Funny in French

So, I have decided to learn French. In my car. Actually, I decided to do it long ago. Mr. Baritone had actually loaned me his French language cd’s a while back, but I never got motivated enough to start until after Morocco. After being frustrated at being so little able to communicate, I decided that since the French conquered so much of the world way back when, French would be the next most logical language to learn. Plus, I want to go to Paris.

So, I am learning French in my car. The French voice belongs to a young (?) woman who I imagine looks like Julianne Nicholson from Law & Order: Criminal Intent. And everyone in a while I run across something that makes me chuckle.

Une femme: Why is the word for woman and wife the same? As if one automatically presupposes the other.

Une entrée: In French, the entrance or an appetizer. In English, the main course. Do the French eat that much better than those in English speaking nations that our main courses are so junior to their tny dabs of food that are supposed to just whet one’s appetite?

Soixante-dix, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt-dix: Seventy, eighty and ninety respectively. Or rather, sixty-ten, four-twenty and four-twenty-ten. I mean, really. Why not just have dedicated words for the numbers seventy, eighty and ninety? Did they run out of words for numbers?

Lu tren: My least favorite word so far. Not that I have anything against trains. I would love to take the train in Los Angeles if they city could ever build around the self-important behemoth of Beverly Hills. No, it’s just the really harsh and guttural pronunciation of the otherwise lovely vocals of the woman on the cd’s. When she says lu tren, she sounds like my brothers when they have chest colds.

My favorite phrases to repeat so far, “Quesque vous voulais?” (What would you like?) and “Je cherche quelque chose comme ce.” (I am looking for something like that). Don’t ask me why, they just are fun to say. Or maybe I’m dreaming of shopping along the Champs Elysee (as if I would ever have the budget to do this).

However, the most fun is imagining what a word actually looks like on a page. The languages that I have studied have been pretty phonetic in nature. Japanese (at least in romaji), Spanish and Italian all pretty much spell the way they sound (And unlike Anne Elliot, I really am not a true proficient in any of them). For years, the phrase hors d’oeuvres would baffle me … I knew how it was supposed to sound, but it always took me a second to route around the natural inclination to say something that sounded like “horse dovres.”

Anyway, I’ve finally made it to the second cd of the series. Hopefully I’ll have made enough headway by fall or next spring to make my way to Paris for a couple of weeks to take some serious language classes, enjoy the city, and take a couple of weekend visits to nearby places (and aren’t all places nearby once you get on The Continent?”).