Mon Professeur de Français

I signed up for my French lessons today.

At first I wasn't sure about taking lessons at all. Regular, traditional language lessons, especially taught in your hometown instead of a native-speaking location, seem to be OUT in a big way. You can find numerous blogs that talk about other ways of learning languages; no one seems interested in talking about language lessons. So I was thinking to myself... shouldn't I be trying to learn French for free, with only the tools available to me on the Internet, plus meeting up with native speakers for conversation practice?

Then I remembered that I have nothing to prove, or to sell. There's nothing wrong with paying for language lessons--I'm happy to give my business to a local entrepreneur.

So I went around the corner and down a couple of blocks to a store that sells African clothing, home decor, jewelry, and cosmetics. There's a sign in the window that says "French lessons". I've often passed it, wishing that it said "Spanish lessons" (or, more recently, "Portuguese lessons") instead. But as happens so often in life, what I have here is actually what I need; I just didn't know it at first.

My teacher is Roosevelt, an immigrant from Liberia who teaches French, Swahili, and African drumming in addition to running the African store. During our conversation I commented that his accent is quite different from my Liberian friend who is a doctor at the hospital. He explained that he has lived many different places and his accent shows it. I understood that immediately: people are always commenting on my own "different" accent and asking where I'm from. Here in Illinois I'll tell them "Oregon" and they'll say "oh, that explains it"; rather than defensively argue that Oregonians do not HAVE an accent, which is true, I laugh and say they ask me the same thing back home. I don't actually know if it's because I've lived a lot of different places (and actually the comments about my accent started when I was a teenager, before I'd been much of anywhere), but that's how I explain it to people. (Because lots of times they won't let it go.)

Roosevelt is engaging and warned me he was going to expect intensity. He turned on the African broadcast of Radio France and told me to start listening online--one of the learning tools often recommended in language blogs. I was glad to hear that he incorporates stuff like that into his method; I know I won't be translating Dick and Jane sentences. Both from the broadcast and from listening to Roosevelt speak French, I think the African accents will be much easier for me to understand and produce than the Parisian accent. If someone told me she was going to learn Italian with a Sicilian accent because it was easier than the Florentine accent I would think she was crazy and possibly tell her she was making a mistake--but I figure if African French is what I need, there's no reason to insist on learning classical French. Not that I have any idea of what the differences might be. But I'm sure they're there.

Aussi, je vais faire la queue quelques films français sur Netflix. Amélie est en streaming et je ne l'ai jamais vu.

Apprendre le Francais

I've never been interested in learning French.

It's always seemed like kind of a fussy language, what ballerinas and people who drink Champagne speak. Definitely like what people who drink Champagne out of a ballerina's slipper drink.

But yesterday I participated in an online seminar for people who are interested in learning about working for the organization Doctors Without Borders, or MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres). I was already interested, but the seminar made me truly excited.

And it answered one of my questions: if I wanted to do MSF, would I be better off continuing to learn Spanish, which I already speak moderately well, or starting over with French?

Answer: Spanish is almost useless in MSF, it sounds like. I think they said around 477 Americans were placed with MSF last year, and only three or four went to Latin America.

So French it is.

French, I remind myself, isn't just the language of people with waxed mustaches and heads of state with fancy mistresses. It isn't even just the language of tough-skinned peasants chewing on crusty rolls and salty sea captains in striped shirts. It's one of the languages used in many of the African countries where MSF works.

And if I'm going to do this, I might as well do it to the best of my ability.

So I cast off the Spanish I learned studying in Guatemala and the Italian I learned studying in Italy, and the Portuguese I was just beginning to learn with the wistful goal of spending the rest of my life, or at least several years, living in the Amazon rainforest, and I take up French.

When I started learning Portuguese I learned about the world of language bloggers. This blog will, I hope, help keep me motivated as I learn.

Google Translate will, at least at the beginning, help me put at least a little of every post into French. Presumably it will be bad French. At least to start with.

C'est l'un des passe-temps plus utile que j'ai jamais trouver.