Above: Justin Watts’ first day in France…
Over six million Aussies travelled abroad last year, and I’d feel confident making a bet that a fair chunk of those wore backpacks and were bound for Europe. In 2007 that’s exactly what I did as part of a study abroad semester in Leeds. I ventured through France, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy and the Czech Republic, and the majority of the people that I met in each country, as diverse and unique as they all were, had one thing in common; they spoke English. Up until that point I had thought that if someone came to Australia then they should speak our language, yet I was able to ask someone for directions in Kiel, flirt with a video store cashier in Paris and befriend a cabin full of people on a train en route to Hamburg all using my native tongue. This made me feel rather humbled and basic – I had never felt that only knowing one language was a deficiency.
To rectify this, in 2010 I set myself a simple goal – learn French. My only previous foray into the realm of foreign languages had been in my High School Japanese class where I learned to dissemble and assemble pens and textas with amazing finesse and rapidity as our teacher wrote some funky looking hieroglyphics on the board. I was going into this from rock bottom with little more than a ‘bonjour’ or ‘oui’ to my name and I had a lot to learn.
It is possible to learn French from an institution in Australia, at a University, or private language school, but these cost lots of money and all the exchange students that I have ever spoken to have told me that nothing beats living in a country that speaks the language you want to learn. So with a limited budget and not the fondest memories of language classes, I was keen to hit up France. To do this I would need a job. France has an unemployment rate of over 10 percent and finding work is hard enough for the average Jaques Shmarkes, so without knowing any French it was always going to pose a fair challenge.
Basically there are two options I could take – work on a farm, or teach English. Having spent my youth doing the euphemistic ‘Father Son bonding exercise’ of building fences on the family sheep property, I was keen for a change and started investigating what was required to teach English. A few months and $1500 later I had booked myself a place in a four week Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) course in the tiny village of Plelauf in Brittany, France. This was a lot of money for me to lay down, but I felt that if it gave me the skills and the qualification to work as a teacher then it would be worthwhile investment and would pay for itself in no time at all.
The course itself was very useful and I genuinely felt like I learned a new skill that I was able to use straight away. But don’t get me started on the grammar. I thought I was pretty grammatically savy before hand – I was all down with my nouns and adjectives and could even tell the difference between those cheeky siblings verbs and adverbs. But phrasal verbs, conditionals, modals, prepositions, this was the start of my foreign language learning experience. And here was I thinking we had three tenses – past, present and future. Well, it turns out there are nine.
I wanted to start work as soon as I could upon finishing the course so whenever I wasn’t studying how to use an irregular verb in the past continuous form, I was searching the internet for language schools and sending out my CV. After sending 150 emails without a positive response I decided to expand my field to include Francophone countries in Northern Africa as well as Belgium and Luxembourg. Another 150 emails later and I had two viable offers: Freelance work in Brussels where French, Flemish and English are spoken and the pay is high or Nancy (a Newcastle sized town in North East France) where I’d make about 400 Euros per week, before the inordinate taxing began. If I wanted to make a lot of money in a year I’d be working in a mine in Western Australia, but I wanted to learn French so I pounced on the Nancy offer like a Frenchman on a baguette. And before I could say my entire French vocabulary (consisting of about thirty words at this point) I found myself signing a contract with no fixed term.
I was laying the foundations for my year as a Frenchman, but I still had a lot to learn. I expected to find some differences confronting like the snowy weather and the attitude towards snails and frogs, but it’s never the differences you expect that catch you unawares. In my first few days I needed to use a public toilet and I was more than willing to pay the required 20 centimes. Once my coin dropped in the slot, the door slid magically open, I stepped inside, and after a pause the door closed. It was all very chic. I looked for the lock and slid the only lever there and the door opened again, staying open for about five to ten seconds before closing. It wasn’t until I was sitting on the can that I pondered what might happen if someone else put a coin in the slot and I didn’t have to ponder for long. My cries were too late and the door opened right up and stayed open for a very very long couple of seconds. All I could do was apologise to anyone who walked passed while my pants kept my ankles warm. I felt like quite the goose indeed.
Thankfully my French, American, British and Australian work colleagues were quite well versed on the French way of life. With their help I was able to skirt further unnecessary embarrassment and set up a bank account, get a mobile and find a place to stay – an apartment I would share with two other authentic Frenchies.
With my basics sorted I set sail for the distant shore of French language fluency, and the waters were choppy. I flipped between feeling like the King of France (before he had his head lopped off) to wanting to stab myself repeatedly in the face with a spoon – often in the space of a few minutes. My tactics were to completely surround myself with the language and study it as much as possible. I used language learning websites, a computer programme, grammar study guides, read children’s books and watched DVD’s of Noddy – amusingly known here as Oui Oui. I studied at least two hours in my room everyday for the first two months and whenever I spoke English I felt as cheap as a lady of the night selling her wares on the street. Yet, by blocking myself off from my mother tongue I developed a resentment for the language of love – which is quite easy to do when you consider its bizarre rules.
Take masculine and feminine forms for example. In English a chair is a chair, it doesn’t have a gender – it hasn’t any dangly bits, why would it? But in French a chair is feminine. Even more bizarre is that ‘vagina’, surely an integral part of being female (though I’m no expert on women), is actually a masculine word. I really would have liked to ignore the whole gender thing on the grounds of it being a bit silly, but it could have consequences. If I ever asked someone for a frying-pan and got the gender mixed up, I could accidentally be asking them for a pubic hair. And the gender issue is not even the hardest part. All verbs have about 45 different ways of being said depending on what tense you want to use; the spelling gives no real indication on how the word is pronounced and any word with an ‘r’ in it needs to sound like you’re about to spit up a golly. I completely French fried myself and took a weekend binging on English TV shows and books.
