My wife Wil and I live permanently in France since 2008. We’ve bought our house in 2005, but we were not ready for the final step at that time. Our reluctance was mainly due to the difficulty we had in speaking French.
But in 2008 the ultimate decision was made: France was the place to be, attracted as we were by the beautiful nature, the calm pace of the French countryside and the low-stress attitude of the local people, so we sold our Dutch property.
Does this mean that we overcame the problems we had with the French language? Not by a long shot.
The first few years were difficult enough with setting up the necessary administrative red tape such as energy subscription, telephone/internet connections, taxes, health care, insurances, importing the Dutch car and more. Just try reading the legal gibberish on the official documents one gets buried under.
In high school I have had four years of French education and Wil had three. That education didn’t amount to much, during an hour a week we learned nonsense phrases like: “J’ai douze ans” and “Papa fume une pipe”. And furthermore endless conjugations of French verbs, even in rare structures like subjunctive mood or conditional future tense. Useless junk we all thought.
Even at the age of twelve, I disliked the language. It sounded grumpy to me. And the abundant ’r-s’ are pronounced wrongly, from the back of the oral cavity as an attempt to clear the throat. An obvious guttural sound.
Eventually, I stuffed just enough of this garbage in memory, to pass the exam and score a ‘nearly sufficient’. That aversion hasn’t changed over the years, I still dislike French.
Nevertheless, we had to deal with it since the locals don’t speak anything other than French. And not just the locals, this goes for most of France. We had purchased a textbook with simple lessons on everyday situations in the French language. That worked nicely. Together with the gradually returning base of our school years, we were able to communicate.
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Soon we discovered a few things.
- We tended to speak softly when unsure about our language constructs. That never works! Speak up loud and clear however primitive the phrases may seem.
- The French don’t have the slightest idea what it means to speak a foreign language. When you tell them that you didn’t understand, they just repeat their last phrase. Often somewhat louder. The idea of building another sentence doesn’t occur to them. They are unable to grasp that someone cannot understand a trivial expression. Must be a hearing problem, hence the louder repetition.
- French like to talk. They talk whenever they can. In a dialogue they jump at every lull to take over the conversation. We generate a lot of pauses due to our limited language abilities and ever so often, we loose the lead. And once lost it is hard to get it back.
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In the early days we met other Dutch people and they appeared to struggle equally with the language.
Many of them went to a course only to be confronted once more with “J’ai douze ans”, no matter how long that age lay in the past. They learned nothing of practical value here. Almost all of them gave up after couple of years and went back to ‘The Low Countries’.
Wil and I stuck to our textbooks and trained as best we could with whatever local was available.
And thanks to our friendly neighbours, who helped us a lot with the aforementioned red tape stuff we survived.
We made real progress these days but kept struggling with the insane complicated French grammar and syntax.
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The most striking difficulty is the absurd gender division into male and female which scourges the language.
Everything is affected by their rules: the articles before the noun (le and la), the adjectives, the possessive pronouns, the plural forms, all of these must obey the constraint of gender.
These constraints are so powerful that they sometimes defy our common sense.
In English we say: “Wil is my wife, I am her husband.” In French this is: “Wil est ma femme, je suis son mari”.
How odd! The gender of the possessive pronoun ‘her’ is bent into the French version of his’ because the pronoun is linked to the noun after, rather than to the possessor as the English do it.
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There is much more to say about the difficult French grammar but let’s move on.
It is common knowledge that only young children can learn to speak a foreign language as if they were born in that foreign country. I gave this a lot of thought.
It is said that a child’s brain closes down to the groundwork of speech about the age of nine. When started after that age, the youngster perfectly can learn every aspect and every subtlety of a language but he/she cannot learn to speak this like a native born.
There always will be an audible accent.
That made me wonder: is it just the brain that causes this effect?
I often had noticed that French men vocally sound, well… like French men.
Their voices are sonorous with a somewhat dark timbre.
Listen to the French Tour de France reporters. They all sound the same. Dark and sonorous. Hardly no distinction.
How could this be?
The answer lies I think in the development of the ‘sound system’. And by sound system I mean the whole bunch of body components that contribute to making sound and essentially in creating speech. What components are these?
