(12-13): Little By Little

(12) is Monday, 18 January 2010

(13) is-- predictably-- Tuesday, 19 January 2010

This week has been sort of a false start in terms of the true immersion part of the program... they told me my classes started on Monday, but my trips to Paris VII early this week told me otherwise. The long and short of that is I also had this week free to see Paris with friends (meaning I essentially got my winter break back with interest and a good exchange rate). I'm told I got all the classes I want, so I now have a good sense of my academic schedule: one 2- or 3-hour class per day Monday-Thursday, unless I want to double up on Tuesdays and then not have class on Thursday. Either way, my proud tradition of 3+day weekends continues, and only if I double up will I have class before noon.

As for Paris VII itself... "utilitarian" only begins to describe it. The main classroom building has hallways and stairs exposed to the outside (so they only have to heat classrooms and minimal pockets of hallway). No power outlets that I could observe from peeking into a lecture hall (handwritten notes, after all), and nothing in the way of student cafes or even a vending machine. Closest you get to Vassar's Retreat or any other student center are some small clearings with tables and chairs (surely meant for study only) in the administrative building right next door. That's where all the bureaucratic stuff happens and a few more classrooms are located. Library's also there.

I really should start putting up pictures, shouldn't I...

But the point is, even now I'm getting a roughly-sketched sense of how this whole French school thing is going to go. More on this next week.

The other big event these two days was my host father's birthday on Monday. They had dinner at the house and invited extended family over... I basically smiled, spoke some French, and took a lot of rounds of the compliment "Tu parles très bien!"* Dinner itself was something I'd never seen before in the States... there's a hot plate at the center of the table, a plate of meat passed around, and you cook the meat yourself on the hotplate. It was actually pretty good... go figure. I followed a projected 50% of the conversation** and they were all very nice.

I'm also noticing that my understanding of French is getting better. Not just I that I'm understanding more and more of what I hear, but there's an important distinction about languages I don't think most teachers ever explain. I think a big part of this immersion experience and mastering French language has been coming to understand French on its own terms. I'll explain.

Learning a language is so much more than "how do you say outdoors in French?" or "what do you call a party foul?"*** Now, as I've demonstrated in recent entries, much of this does work, and it's crucial to making your foreign speech functional. But, every so often, teachers or websites will tell you (rightly) that there really is no good equivalent for a word or term in the other language (here's a fun example: "nuc" in French is "back of the head" in English... do you know a one-word equivalent?).

If a language could be translated word-for-word into another, it would be pointless. It wouldn't be a translation; it would be a set of synonyms, bringing (almost) nothing new to the table.

The reason we have different languages is because they do different things well. For instance, the difference between addressing somebody with a formal pronoun ("Parlez-vous francais?") or an informal one ("Parles-tu francais?") doesn't make much sense in the U.S., where having many casual friends (nay, "acquaintances") is normal. You may not see a high school friend for the rest of your life after you graduate, and that's fine. But this dynamic fits very well in a society where social interactions are more formal and one's friendships are fewer, but expected to last a lifetime. When interpersonal relationships are more cut-and-dry than awkwardly wondering where you stand with somebody, that jump from "vous" to "tu" turns subtext into text.

I guess my point is that it's really all about taking the language and loving it for what it is. Chances are, those peculiarities and anomalies that make no sense are probably your best clues toward other things that, once understood, will really make you at home in this language and the culture with which its symbiotically involved.

On a somewhat-related note, getting into a new language takes a lot out of you. This was much worse last week, but living your life in another language is hard. I mentioned that my French capacities would be exhausted by the end of the day, but there's more than that. Doing even mundane things (like purchases) takes a consistent (and consistently larger) mental effort throughout the day. For your next long-term stay in country with a foreign language, remember this: even more than for jet lag, take it easy for a while to accommodate language lag.

So, my French isn't perfect and my daily activities still land me squarely in the category of tourist (an often-exhausted one), but I think little by little I'm plugging in over here.

-Andy

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Footnotes

*"You speak very well!"

**Hard to say for sure; we're still waiting for the Florida polls.

***For those of you who need that one in English, it's something socially unacceptable, but only because it's in a designated party setting. Let's take a popular example. Contrary to what you might think, crashing a White House party just means you've mastered the skills set forth in Wedding Crashers. This is not a party foul. What is a party foul is (even accidentally) spilling your drink. What's worse is spilling your drink on Obama's shoes. Worst of all? Doing that as a fellow Democrat, because you have thus committed a political party foul.