Learning the language foundations is important, but I could do that sitting in my room in Australia. What I really needed to do was use what little I did know out in the real world. This might sound like the obvious thing to do, but when you only know 300 words and one tense it can be quite limiting. It’s fair to say that people weren’t lining up to come and chat with me. I became a ‘yes man’, and I accepted any opportunity that could involve speaking French, and when none came to me I hunted them out. I re-contacted a French chap that I had met in a youth hostel I was staying at when I first arrived and joined the Chess club that he plays at. For the first few weeks I was just playing against children under the age of 10, who not only could speak far superior French than me, completely wiped me off the board too. I chose to ignore that though and search for the little victories. One night I was able to ask a 6 year old girl, champion of Lorraine, if she would like to play with me, she said yes and then I scored one of my rare wins in the most epic fashion. Little girl: zero Justin: one.
I then joined a tennis club, table tennis club and a Brazillian drumming group after I saw them perform in the main street, and it was here that I took my culture skills to the next level. The drummers, all being experienced musicians, were easy going people, free with their thoughts, free with their opinions, and free with their kisses. Girls and guys. In one afternoon I kissed more guys than I ever have in all of my gay chicken victories combined (I don’t go out of my way to play this but I’m a competitive person). The man kiss is about as common in France as the man hug was in Australia about 10 years ago, back before they were handed out willy nilly. My drumming skills still haven’t really improved that much, but I have gained so much in other ways from this group.
One weekend we were invited to play for campers at a music festival. We got free entry into the festival and had food provided, which is close to being the coolest things ever, though I am still in the mind set where anything with the word ‘free’ in front of it is the coolest thing ever. We listened to some cool music, ate food, chatted in French and then at two in the morning started performing for the wild campers. We didn’t stop until close to seven in the morning, and with the beats going strong I didn’t feel tired at all. I played the shaker most of the night and though I didn’t exactly push my musical ability, I can now say I’ve jammed all night with French freestylers, beat boxers, guitarists and also oddly enough a didgeridoo player. Things only got better though. After a cup of soup in the morning I sat around the campfire to warm up and a friendly and cold French lass called Elodie sat next to me and we started chatting. She didn’t speak a word of English, but that didn’t stop us and I grabbed her number and we met up several times as the weeks passed. We chatted for hours at a time and she really made me see the beauty in speaking another language – without my new skills, it just wouldn’t have happened. She was beautiful, patient and funny, but unfortunately had to leave to teach kiddies in Holland.
On a good day I could pull out a sentence like ‘I did work tomorrow but at Saturday I may watch you with a film’. So it just goes to show the pulling power that coming from Australia must have. Over here people dream of coming to Australia, and the stereotype is of us all being surfies, that carry large knives and ride kangaroos prevails. I think the stereotype of the French femmes could do with a bit of a brush up. Before arriving I imagined that I would be overrun with prim and proper Amélie look-a-likes but that just hasn’t happened. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of I-hope-someone-introduces-us-so-we-can-kiss ladies here, but they all fall into two categories. They are either; A. Actually from another country like the foxy first lady Carla Bruni who’s originally from Italy or B. Smoke cigarettes like they’re good for you – Elodie fell into this category. Of course with all rules there are exceptions but I’ve only found three. So France is not necessarily the place to find the ladies, unless the smell of smoke grabs your goat.
My experience with Elodie opened up the doors of conversation which felt like a gift from the Gods. It enabled me to actually take part actively in social gatherings, rather than just sitting like a piece of furniture. I was invited to a workmates dinner party and I relished the opportunity testing out my new skills on all of the other guests. I was talking to an engineer at an aluminum smelter in the French Alps where he lives who wasn’t too passionate about his job but loves paragliding. He told me that he dreams of going to Manilla. Not the Manilla that’s the capital of the Philippines, the Manilla that is 45 km from Tamworth, is home to 2000 residents and was recently found to have the lowest per capita income in all of Australia. It also happens to be the paragliding capital of Australia but still, it’s a funny world.
Funnier still was when I made an A-grade faux ami, or false friend. These are words that are the same in English and French, but have different meanings. A good example is when as Aussie mate of mine told her new French pals that she was trés trés escité for the New Years Eve celebrations. Turns out that excité doesn’t mean ‘excited’ but ‘horny’.
Well, mine that night almost rivals it. We were talking about French bread and people were showering it with complements, so I piped up and said something about how in Australia we use more preservatives and that no one ever talks about how good it is. Before I could go on to say how I appreciate bread that stays fresh for longer than thirty seconds I was cut off by laughter. The sort of laughter that lets you know you have made a critical error. Yup, preservatif is the French word for ‘condom’, the word I was looking for was conservation.
Now, halfway through my year in France, I can already say that it has been a rewarding, challenging and, except for occasionally making a fool of myself, an enjoyable experience. Learning the language is a long, long process and it is harder than I had expected, but the victories I score with it, however few and far between they are, make me feel like I’ve grown an extra limb. With six months to go I’ve still got plenty of time to improve and although the conversations I have are not all that complex, I feel far from basic.
An old Chinese proverb, I believe, works oddly well in regards to learning a new language:
‘The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is NOW’.
