French Lessons
“It takes 600 hours to learn basic French,” said Angelique, our brunette French teacher, as if her statement were a well-known fact.
She wiped the classroom whiteboard with her back to us. Streaky blue and red veins from the dry erase markers were all that remained after our lesson on common French greetings. Angelique’s bangled arm thrashed up and down, side to side, and top to bottom as if some nascent Picasso might emerge from her efforts.
“Where’s that statistic from?” I asked, trying to validate the source of this random assertion.
“I read it somewhere,” she said, shrugging her shoulders with Parisian aloofness.
“How many hours have we put in?” asked Kevin. The look on my husband's face was one of bewildered optimism.
“Sees,” she said. “Six.”
Kevin’s crestfallen face slumped in the direction of his Sperry Topsiders. To him, French class might as well have been a prison sentence with the possibility of time off for good behavior. I didn’t need a translator to interpret his body language. It said I would be learning French for both of us. My husband is a born explorer, an avid yachtsman, an entrepreneur. Classrooms have never been his thing.
“Darling, exposure is good,” I reminded him. “Your subconscious is picking up more than you think.”
“What’s the word for wine again?” His forehead bore the creases of his consternation. “I need a drink.”
“Vin rouge or vin blanc?” I said.
“Both,” he said.
“See, babe, you’ve already picked up the basics.” I grinned and extended my fisted knuckles. He met my knotted hand, then flicked his fingers in a mock explosion before opening the car door for me. Starburst.
“The important stuff is all I really need anyway, right? Vin. Fromage, and…what’s that word for bread again?” He puffed his chest in a show of linguistic mastery.
“Le Pain. Mmmm. Fresh from za Patisserie.” My head tilted back in imagined ecstasy.
Before we started French lessons, I envisioned our twice weekly class as a kind of educational “date night.” I imagined practicing our newly adopted language over a glass of wine and dinner at Moulin, our favorite local French bistro. How romantic. In reality, I conjugated verbs on my dinner napkin while attempting to recall what I had learned an hour ago. Kevin drank wine and discussed generators for the new boat. Talk of yachting equipment is as foreign to me as a second language is to him.
Despite my best efforts, my pronunciation remained hopeless. Every attempted word—the few I remembered—sounded like I was spewing soapsuds out my nose. In the end, I gritted my teeth with embarrassment, said si vous plait to the native French waiter at Moulin, and pointed at the menu.
During lesson five, Angelique asked each student why they wanted to learn French. I found it odd that she waited until halfway through the course to delve into her students’ motivations for learning. Why seem like an ice-breaker question, not a midcourse milestone. Then again, maybe her teaching style is simply French.
The elegant white-haired woman seated to my left, told the class in French her age. Eighty-one-years-old. She then described in French how she studied French in her collegiate days and thought a refresher course would be good for her aging brain. From her sultry pronunciation and considerable vocabulary, it was clear she belonged in a more advanced class.
I watched Angelique’s eyes light up. “Oui,” she said, “bien, Margaret.”
The well-groomed elderly man seated beside Margaret told the class his aim was to refresh his French. He recounted his why in a conspicuously accurate French accent without any of the hesitation of a neophyte. At that point, I decided Kevin and I were in the wrong class.
When it came time for Kevin to answer the question of how we found ourselves enrolled in beginning French, his meager vocabulary took him as far as je m’apelle before he resorted to English.
“Buying a sailboat and sailing around the south of France for the summer is a pretty good reason to learn French,” he said. His Australian insouciance made our future plans sound adventurous—entertaining—rather than pretentious. He will never need to learn another language. Charisma has a language of its own.
“Cabotage?” she chirped with sudden enthusiasm. “Oh, bravo.”
“Cabotage?” I repeated.
“You travel from place to place on your bateau, oui?” said Angelique, harvesting my question.
“Qui,” I nodded.
“Zeess is coastal navigation, no? In French, Cabotage.” She shrugged her shoulders, surprised at my surprise. Her face said, ‘But, of course, you idiot. Everyone knows zeess.’
I lingered in my surprise that a single noun could be used to describe our lifestyle.
Cabotage.
Apparently, a nomadic seafaring lifestyle is built into the French lexicon, not a foreign concept.
Oui. Cabotage.
Five lessons in, I was beginning to feel hopeful. I’d learned something useful. At this rate, mastering French was a mere 595 hours away.