Language Exchanges

Learning French can be tough when you don't really have any French friends to practice with. It's one thing to see words and hear them spoken, but to create coherent sentences in return...now that's tricky. One of the expats we met told me about a website called Polyglot where you sign up and find friends to speak with. He said, I guarantee you, if log on, you'll have a million people wanting to practice English. And within a few days of signing up, I received over a dozen requests to meet. Insane! I didn't have to do a thing. The numbers were a bit overwhelming so I narrowed it down to three girls with my first meeting being this last Saturday. Adam came along as well, and we both eked our way through a two hour conversation. It's one thing to say 'hello, my name is... i live... i like... i come from Chicago....but then to tell your story about who you really are, why you're in Paris, what your plans are (we barely know the past tense of verbs, let alone the future! ha) that's a whole other challenge. We even got into a discussion on prejudices between the northerners and southerners of France, and how that reminded us of our own country's divide. Yeah, it got tricky at times, but I was glad Adam was there to share the conversation. Our French friend knew English very well, so we were grateful she was so patient with us. We have another meeting set up with her again this Sunday where we are to try and describe our own country's politics to each other. We have some serious vocab studying to do ; )

The following afternoon, I had meeting #2, sans Adam, in a cute little tea salon in the 13eme. It was so quaint and warm with walls filled with shelves of tea tins and yarn; I think this must be a local hangout for knitters? But unlike the bar I was in the previous day, this place was much quieter and easier to understand a conversation. Again, for two hours, I tried to speak all in French, and my friend, all English. She, too, was very good (these guys all seem to start learning about age 10 or younger anyways...makes me jealous), and again, it made me thankful that she had such patience. Turns out, she wanted to practice to get over her shyness, and here I am thinking the same thing about myself. I give her, and I suppose myself, a bit of credit; it takes a lot of guts to get out there and speak with a complete stranger, let alone one who speaks a language you barely know. In addition to the meeting this Sunday, I have two more set up next week. As Julia Childs once said, "I'm going to learn this language come hell or high water," and this is my way, so far, to continue forth with my learning with the same enthusiasm as her. The thought of it makes me wince a bit, as you know going into these you will stumble and fall...a lot...but then you always have to remember that sense of reward after saying your au revoirs. Besides, this also gives me a great excuse to explore the city's bars and cafes ; )

BR the Librarian

Shonan the Librarian: 

Delinquent borrowers will be fed to the dragon

So I started volunteering for a few hours once a week at a private school, L'Institute de la Tour, in the 16eme of Paris. They have a pretty cool afternoon program on Wednesdays (since kids don't usually have normal school on Wednesdays) structured to fully immerse bilinguals and non-bilinguals into English. A friend of a friend knew the wife of one of the American teachers working there, so that's how it all started. This has been my third week, now, and the first not to get lost trying to find the right door to enter within the inner maze of the institute's courtyard. The lady at the front must think I'm just plain stupid as she tries to describe to me where to go (and yes, i'm trying to get directions in french...but there are just so many doors!)...not a feeling of pride for this so-called architect. 

This past year, the program has grown immensely, and now there are over a 120(?) kids between the ages of 7-11 split up into 7 different groups based on ability. Classes consist of things like art, theater, writing, literature, vocab, etc...sounded like a cool thing to get involved in. Alas, though, I do not get to help out within the classes (they have high school student from the institute who volunteer for this), so I, instead, have been dubbed the librarian. I felt weird taking pictures in the school, so I found this super sweet librarian poster....(for all you D&D fans out there ; ) most of the other librarian images online were just dirty, ha). And by library, I mean a folding table with 7 bins of books ranked on their difficulty. Each week, I get to knock on a teacher's door every time the classes switch (3-4 times a day), and ask who wants to go to library. The kids come out, and on my spreadsheet, I cross off the name of the book they just returned, let them go find a new one, then write down the new title for them. It takes about 5 min per class. The rest of the time I just sit in the hall waiting for the classes to switch again. This week I went through and organized all the books making sure they'd been ranked properly, and seriously had to laugh at some of the options out there. My favorite was a book called ' THE ROADMAKERS' which was categorized in the 'easy box'. And yes, it didn't have much text, and has a ton of big pictures about those huge machines that make roads, but seriously, the vocab? Here's one of my favorite lines (and yes, I tend to read these when I have nothing else to do ; ) ..."an insulated tipper lorry leaves a pile of dense bituminous macadam." Wha?! I still have a hard time IN english saying the word 'bituminous' (also not another proud moment for this so-called architect), and here it is in this book for mini frenchies to learn english? I had a much better time, though, reading about a little fox cub (un renardeau) who was going to school. This book was super sweet because it had the french right next to the english. So I'd read the english, then try to translate it myself before looking at the 'answers'. Not gonna lie, it was kinda fun, and I kinda felt smart.  

