When I first came to Harvard in the fall of 1992, I knew nothing whatsoever about French, except that I wanted to learn it. In high school I had studied Latin, an alternative allowed by my Jesuit school in Chicago. Now, finally, I was going to learn a language spoken by the living. French A was designed for those with little or no experience in the language. I couldn't attempt to pronounce the French r without laughing or choking, or both; in the pronunciation of the ubiquitous c'est I would certainly have found room for two s sounds and one t.
Last year, on vacation in Boston from my travels in France, I called my very first French teacher. She and I have remained in regular contact for some six years, but until this particular telephone conversation, we had spoken and written to each other in English. All who speak a foreign language know that friendship is easier to begin and maintain when both friends are able to speak exactly what is on their minds. So it was no wonder that we naturally fell into communicating in English--she who had a better command of it than the majority of native speakers, and I who was just embarking on a long study of her native tongue.
Now, after seven semesters of French at Harvard and about a year and a half of working and traveling in France, I decided that I had made sufficient progress in the language to avoid embarrassment, speak naturally, and maybe even make her proud of her sometime student. She was astounded by my abilities, and I was elated by her astonishment. "I can't believe it, John," she said to me in French. "Your accent...c'est parfait. I feel like I'm talking to a Frenchman. It's incredible. How did you do it?"
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I left for France on a Fulbright fellowship in September following my graduation from Harvard, to teach English in a public secondary school in Marseilles. But I decided to stay in order to learn "to speak French like a Frenchman," as I told myself upon making the decision to exhaust nearly all of my personal savings to do so. My French teacher, like most people I meet, tells me I now have a neutral, essentially Northern accent, and that's exactly what I want to hear: it's the accent that, before learning the language well, made French seem like delicate music to my untrained ears, and the accent that checks people from telling me where exactly I'm from.
In most situations, I pass for a native speaker, though, much like Cinderella, I lose my graces after midnight and occasionally have to search for an unfamiliar word. But when I am alert and at ease, I might as well have been born and bred in the Hexagon. Writing French correctly is in some respects a simpler matter. To the surprise of French friends generous enough to read what I write in their language, I don't make spelling mistakes, but I do not yet have the rhetorical control that I have in English. More important to me than the appearances of having mastered French, however, is the confidence I have and the downright pleasure I take in speaking French. The once mysterious-sounding nasal vowels and gag-provoking r's are now natural to me, and the most quotidian of transactions have finally become just that: I no longer dread buying stamps and review what I'm going to say to the postal clerk before saying it.
So how exactly did I do it? I am asked the question by nearly every new French acquaintance I make, and they are often kind enough to answer it for me: I must be talented in foreign languages. I confess that I don't like this answer at all. In fact, I am rather vexed when my amiable acquaintances supply it. It's not that I think they are wrong, but rather that I find their answer woefully incomplete. For with or without talent, learning a foreign language is a lot of hard work.
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As an entering freshman, I was ready to tackle French. To the confusion of newfound friends who, having failed Harvard's proficiency tests, found themselves conscripted into foreign-language classes, I was beginning my college career with a year-long elective. I had no intention of concentrating in French. (My field was government.) No, my study was to be a delightfully unmixed indulgence.
As I headed over to Memorial Hall to choose my section, I gave no second thought to what I was about to do. I had definite reasons for choosing French, all formed and processed in the space of no more than 10 minutes during a twelfth-grade English literature class. We were studying a poem whose first stanza was written in French, a language to which, until that point, I hadn't paid any particular attention. While our school's top French student was preparing to read the text aloud to the rest of us, I had a few seconds to try to make the thing out, pressing into service four years of Latin and 17 years of English. I can't remember deciphering much, but I do remember being struck by the preponderance of quaint accent marks and by the very strong representation of consonants relatively sparse in English, such as q's and x's. And what charming alphabetic neighbors they had! X was found with eu, ou, or ieu, and q with a u and an e for good measure.
And then my classmate began reading. I had serious trouble following her. Was I even on the right page? Why was I hearing very few n's, t's, and r's when there were so many of them before me? In less time than seemed necessary, she was finished, while my accusatory finger remained riveted to an -ent that I didn't hear pronounced at all. No English speaker is foreign to silent letters, of course, but this was preposterous. This language was flirting with my eyes. And I was seduced.
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