Editor's note

By Megan Hirt

Thursday, September 11, 2008

I can speak French.

Or so I thought, before I actually went to France.

Fresh off my nine-hour flight to Paris, I was giddy at the sight of stone streets, the smell of fresh baguettes and the sounds of the French language buzzing around me.

Feeling ambitious, I strolled into a store to buy a phone card, and inside stood two French boys.

The notebooks scrawled with vocab lists and verb conjugations, the hours spent willing my vocal cords to produce those throaty French sounds all flashed before me.

Everything came down to this: my first real French conversation.

I approached the guy behind the counter—all cheekbones and pouty lips, blonde hair crashing into his eyes—and said “Bonjour,” nodding my head politely, just as I’d practiced in the mirror.

The word had barely escaped my nervous lips when the other guy—brunette curls, striped sweater in June—looked over at me, then at his co-worker, and mumbled, “American.”

I remember their amused grins, the impatient confusion in their eyes as I struggled to spit out basic sentences.

I remember the burn in my cheeks, the heavy knot in my tongue, the way my brain short-circuited as I frantically searched for the French words that corresponded with my English thoughts.

Second person plural, direct object there, future tense here—Oh, I messed up, can I start over?

As I was leaving the store after what seemed like hours, the blonde said to me, in French, “You speak French very well, my dear.”

I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic, serious or sympathetic.

I wanted to reply that this was my first day in France and that I’d just spent nine hours on a crowded airplane next to a burly man with pistachio breath.

But though all these words were somewhere in my head, standing there, I couldn’t say them. I just nodded politely and left.

My time in France opened my eyes to all the nuances of communication I once took for granted. No matter how much I study, I’ll likely never be able to fully comprehend the humor or master the distinct flow of conversation in French.

Read Derek’s story on page 12 about KU student Travis Tewes, who can rap in English and Japanese and who has used his language skills to make a name for himself in Japan’s hip-hop scene.

And, be sure to check out page 6 for the first installment of “Transatlantic Trends,” a fashion column from Jayplay writer Chris Horn, who’s spending the semester in France.

I hope he has better luck conversing with the locals than I did that first day.

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