And with two days to go before we leave
for Europe, I have to wonder--have I retained enough French to make
our trip go smoothly?
I guess we’ll see beginning Thursday.
I’m not fluent in French, nor have I
ever been. I’ve just picked up enough, through travels and
self-teaching, to get us where we need to go. I don’t have any
natural aptitude for language, so every time we leave Europe I seem
to forget whatever French I’ve picked up, hence my need to learn it
all over again right before we go. And since they speak French in
three of the four countries we'll be visiting this week and next...
Sigh. And yeah, I know, it’s not a
very efficient way to do things, but when you’re dealing with a
brain like mine what do you expect?
If I had to grade myself on whether or
not I have enough French crammed into my head, I’d actually have to
give myself four different grades, for reading, speaking, listening,
and writing the language. I’m actually not too bad at reading it;
if I had to grade myself on that, I’d give me a B-. And reading
French is the most important thing I need for our trip; after all, I
need to understand directions, road signs, and which chocolatey baked
goods are which. Reading French, for me, at least, is fairly easy.
Even if you don’t know all the words you can make a pretty good
guess as to what the sentence or phrase means.
So I guess I have that going for me.
Unfortunately, that’s by far the best
of the grades I’d give myself. I can speak enough to either make
myself vaguely understood or to make whoever’s listening to me take
pity and switch to their English, so let’s give me a C- on that.
Listening to a native French speaker speaking French and trying to
understand it? D- on that. And writing French? Well, I haven’t
even made at attempt at that, aside from whatever’s stuck in my
brain learning to read French, so I’ll have to give myself an F+ on
that (assuming, of course, F+ is an actual grade).
So let’s average the four grades
together--B-, C-, D-, and F+. That’d be, uhm, let me convert the
letters to numbers, divide them, and convert them back to letters,
and we, uhm, hold on a sec. . .we end up with a D+.
I’m screwed, aren’t I?
Of course, every time we’ve gone to a
French speaking country I’ve gone over there with pretty much a D+
average, and we’ve survived. Sure, we’ve had to occasionally
rely upon the kindness of (English speaking) strangers, but we seem
to have come through with no bruises. And there have been a couple
of times when I amazed even myself and pulled French out of my head
that I didn’t even know was there, like last year when I almost had
an actual multi-sentence conversation with a kind woman in a gift
shop. So with any luck that’ll happen again this year when we're
in the Belgium-Luxembourg-France portion of our trip.
Just keep your fingers crossed for me,
if you would!
Two days to go!
No comments:
Post a Comment