About that français thing

[muckefuck]

Making my way to the café for a little breakfast before work today, I, as is my wont, rehearsed what I might say to any Spanish-speaking buddies I might run into. What immediately popped into my head was, "Buenos dias, ça va?"

Sums up my conversational challenges in a nutshell. Five days ago, I would've had the opposite problem. Of course, five days ago I'd never really spoken more than two consecutive sentences of French in my life. It's been twenty years since my last visit to a Francophone country and back then all I had at my disposal were the simplest tourist phrases. Now that I think of it, all my boyfriends have spoken French, but our rare exchanges never amounted to much.

Several times the first day, I found myself wishing the people around me spoke German like sensible foreigners. Montreal is usually described as a "bilingual" city, but it is in somewhat the same way that Chicago is "racially-mixed". The only three people I met who were truly equally comfortable in both languages were a retired translator, a government employee now living in Ottawa, and a Montreal native of mixed French-Anglo parentage.

That's not to say that most people around me didn't have good English or that they weren't more than willing to speak it to me. But I always felt at a disadvantage making acquaintances since, right off the bat, they had to cater to my shortcomings. The saving grace was that--in spite of all time he's spent there over the years--le Lutin's French is surprisingly weak, so I benefitted from being by his side most all of the time. My one real solo effort, with a FOAF who accompanied us to the summit of Mont-Royal, was passable, if at times excruciating.

For instance, at one point I wanted to say it was stuffy inside the bar, so I came out with "C'est étouffant." He didn't seem to recognise the word at all and I was completely stuck for an alternative phrasing. (Actual idiom: "On étouffe." "One suffocates.") Another time, I wanted to make a joking reference to coureurs des bois, but for some reason I stuck in an extra letter and the whole table looked at me confused as I struggled to explain what a courrieur des bois was.

These moments, where I couldn't even get "partial credit" for having the "right answer", were the most frustrating at all, worse even than forgetting a common word entirely. The most embarrassing of all was saying "poutine" and having it misunderstood as "putain" (probably because /ɛ̃/ is often realised as [ĩ] in Quebec French and, as a Midland speaker, I generally prenasalise vowels, i.e. my tin is more often than not [tʰɪ̞̃(n)]). At Marché Jean-Talon, a woman was so amused by my pronunciation of "deux" that she repeated it several times, chuckling to herself.

But that was unusual. Most clerks were very understanding and patient, even when I bamboozled them with senseless requests. Such as in the market when I tried to buy "peameal bacon". I don't know if I'd've had any more success if I'd asked for "back bacon" of if it's just not a common cut in Québec.

Comments

[mollyc-q.livejournal.com]

Its funny, before you left I wanted to say, Montreal was like my trip to Paris with a bigger linguistic safety net, and it sounds like that was in variation what happened. I can also empathize with the mixed language responses and the brain primed for responses in the "wrong" "other" language. My Spanish was never as fluid as when I was trying to speak Bengali on my senior year trip to India, and on the return my spanish-bengali was not useful in a spoken word exercise in my Spanish class.....

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

Several times the first day, I found myself wishing the people around me spoke German like sensible foreigners.

OMG, YES. This concisely sums up my feelings on several random occasions in Barcelona. I was delighted to share a brief conversation with some actual German tourists one evening, though we kept slipping into English when my brain didn't have a particular German word handy.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Real polyglots tell me that you eventually get to the point where you have settings in your brain for each distinct language instead of "NATIVE" and "EVERYTHING ELSE". I'm almost there, but my brain keeps wanting to say, "What more do they want? German's plenty good!"

[gorkabear.livejournal.com]

My thing with French is weird. I'm fluent enough to get by and I can use a decent amount of vocabulary but in none of the two french-speaking relationships I had I was able to argue in French. Go figure

I mix Portuguese and Galego (the dialect that my mother's family speak) and Italian...

[cruiser.livejournal.com]

I'd be at risk for being burned at the stake in any country where the people weren't so nice, but truly, in Canada, when they speak of bilingual, they mean that as a country, they have two languages. The individuals themselves, not so much. I mean, they're all "Nice job, eh?" if you speak both languages, but except for the sorts of folks you mentioned, they don't really expect much more than not having to turn the box around to look at the other side to know that that's cake mix, not brownie mix.

[tisoi.livejournal.com]

(probably because /ɛ̃/ is often realised as [ĩ] in Quebec French and

It's actually more like [eĩ]

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

[tisoi.livejournal.com]

Oops. I forgot to put nasalization on the [e] too.

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

For some reason, a lot of Ontarians (the ones who don't say 'poo-teen') think that it's pronounced /putɛ̃/. It, quite frankly, leaves me speechless, and I hope they make a trip to northern Ontario and order it and get the stinkeye from their waitress.

Did you go to Le Club Sandwich while you were here? That's my favourite diner in the Village, I think.