Une semaine en France, pt. II: Hallo! Ik ben Rachel, en ik ben gek.

Or: the wedding!

One of the things I was asked a lot over the weekend and few days following is whether French weddings are different from American weddings. I generally answer that they’re pretty similar, but it would actually be more correct to say I’m not really sure, since I haven’t been to a wedding since my early teens. I guess the main points are the same: friends, family, food, booze, nice clothes, dancing, etc…but I also could not imagine a bread crocodile filled with petit fours at an American wedding. Having the married couple ride on a tractor is actually something I could see happening in North Dakota, though J

The other thing that was pretty different is how international it was: people were speaking French, German, English, Italian, even a little Dutch…it was interesting to meet older people fluent in a foreign language. The groom’s family comes from the region right on the border with Germany, and it was quite common for them to start in French, but seamlessly switch to German when they noticed their interlocutor didn’t understand.

It was all in all very lovely, and also a ton of fun—but when you mix the Erasmus-in-Berlin crew and an open bar, what else can you expect? Some of the highlights were undoubtedly:

--M. comparing me to an autumn leaf

--Hearing one of the Lac du Bois birthday songs sung in a real French context for the first time, excitedly telling this to A., singing it to him, and having him join in

--M. telling me he gets it, I can stop talking about Lac du Bois

--Me proclaiming I am an awesome drinking buddy and A. and J. wholeheartedly agreeing

--Learning the titular Dutch phrase (Hi! I’m Rachel, and I’m crazy). Apparently J. thought it was a priority that I learn this…

--Getting complimented on my pronunciation of “Geweldig” (great)

(Note: the reader should imagine a smiley face emoticon after every one of these J)

I’m sure there are more, but that’s what comes to mind!

I guess my only regret (apart from not bringing my camera, argh!!) is not brushing up on my Dutch a bit before I went. When you’ve only tried to learn a language for 2 weeks, a 2-week break is pretty long L I really wanted to say more, but I just couldn’t remember anything, and also never really learned modal verbs, so…meh. Sorry, J., maybe next time! (Hopelijk!)

Question Fail Day

When you're learning a language, awkward moments kind of come with the territory.

Take today for instance: I started reading a new French novel on the RER this morning (L'arrache-coeur, really good so far btw), and naturally ran into some words I didn't know. Rather than consult an oh-so-impersonal dictionary, I decided to ask one of the English profs what a few words meant on our way to class. The interaction went a little like this:

Me: Hey, can you help me with the meaning of a few words?

Prof: Sure, what are they?

Me: Um, let me check...(pulls out book, searching for the mostly frequently used unknown words)...how about "crottes de bique"?

Prof: What?

Me: (a little louder) "crottes de bique"? (points)

Prof: Ahhh....goat shit!

And "shit" was about what I was thinking, after having said that in a hallway full of students....

This isn't the first time something like this has happened, however. Once, when I was out in a restaurant with a friend of mine, I spontaneously decided to ask about a word that came up during one of the ads on TV.

Me: Ca veut dire quoi, flore ? (What does "flore" mean?)

C: (embarrassed, sideways glance) Euh...comment expliquer... (Um...how to explain...)

Me: (looking at her expectantly)

C: La flore c'est la bactérie dans les intestins mais aussi dans le (she lowers her voice to whisper and looks right and left) VAGIN (The flora is the bacteria in the intestines but also in the...VAGINA)

I had to snicker. I couldn't help it! Apparently "vaginal flora" exists in English, too, but I necessarily think of "flora and fauna"--wildlife and plants and such, and to think of such a vibrant and lush ecosystem existing in the vagina...well, it was quite amusing! (even if I admit it must be true on a microbiological scale).

Somehow, this all made me feel a bit like a child. How many hella awkward things must we have asked while growing up? Unfortunately I can't remember any right now, although I do remember the first time I experimented using my middle finger to point to people...

But why question fail day, you ask? The next two words I asked from my book turned out to be: 1. invented by the author, and 2. blotting paper. "Goat shit" was by far the most useful.

How do you manipulate the baguette?

It's been a long time. I'm annoyed with myself for not better cataloging my adventures, mostly because a lot of great stuff has happened, which, lacking a written record, is now sinking into the obscure depths of my memory. Here is a small taster, though:

I had my students prepare a short presentation on a holiday they celebrate with their family, and one chose the Chinese New Year. At the end, I gave the others a chance to ask questions, and one boy raised his hand.

"But..." he hesitated, thinking. "How do you manipulate the baguette?"

I was entirely baffled; I was imagining breaking bread, perhaps in some unique, creative way somehow connected to the Chinese New Year...but then I remembered. Baguettes is the French word for (among other things) chopsticks.

"Chopsticks!" I exclaimed. "How do you use chopsticks!"

Problem solved.

Another classic occurred today when I was asking the class to list characters in a royal court in medieval times. One girl suggested "valet". I replied that this was the middle ages, and there were no cars yet, but perhaps we could list "carriage driver." Little did I know, "valet" also means "knave" in French...

These are actually wonderful illustrations of how much you can learn about a foreign language simply by examining mistakes its speakers make in your own native language!

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 ?