schade um mein Französisch, n'est-ce pas ?