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The following text is from the Dutch < Meertens Institute –> Research and documentation of language and culture >
There are no special speech organs. Your lungs, your nasal cavity, your lips, your tongue, your vocal cords are not at all exclusively meant to talk with. On the contrary: the human lungs initially seem to be mainly intended to pump oxygen from the outside air into the bloodstream. The nasal cavity serves, among other things, to heat incoming air and to smell it. Lips and tongue are mainly intended to help grind food. And your vocal cords form a safety valve that can close the way to your lungs if you choke and the food ends up in the trachea instead of in your esophagus.
It seems that mankind has come to use language in the course of evolution and that he has started to use the organs that happened to be available for this purpose, without those organs being particularly suitable for this. That must have had an influence on the language sounds we can make.
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Well, knowing this and taking into account that the world’s spoken languages cover a enormous spectrum of sound, we might say that we individuals are poorly equipped for reproducing all those sounds. In fact it cannot be done and we have to settle for a subset of this extreme richness of lingoes: our native tongue.
Toddlers and the little ones in kindergarten have an amazing ability to mimic and imitate their parents and educators. That’s how they quickly learn to talk and understand speech. During this process, their voice elements are shaped and trained. How is this done? By having them practice on the sounds of speech they hear all day long.
Over the first decade of their lives, their speech components are honed and fine-tuned and in virtually all cases for one specific language, their native.
Once the organs have become into the desired ‘shape’, fine-tuned and all, the process comes to an end and the speech system is now for life optimised (and fixed) for it’s specific task.
Of course the sound of the voice itself will change over years as the body grows into it’s final dimensions. And of course most of us never stop extending our knowledge of the language itself.
I am aware of my modest performance when speaking French but still I’m regularly amazed that I have to repeat myself, though in my opinion my question or remark came out fluently. Wil has the same.
And even when I prepared the first sentence in my mind, often an uncomprehending gaze is my share.
We discussed this during a nice dinner in a good restaurant with our English friends Scott and Alexandra. I told them it must be our pronunciation that causes the trouble. Alexandra, who masters French quite well, has of course a strong English accent that in my ears is even stronger than mine. But she doesn’t seem to have this pronunciation related troubles.
I pointed her out that when she mentions names of nearby villages, I often don’t understand what she says. As an example I chose the village Ébreuil.
“You pronounce it as Ébroi,” I said, “where it should be Ébruij.”
“No,” said Alex, “absolutely not. It is Ébroi”
Since we couldn’t agree we appointed the French waitress as referee.
“Who pronounces it the proper way,” we asked her.
The woman was a bit embarrassed, like when one asks: “what do you think is the age of this lady here?” But finally she pointed at Alexandra as the winner.
I couldn’t understand, in my ears she was so far off the proper way of saying Ébreuil.
Of course we asked the waitress lady to let us hear what it should be and when I listened attentively, I heard her saying something in between.
Not the way I pronounced Ébreuil, neither Alexandra’s version.
We left it at that for the moment and the chat went on.
Then out of nowhere Alex said “I once spoke a Dutch person a teacher English who said to me: ‘The English can’t pronounce the word town properly’.”
What nonsense is this, I thought, they can’t say their own word town?
“I mean the Dutch word town,” Alex explained, “You know, garden.”
“Ah! You mean tuin,” I said. And zooming in on the topic, it appeared that in English the diphthong ‘ui’ does not exist. And because of this absence, the young English children do not develop the skills needed for producing this two-sound.
And because of that, they cannot pronounce the ui sound in Ébruij. But it gets weirder.
I grabbed my iPhone typed in the word ‘Ébreuil’, had it translated into French and pressed the ‘Listen’ button.
Ébruij heard Wil and me clearly.
Ébroi heard Scott and Alex clearly.
Several times pressing the Listen button did not change our experience.
It appears that our brain let us hear what it thinks we should hear, within the possibilities of our native tongue.
And so we Dutch have no way of knowing whether our diphthong ui matches better the three-sound eui in Ébreuil than the English oi does. Whereas the guttural ‘r’ in the name is a certain impossibility for the British to speak out loud.
One thing is for sure: we foreigners all hear it the wrong way.
Eef
September 2024
Links:
- https://meertens.knaw.nl/
- https://meertens.knaw.nl/v2023/en/about-the-meertens-institute/
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Editorial comment:
Eef asked me to comment on the above and posed some specific questions about our language challenges when we moved abroad to Sweden. The answer was a bit too large to fit on this page, so I split it off into its own page. For my comments, see this followup article.
Paul
September 2024