Francophobia

The worst way to learn a language

Take that, Academie Francaise, I’ve left off your accent marks.

What follows is a kind of FAQ. A backstory, if you prefer.

I did not intend to do a PhD in French. This seems like a weird thing to fall ass-backwards into doing, and it wasn’t exactly like that, but it was closer than you might think. I had studied French in college because I wanted to read novels but thought this way I could do so and leave with a practical skill. (Error #1 of so so many.) While doing so, become more interested in French history than literature (at least in the sense of the academic study of literature, analyzing the structure of poems and whatnot). I applied to a bunch of history doctoral programs and do you know what history doctoral programs are looking for? Someone who has taken a history class before. Had I? Possibly one?

Most of the programs I applied to rejected me. One—NYU—said, you can come, as long as you do joint French Studies (social sciences but of France) and French Literature rather than French Studies and History, which was what I’d put down. My major had been French and this was what I qualified for. I was not exactly torn. It was between accepting the French-and-French offer and staying on in the windowless office where I was customizing a template of thank you letters to donors to a non-profit. I took the (modest) pay cut and went off on my merry way, still blissfully ignorant of why this path was not for me.

To do French as a UChicago undergrad, you just needed to do whatever it was you were doing in passable French. There were not enough takers for them to be particular about the quality of this French. At NYU, it became immediately apparent that everyone else could actually… speak French. Not fluency as in, can give a class presentation in French and do the term papers and readings in that language. Fluency as in, they relished the chance to socialize in French, either because they were big Francophiles with an ear for languages, or—often, so very often—because they were from France.

The more ease with which other people could do this, the more out-of-place I felt. I am not a particularly socially anxious person. No, the reason I was so nervous was that through the coursework itself, it became clear that the aim of the whole enterprise of French grad school wasn’t the Ideas but the perfecting of your French. Papers would come back with grammar errors marked that I couldn’t even begin to make sense of. It wasn’t enough to use language for communication. What you were communicating was secondary to the precision with which you said it and the scarf you wore while saying it.

So I became massively self-conscious every time I said anything in French, in any situation. It always felt like I had been called on in class, and needed to make sure I didn’t mess up the gender of any nouns, or forget a subjunctive, or give evidence, through my accent, of maybe possibly not being entirely French. Even the listserve postings for side jobs, generally babysitting, required a native French speaker. My Francofail self wasn’t up to the task of bringing a child from school to afterschool programming, so I never even applied, forced to supplement the stipend with such activities as freelancing for libertarian publications that no longer exist. (This bit was actually fine by me.)

There was some class you could take, in my program, where you learned how to teach French history. How fun! I didn’t get in because my French was, as a professor told me in more professional words, merde. Receiving that rejection, not even from a job or a program or anything but a pedagogy class, is literally the only time I can recall having ever cried in any workplace-type setting, right there in the shared grad-student office. (I had traded a windowless Midtown office for a windowless Village one.)

Eventually I did get to take the esteemed pedagogy class, now under a different professor. That professor (French) let me know that another grad student in our group had really good French and do you know what nationality that student was? Exactement. Being told that your French is wanting, compared with the French of a classmate who has a really long aristocratic FRENCH name is the sort of thing that sticks with you. I was le sorry, I had le tried but I guess not hard enough.

Once the required TAing (actually just teaching, we were the instructors) began, in the second year, things went truly south. The one thing everyone had to teach at first, and that only the chosen ever got to move past in later years, was… French grammar. Which is, I cannot emphasize this enough, not my strength. I had to get in front of a room, speak French, and then judge other people on whether THEY had gotten the gender of nouns right, or remembered where you’re meant to use the subjunctive.

This was a well-run undergrad French language program that I did not personally design, so any harm done to undergrads from my presence in the classroom was minimal, and as with all things, I got better at teaching French, though never, like, good. That is not the point. The point is that teaching only further reinforced my sense that French was the language you use when correcting people’s French. Obviously I never graduated to teaching content courses. Instead I remained with the content for which I was least suited.

Somewhere along the line, I should have just asked someone at NYU if I could change programs and do French history. I am time-travelling right now to speak with my 2008ish self to learn why I didn’t do that. I also might have taken note, earlier on, of the fact that I was hearing unprompted from a bunch of literary agents on the basis of my (very much English-language) blogging, so maybe there was something I was better at than having panic attacks about accidentally writing passé composée on a blackboard.

But again, the point of this post isn’t the woulda-coulda-shouldas of life, but rather how it came to be that I’m so weird about speaking French.

All of this brings me to a coffee out I had with parents from my kid’s dance class. Both of them are French (French-French, not the slightly less terrifying but more challenging for me on the accent front French-Canadian), two of us had just met the third one for the first time. He said something about how he would switch to English, for me, and I thought, OK, this is silly, I need to get over this. Here are two people, both fluent in English, but clearly more comfortable in French, and I spent exactly 10,000 years studying and working in that language. It seemed if nothing else rude of me to allow this to happen.

I responded in French that they shouldn’t switch to English on my account, that I understand everything they’re saying and that what I say might not sound like much but that I will speak to them in French. The one I hadn’t met before was like (in French), oh, OK, you speak French, and then we all just spoke French for the rest of the time, with the exception of a sentence or two when I was explaining what it is I write about, which is much more succinctly done in the language all the terms come from. (It occurred to me that if I used French to explain it, it would sound like I was an arts critic, which is as beyond my capabilities as conjugating être.)

Anyway the point of this story was that when it hit me that parent friends/acquaintances are not in fact professors grading me on my French ability, nor hyper-competitive classmates relishing that clearly I was not the one about to steal their spot in jobs that let it be said I was not applying to in the first place. They are normal people with their own lives and concerns, not members of the Académie Française. And so, years after I was meant to be doing this, I was sitting in a café (in Parkdale, not Paris) with French people, speaking French, effortless chic at last.