Je ne comprends pas le français. (But I'm working on it!)
So in preparation for
my trip to Montreal, I asked my sister-in-law Lynette for help with a simple French apology, since she had taken French in college. She refused to help, based on one really important fact: in French, it's all about the accent. In this simple phrase...
Je ne comprends pas le français. (I don't understand French.)
...at least 7 out of 26 letters are either barely spoken or else completely silent. (At least to American ears. Linguists have demonstrated that before a certain age, children can hear and recognize phonemes from every human language; but as they start to develop language skills, they lose the ability to discern phonemes that aren't in their native language. Weird, huh?) That's over 25% of the letters that aren't pronounced. A written French phrase pronounced as an American would sound out the letters is almost completely unintelligible to a French speaker. Here is, as best I can transliterate, how that phrase should be properly spoken in French:
Zh' n' compra pah-l fra'say.
Even that is too fully voiced: the r's in
comprends and
français are so softly voiced as to be almost w-like or h-like. When I hear a native pronounce those words, I can tell I'm getting them wrong; but I can't quite make my mouth get them right.
And here is how an unknowing American might pronounce that phrase, based on its written form:
Gee nee comprends pass lee frankaze.
So Lynette was right: it's all about the accent. Well, not all, but quite a lot. She recommended that I go to
Barnes and Noble and pick up some of their French language CDs. She said that she had some good luck with their Russian tapes; and she further said that the audience wouldn't expect too much out of me, but would appreciate me making the effort. (
And she was right.)
But I'm kind of picky when it comes to language instruction. I've heard from many sources I trust a lot that
Pimsleur is the way to go when you want to get functional in a language quickly. And having tried some Pimsleur in the past, I found it to be pretty good at conversational fluency. It works on a few core principles. One is brevity. Their research says that more than 30 minutes of study per day won't do you any good, because your brain saturates. Another principle is anticipation: where some language instruction methods work by having you repeat phrases, Pimsleur introduces the phrases and then later asks you questions, where the phrases are the answers. There is some repetition, but there's a lot more anticipation. And they like to blindside you: you'll be in the middle of lesson 3, and they'll ask you a question from lesson 2 or 1. And what's surprising to me is how often I'll know the answer when the question is asked out of the blue like that.
So imagine my delight when I learned that
the Barnes and Noble disks are Pimsleur disks. I had no reservations after I saw that, and I bought them immediately.
I've been listening to these disks and working the lessons for about a week now; and though they didn't keep me from embarrassing myself in Montreal (a speaker who won't embarrass himself for the audience's amusement just doesn't understand the power of cheap laughs), I honestly feel like I understand more French today than I do Russian — and I spent two long, miserable, interminably frustrating years studying Russian in college. In fact, my Russian experience convinced me that I have almost no aptitude for languages; and yet now thanks to Pimsleur Instant Conversation French, I'm actually having
fun learning a language. That's a new experience for me.
Now there is a downside to Pimsleur: it's based exclusively on spoken language, not written. The emphasis is on conversation first, just like children learn their native tongue. The problem with that, though, is that I honestly think I can already comprehend a lot of
written French better than I can understand spoken French. Why? Because again: it's all about the accent with spoken French; but there's no accent in written French. When I look at that phrase...
Je ne comprends pas le français.
...I can see a lot in it. The "ne" implies negative (though I would never have guessed that "pas"
also implies negative, and I would never have guessed that a language would commonly use two negative indicators in a single phrase). "Comprends" all but
screams "comprehends". "Le" is "the", even I know that. And similarly, I've heard "français", but I probably could have figured it out regardless.
But when I hear the phrase...
Zh' n' compra pah-l fra'say.
...there's almost nothing there that I can recognize. "Fra'say" is about it.
Why do I understand so much of the written phrase? Well, I first learned the answer in a fascinating old PBS documentary,
The Story of English, that first aired when I was in high school. (And boy, I'm thrilled to learn that's available on DVD! When
crap like this makes it to DVD, it makes me worry about the future of a society that actually wants to dredge up such programs; but then when I learn that this amazing PBS documentary is also available, it gives me new hope.) Hosted by Robert MacNeil, this series provides an overview of the history of the English language. As much as I jumped on the
Cosmos bandwagon with the rest of the geeks,
The Story of English was actually a more significant PBS series in my life.
Cosmos just told me more about the scientific world view that I already held; but
The Story of English opened up a whole new world view for me, the world of linguistics, of language as history. One of the many things that had fascinated me about
The Lord of the Rings was how Professor Tolkien had invented all of his own languages, and how he had in fact written his "histories" (in part) as a way to explain how the languages became what they were. Suddenly,
The Story of English made me see that that was exactly how real world languages work: the language is what the history led it to be.
And then I learned the answer again from
Professor Thomas E. Toon, one of the two best professors I ever had at
the University of Michigan. (The other was
Professor George Piranian, who I'm delighted to see is still listed on the Emeritus faculty of the Math department. Some day, I have to write down my George stories...) Professor Toon roped me in with a class on Tolkien. I mean, come on! Tolkien! I read Tolkien's books over a dozen times before college. It had to be an easy A, right? Well, it wasn't easy, but it was a lot of fun; and that was due in equal parts to Professor Toon's knowledge and to his wit. (When his son was born, he posted a notice in the English department for a "Name That Toon" contest.) And so when I saw the listing for his English 301 class, The Power of Words, I couldn't resist. Here was a class on one of my favorite subjects (the history of English) taught by one of my favorite professors. I had to take it. And I enjoyed every minute of it, despite the fact that my papers were graded by a rather humorless TA who just didn't appreciate my style. (For an assignment on humorous language, I wrote the whole thing in a format that consisted of block-quoted jokes, each followed by a one-paragraph essay inspired by the joke; and then the jokes and paragraphs were arranged in such a way as to form a larger rhetorical point. It would've made a brilliant magazine article, I'm telling you, with the jokes as call-outs and the text as responses. But the TA felt that the jokes should've appeared in-line within the paragraphs, and the paper should've been structured in a more traditional, more academic style. Terminally stuffy, I swear. No imagination, no sense of style at all!) I just kept writing my papers my way, regardless. And I felt vindicated when Professor Toon returned my final paper to me, said some very kind words about it, and gave me a retroactive A for four papers. That final paper — a rather prescient essay (if I do say so myself) on how the evolution of computer terminology and its expansion into general use is a microcosm of the evolution of the English language itself — is still kicking around my office somewhere. After Professor Toon's praise, I just can't let that essay go. (And after all that, I
still went into computer programming instead of English. It's a disease, I tell you!)
