With an obstinacy that would put an exceptionally stubborn child to shame, my brain refuses to learn foreign languages. Teachers tried to teach me French in junior high (or maybe high school; or maybe both; I forget). Other teachers tried to teach me Hebrew in the extracurricular Hebrew school my parents sent me to. They failed. Miserably.
One phrase got me through Hebrew school. Roughly transliterated, it’s “uh-nee low yo-day-a.” In the Hebrew alphabet (thanks to Google Translate) it’s אני לא יודע.
The same phrase translated into French got me through French class. In that language it’s “je ne sais pas.”
For the benefit of those who don’t speak either French or Hebrew, in English it’s “I don’t know.” That was my stock answer whenever my French or Hebrew teachers called on me.
Priorities Change
When I was a kid, I didn’t care about learning languages. Now, because I like to travel, I’d love to learn some.
I’ve tried off and on with varying intensity to learn French, both because I enjoy visiting France and because French is one of the official languages of my country, Canada. But French isn’t easy to learn; not in the least. I still can’t carry on or even understand a French conversation. In fact, I haven’t advanced much beyond “je ne sais pas.”
English throws enough roadblocks in the path of someone who wants to learn it. But those barriers are no higher than street curbs compared to the mountains thrown in the path of someone who wants to become fluent in French. I have a true appreciation of anyone who can speak it well. Even if it is their mother tongue, they must be geniuses.
Silent English
In English, there are some words with silent letters. For example, what’s up with the “g” in worlds like right, fight, height, might, light…? True, we need to make it clear that it is a hard “i” preceding the “g” and not a soft “i.” But couldn’t we just agree that an “h” after an “i” does that? Then we could do away with the “g.”
And if we sliced the “k” off words like knife, knight and knave, then, at least when spoken, we’d be none the worse for the loss. Well, ok. True. Yanking the “k” off of knight and knave would leave other words. But we could probably figure it out from the context like we must do when those words are spoken.
Super-Silent French
English may make occasional use of silent letters, but French employs them with reckless abandon. In hardcopy books, magazines and newspapers, if the French didn’t print any of the letters that are silent when the words are spoken, the world would have many more forests than it has now.
If you don’t know how to pronounce a French word, don’t bother vocalizing the last letter or two (or sometimes three). I don’t know for sure, but I’m willing to bet that you’d be right much more often than you’d be wrong.
Well, that is, not always. Letters that are silent in most instances decide to speak up in others. A letter at an end of a word that is silent when the next word begins with a consonant is usually pronounced when the next word begins with a vowel.
I know this rule, but because my brain is used to pronouncing words pretty much the same every time, it has a hard time remembering to put the rule into play when struggling say anything in French.
French Sex (Have I got your attention?)
Then there is gender. In French, every noun, even those for inanimate objects, has a gender. French isn’t the only language to do this, but I can speak only about French. (Just to be clear: I can speak about it, but I can’t speak it.)
As far as I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to determining the sex of an object. I looked under my chair. I couldn’t see anything that suggests it’s female. But to the French it is.
And in French, a tower is feminine, but a monument is masculine. So, a tower that is also a monument, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, is bisexual, so to speak.
If you don’t know French, or another language that applies genders to all nouns and has a grammar similar to French, you probably think, “Yeah, so, why does it matter that they assign genders to nouns?” It matters because the articles “the” and “an”, along with possessive pronouns, have male and female forms in French.
The French expect you to use the right one. But I can rarely remember which nouns—other than homme, femme, garçon and fille (man, woman, boy and girl)—are male and which are female.
Order Vowel Foods
I learned a little trick in this regard that I’ll pass along to you at no charge. It will help you when ordering food in restaurants. In French, the male form for the English word “the” is “le” and the female form is “la.” However, when the noun after le or la begins with a vowel it is not just permissible, but mandatory to abbreviate both le and la to l’. When you speak the contracted word combination, the “l” sound runs up against the noun it precedes. And, as I said, that’s the same for both male and female nouns.
So, if you are in a restaurant and you don’t want to embarrass yourself by using le with a female food or la with a male food, choose foods that begin with a vowel. That way, when you want to say “I’d like the …,” you can just say “Je voudrais l’ …” regardless of whether it’s a male or female food.
It’s a good thing I like lamb (agneau), garlic (ail), onions (oignons), and oranges (oranges). Those are the only foods I can think of off the top of my head that start with vowels in French. There are probably more. I wish I knew them so I could expand my menu choices.
Definitely
Warning: This works if only you use the definite article. This is the opposite of English, which uses “a” or “an” depending on whether the noun following it starts with a consonant or vowel, but uses “the” in both cases. In French, the male form for “a” or “an” is “un” and the female form is “une” and you don’t get to contract them or change them when using them with a noun regardless of whether the noun starts with a vowel or a consonant.
However, just to make it more difficult, un, but not une, is one of those words that is pronounced differently, despite being spelled the same, depending on whether the word following it begins with a vowel or consonant.
Thus, it’s always easier to be very definite about what you order—“the whatever,” not “a whatever.”
Aside: When I was a kid, most people used “sex” and “gender” almost interchangeably. (Yeah, yeah. I know. It was a much less enlightened time.) Be that as it may, I was wondering, are inanimate French objects gender fluid these days?
Possessing Sex
You’re probably thinking, “Well, at least it’s easy when talking about your own stuff or about the stuff of someone you know. Then you don’t have to worry about whether to use the male or female possessive pronoun because you know the sex of the possessor.”
Non, non, non, mes amis. It is the possessed thing and not the possessor that determines whether you use the male or the female possessive pronoun.
Politically Incorrect
Just as an aside, I should mention that French is a politically incorrect language when it comes to genders. In French, the male form for the English word “they” is “ils.” The female form is “elles.” If you are talking about a group of only men you use “ils.” If you are talking about a group of only women you use “elles.” However, if you are talking about a mixed group—even if it is a group with 100 women and only one man—you use ils.
Conjugation
Even if you figure out which letters in French words you can leave by the wayside when you speak the words and you manage to remember the gender of all nouns, you still have to figure out how to conjugate verbs and get the right forms (male/female and number) for adjectives.
I’m not going to explain how to do that here for two reasons. First, it would take way too long. And, second, I can’t recall. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to remember. It’s far too complex.
There are different verb forms for first, second and third person; past, present and future tense; infinitive, subjunctive, indicative, conditional and imperative; male and female; passive and active; and probably a couple of criteria I’ve either forgotten or never knew. I think there may be a different verb form depending on whether you are facing north, south, east or west when you use the verb, but I could be wrong about that.
And you don’t conjugate verbs the same way for all verbs. There are a few different endings for the infinitive version of verbs—“ir,” “re,” “er” and possibly one or two others that I’ve forgotten. Verb conjugation differs for each verb ending.
Then there are a couple of verbs that don’t follow the standard rules. Their conjugation makes no sense whatsoever.
🤷🏼♂️
With all those oddities, I can’t understand how even someone with an ear for languages can learn French. For me, il est impossible. Or is that, elle est impossible? I don’t know.
That’s all I’m going to say about the subject. Keep in mind though, I may be totally wrong about everything I’ve written above concerning the French language. That may be why French people find it excruciatingly difficult to suppress their laughter whenever I attempt to speak French.