There is a strict 'no-french policy' during these afternoons, but when kids get yelled at, it's all in the mother tongue. Last week, a boy got pulled outa class for calling one one of the teacher's aids an asshole. That kid got reamed in french out in the hall, and here I am, sitting silently at my folding table, staring at the wall, just taking it all in. In fact, I think I got about 80% of the reaming convo down, and THAT made me feel smart. When life slows down as much as it has recently, it's easy to get excited about the tiniest of accomplishments such as these. For now, the librarian job is pretty painless, but perhaps a bit too painless; I'm hopping to get a bit more involved in the school the more I hang around.

How's Your Plumbing?

As I was cleaning the bathroom sink yesterday, the handle to the faucet broke. It didn't break off, it just wouldn't shut off the water. Adam was at work, and I was alone, and I started panicing as I searched everywhere for the sink's shut-off valve. Nowhere. I'm thinking, god dammit architect, if you can't find this..... after a bit of searching and tracing pipes, I found the lever in the kitchen. That's all great, but that shuts off the water for the entire apartment. So it's actually quite humorous. Every time we want to get some water or flush the toilet or whatever, we have to turn the valve and listed to the sink water just flowing away. Our landlord gave us the number for a plumber she knows, and that in itself was a whole morning exercise. And this was just to call to make an appointment! That's when your brain has to switch to full translate mode and you spend god knows how long looking up phrases for any possible scenario that might be met over there phone. It's even more nerve-racking when you know Google translate only helps you so far. What you translate doesn't necessarily come out to mean exactly what you want it to mean. This was my favorite:

Found this phrase online.

I cannot turn the tap off: Je ne peux pas arrêter le robinet.

Thinking I could simply change 'le robinet' (the tap) to 'mon robinet' (my tap) Google Translate informed me this was a no no. Now the phrase means:

I cannot turn off my cock

Lots to learn...looottttttsss to learn.

Learning French

So how does one learn a language? Good question. It still seems a miracle to me with any bilingual individual to be able to just get it. To be able to flip flop back and forth between one language and the next with ease seems miraculous to me. In any case, the more we learn here, the more we realize just how far we have to go to even become close to bilingual. It seems hopeless at times. Other times when a recognizable phrase comes out of the crowd or the TV or wherever, and we immediately understand without thinking, that's when the learning feels like magic. I think if there weren't any of that magic, we would have given up long ago. So in any case, how are we undertaking this seemingly impossible feat? Recently, we've been starting each morning with a 20 min podcast. Our hosts Mark and Anna have become dear friends of ours as we join them with our breakfast for a bit of enlightenment and new vocab. Another best friend besides Mr. Pocket Dictionary is Mr. Google Translate. He can talk both English and French for us, so we like him a lot. There's been many hours sitting with Mr. Translate forming sentences, and us talking to ourselves. Our neighbors probably think we're nuts. Especially when we yell out a new phrase we've just learned, then revert back to english for the rest of the thought. Adam and I have placed post-its around the apartment as reminders and try to speak in French to each other both at home, and especially in public so that our English twang doesn't fully give us away. Oh, most importantly, there's the awkward situations where we actually have to talk to people. This is a bit nerve-racking because you never know what to expect, your senses are on high alert with the hope your brain doesn't shut down when trying to form a response. One Sunday afternoon, we went out for coffee with some parisian friends we recently met. Although their English is great, they asked if we were would be speaking French this time. Through patience and persistence, and a bit of English here and there, we were able to sustain a fairly primitive conversation for over an hour. I'm sure the conversation wasn't as exciting as it could have been, but it was a start. Ben Franklin once stated that the moment you go to a place where you don't know the language, you automatically lose half of your intelligence. He's completely right. We've reverted back to the age of toddlers just starting out in society. Hopefully with enough wine, cheese, and coffee with friends, we'll hit a growth spurt soon.


Oh yeah, and there's youtube, too. Check out this gem. Learning about the word ' to go'...