So after those two rather lengthy digressions (if you don't want digressions, you've come to the wrong blog), what's the answer? For that matter, you may have forgotten what the
question was by now, so I'll reiterate. Why can I more easily understand written French than spoken French? The accent is what makes the spoken French harder for me, of course; but what makes the written French easier than, say, written Russian? No, it's not the alphabet, though that's a good guess: Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which
Stop, Martin, stop! Please, please stop! Just get to the answer!
All right, all right, I'll stop digressing (yeah, right). The answer is
the Norman invasion of 1066, in which
William the Conqueror led a Norman force to conquer and occupy England. And when the Normans became the central government,
the Anglo-Norman language became the official language of government. And since the English upper class wanted to curry favor with their new rulers, it became the language of the upper class as well.
And since Anglo-Norman is
closely tied to French, that means that the English language gained some very strong French influences. In fact, English became something of a bifurcated language, with two words often standing for one concept: a word for the elite, and a word for the commoners. Professor Toon liked to point out examples from food, since food was one thing the two strata of society had in common: the commoners raised it, and the commoners and the elite both ate it. Thus...
- We raise cows, but we eat beef (from boeuf).
- We raise pigs, but we eat pork (from porc).
- We raise chickens, but we eat poultry (from poulet — though "chicken" is used on American menus a lot more often than is "cow" or "pig").
And so on. There are countless examples where English has two words for one concept, and the more "elite" word is derived very clearly from French. I know it might offend the pride of some Brits; but the language of their aristocracy has an awful lot of French in it to this day. And since American English derives from British English, the same is true here.
See? Language as history. Exactly what Mr. MacNeil and Professor Toon (and even Professor Tolkien) were trying to teach: language is
never static (unless it's dead: nobody's inventing any new words or grammatical structures in Latin these days); and as a language changes and grows, it reflects the history and changes of the people who speak it. That, my friends, is very fascinating to me. It is a fundamental insight that changed my view of so much of the world, and still colors my approach to all sorts of topics. It made me, like Professor Tolkien and Professor Toon, a
philologist: a lover of words, as Professor Toon explained. (Though the etymology is
a little confusing: "philo" = lover + "logos" = knowledge leads to "lover of words"? But apparently "logos" also has a secondary connotation of "speech" or "words".) Oh, I'm strictly amateur in the subject. I have more of a Trivial Pursuit level of linguistics knowledge than any real academic knowledge. But still, the ideas fascinate me, and stick with me, and matter a lot to me. (Witness the length of this post!)
And as an amateur philologist and something of an avid reader, I like to think I have both a sizable English vocabulary and at least some familiarity with the sources for many words. I can recognize some degree of French roots, and Latin roots, and Germanic roots. (I can even sometimes recognize Slavic roots, thanks to those two years of Russian; but those are pretty uncommon in English.) But as those roots have been adopted, they have changed. As English has grown, it has modified in one direction; and meanwhile, despite the best efforts of l'Académie (hehehe), French has grown as well, but often in different directions. From my outsider's view, it sounds like the French language has evolved toward efficiency, toward saying more with fewer sounds by deemphasizing and even eliminating extraneous sounds in the words. The result sounds somewhat liquid or even melodious to me.
So when I see written French, it strikes a chord: I recognize a lot that's there, even though I'm still just beginning my study. But when I hear spoken French, that liquid efficiency undercuts all my knowledge. Sometimes when I hear a sentence on the Pimsleur disks, I have this strange feeling that if I just saw it written down, I would puzzle out the meaning. Practically the first sentence Pimsleur teaches is "Je comprends le français."
(I understand French.) Three out of the four words there I can puzzle out with little effort when they're written down: "comprends", "le", and "français". That leaves only one word, "je"; and it's short, and I remember that short words are usually simple, fundamental concepts. In this place, I would guess a pronoun: he, she, you, or I. From movies and books, I know that you is "vous", so I would be left with three choices. I'm betting that I would guess I from context.
But "Zh' compra-l fra'say"? When I hear that, there's nothing I can easily pick out, especially when the speaker speaks at a normal conversational speed — and especially with those softly voiced r's. The first time I heard it, it sounded like "Zhucompal fra'say." All the English vocabulary in the world doesn't help me to recognize that.
So while I'm enjoying the Pimsleur disks, I'm supplementing them a lot. In particular,
Babel Fish is my friend: it has done most of the heavy lifting of translating for my Ink in 60 Seconds talk, and for this post. I usually listen to the Pimsleur lessons while I'm driving; but when there's something I just can't get, I translate it on Babel Fish later, and it often clears up the confusion.
I think when I get a little farther along, I'll try to pick up some French books (or maybe
comic books). I'll say it again: for the first time, I'm actually having fun learning a language. I know I'll get busy with a lot of things, and it will be hard to stay with this; but I hope I can manage it. It would be nice to say that I finally learned another language.
