La musique

One of my main goals is to get more comfortable with the French language. I have studied French on and off since high school, but textbook French is different than the living-in-Paris kind. For instance, as a tourist, you can pat yourself on the back for ordering the wine in an accent that doesn't make the waiter change into English automatically. It is quite another thing when faced with a bank manager on the other end of a cell phone call telling you something about your account.

So, this summer I enrolled at the Alliance Française in Paris for 6 weeks. For those of you who don't know, The Alliance Française is a government-sponsored school whose sole purpose is to promote the French language around the world. There are branches around the world and one in NYC. Strangely, when I took a placement test in NYC, I was in the beginning of the advanced class; in Paris, the end of the beginners.

I had normal classes there, but as part of the package I signed up for, I had 3 one-hour Linguistics classes, to help me with my accent. Among other things, I found out that English and French share very few sounds. Even something as simple as a "p" is different. In English we have a lot of air after the sound (think "pew"); the French do not have any air at all.

Also, there is something called la musique of the language, which incorporates the pitch and rhythm. The instructor told me that English speakers' musique is like Jazz: pitch not in line and emphasis are all over the place which is very disorienting to native French speakers. English has emphasis or stress on a syllable in each word; French has one per phrase. 

I plan to come back to this at some later time, but right now, this is too much to handle. Besides, I do not want to lose my charming American accent; it helps me get by. The French, unlike English speakers, are very aware of grammar, spelling and tense. If you have one grammatical error or a misspelling in an email, the reader will think that you are not very bright. If they know you are not a native speaker, they give you wide berth.

While my time at the Alliance was useful, I was not speaking as much as I need to, so I now have a private tutor named Eric. He has given me children's books to read and I am hopeful I can get my vocabulary up to par. We were discussing a new show we had both seen at the Folies Bergeres.  My friend Laure had done the costumes, which were lovely, but the show itself seemed amateurish in some ways. Some very talented people, but all very young and no personalities (which I guess I expected, given the history of the place).

During this discussion, Eric said that the French really don't really have a musical legacy. I disagreed, citing my love for 19th century French opera and songs (chausons). Eric did not disagree but said that there is no popular musical heritage after Edith Piaf. What about Yves Montand? He was derivative and even his big hit "Les Feuilles Mortes" was much more popular as the English "Autumn Leaves." Wikipedia even lists him as an actor, not a singer.

I realized that the 19th century French of Massenet, Fauré, Ravel and Debussy is what has kept the language in my head but this may not be serving me now. During those long years that I did not study the language, the phrases of Manon, Werther or a Fauré song have kept the language alive for me. Unfortunately, this puts me in a position of wanting to exclaim "Grand dieu!" instead of "merde!" when something goes awry. I am hoping this knowledge will allow me to move forward in a more 21st century mode.