Speaking English amongst the Frogs.

Well last week I talked (typed) about the different types of people I have found myself speaking French with. Now, as a companion piece I offer you:

My experiences of the English language in France.

I do genuinely believe that French people speak, on average, more and better English than English people speak French. Mostly I would put this down to the the same reason as a huge majority of English people can pull off a relatively convincing generic American accent. We hear it the whole time. Friends reruns never end (although apparently the cool kids watch How I Met Your Mother these days). This however doesn’t mean that all French people speak amazing English. There are, as there always are, scales of these things.

Firstly we have the bilingual people. One of these is my English teacher for self-explanatory reasons but let’s move on from him. Fast. Among my friends I know two bilingual people. That’s it, and one of them I’m not as school with so we only ever see each other for like two minutes every few weeks at which point we will confuse anyone who’s around by just speaking English to each other. The other bilingual is at school with me and there most of the times that I go out so I see her with shocking frequency. It’s great to know that if everything goes really wrong I have someone that I can talk to in English without feeling like a burden. However her English comes from America which opens up a large cultural gap between us where we find each others’ voices mutually hilarious and unpleasant. (I also know that she reads this so if you’re her then go give thyself a good pat on the back and know that you do a ruddy excellent fine job at speaking the British tongue) I have this sneaking suspicion that there are more bilinguals hiding amongst my teachers and the other adults that I cross on a regular basis but I wouldn’t know since I have never tried speaking to them in English.

I can speak English with a great number of my friends. Many of them are really really good at English and have charming accents and I really enjoy hearing them speak English. However I discovered in my time here the difference between someone who speaks two languages and someone who is good at a second language. When I speak to bilingual people I can change language at will. Every other text, every other sentence – in speech sometimes even mid-sentence. And the same applies to them. In our conversations neither of us will be surprised or bothered by hearing something appear in one of two languages. However with other people a conversation switch into English can’t just happen. If asked to speak in English they can and will but just mixing it in as about as effective as mixing in phrases of Swahili unexpectedly. It’s just confusing.

Some of my friends have asked me to speak English with them so that they can hear it more often and improve their pronunciation and they’ll speak English back to me. Normally this will take place over a meal, which works for me since the cantine, being the single loudest place in the universe is where I most frequently fail to understand French. Obviously these are not the same people as those who already, by some unknown dark force, speak near-perfect English. What this means is that they make mistakes, don’t get me wrong, the others make mistakes too, hell even I make mistakes because I’m not a robot. Yet these mistakes are different, these are the kind of mistakes that an English speaker with no knowledge of any foreign language, or even with no knowledge of French would not understand. E.g “there stay ice creams.” I think we can all agree that this sentence means nothing, since it is translated word for word from the French. These conversations are tough since they require such mental gymnastics as retranslating a sentence twice to figure out what they were trying to say and then correcting them and often getting asked “why”. I can promise you, 99% of the time I have not the slightest clue why we say one thing instead of another thing that seems equally right but isn’t. I cannot explain it all.

Other things I cannot always explain is really obscure vocabulary. I quite like being a dictionary since it makes me think about English. Also, since I often don’t know the French word that someone is asking me to define I get treated to a round of Pictionary or charades or awkward-explaining-what-this-not-very-polite-word-means sessions. (As a side note, I have become very good at French vocab Pictionary since we started studying Proust. My rendering of different wildflowers is now top notch.) However I cannot always be 100% on top form for dictionary duties. A prime example of this was a day when I walked into a class first thing in the morning. My metro had decided to stop itself in a tunnel for an extra five minutes that morning and I was on the edge of being late. I had a headache (which halves my comprehension skills somehow) and had just run up three flights of stairs. My teacher at this point decided that he was so desperately curious about an English phrase he’d discovered that he would ask me right then as I took my seat. Needless to say I did not respond. I found out later that he was in fact asking me about a phrase that was popular in 18^th century journalism, which would be why the recognition bells weren’t ringing in my head. At least, upon seeing my confused little face, the teacher admitted that perhaps I was not the Ambassador of Obscure Vocabulary or at least not at 8AM I’m not.

Tagged: Anglaise en Prepa, English, Folie, Foreign Student, France, French