By Paul Carrier
William Alexander is an American in his late 50s who doesn’t simply love France. He wants to be French. Trouble is, he doesn’t speak the language. So he sets out to learn it, and therein lies a tale that is informative, moving and eye-opening.
Above all else, though, Flirting with French is damn funny.
How could it not be? The poor guy finds himself in France struggling mightily to be understood, yet mangling la langue so badly that he ends up saying things like this: “It sleeps very cold in the soup.” Alexander’s French vocabulary is limited, and he keeps forgetting words he has learned. His grammar is spotty. And his pronunciation? C’est pathétique!
Despite Alexander’s breezy tone and comical anecdotes, this is a serious guy on a serious mission. “I have such an inexplicable affinity for all things French that I wonder if I was French in a former life,” he muses. Molière, perhaps? More likely Robespierre, whose date with the guillotine during the French Revolution would explain “that persistent crick” in Alexander’s neck.
Yet Alexander knows that the deck is stacked against him. Attending a conference of linguists, he discovers that only a tiny minority of adult students will ever achieve near-native proficiency in a foreign language, and none will achieve native proficiency.
Still, he plods ahead with language software, podcasts, a French pen pal, audio courses and assorted French classes, including a prestigious two-week immersion program in Provence, all while interviewing experts on brain science and linguistics. To become bilingual, Alexander discovers, he must learn to actually think in both languages, eliminating the inefficient “mental middleman” that translates English into French.
Alexander chronicles not only his halting, faltering, humorous forays into French but also the history of the language, its inner workings, and the science of language acquisition. He does his homework to the point of masochism. To prepare for a trip to France, Alexander reads a history of the country that runs to 500 pages, “although it feels not a page over a thousand.”
Although I was raised in a French-speaking home and did not learn English until I went to school, I found much here that was revelatory. Alexander approaches French with a mixture of devotion and a wry sense of humor. He may worship it, but he doesn’t hesitate to poke fun at its idiosyncrasies.
Take, for example, the matter of gender. Unlike English nouns, all French nouns are either masculine or feminine, yet as Alexander points out, there is no rhyme or reason to the gender of any given noun. “Breast” is masculine. “Beard” is feminine. “Arms” are masculine, but “legs” are feminine. In the oddest of oddities, “vagina” is masculine. And so it goes.
Then there is the sheer lunacy of numbers in French. Alexander explains — and the strangeness of this had never occurred to me before I read Flirting with French — that French numbers only make sense up through sixty-nine (soixante-neuf).
After that, things get weird. In French, seventy is soixante-dix, which translates as sixty-ten. Seventy-nine is soixante-dix-neuf, or sixty-ten-nine. And eighty? It’s quatre-vingts, or four-twenties. Which brings us, eventually, to ninety-nine. That’s quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, or four-twenty-ten-nine. “French has a numbering system that is only slightly less complicated than the Babylonian calendar,” Alexander laments.
Flirting with French blends entertaining quips about Alexander’s adventures and fascinating facts about the language he adores. For example, although English has absorbed many French words, the French lexicon is only about a third the size of the English vocabulary. And while English pronunciation normally stresses one syllable in each word, French does not, giving spoken French a monotone that makes it that much harder for English speakers to understand.
But this is Alexander’s story, after all, so more than anything, readers will want to know whether he succeeded in his valiant quest to master French. He offers up a surprise ending, which I won’t disclose here. Suffice it to say, the outcome is worth the wait. Pick up a copy of Flirting with French, and discover it for yourself.
