Most of the people that know me, including friends, family,
and classmates, will say that I’ve spent well above my fair share of time
complaining about the fact that I am required to take two full years of a
foreign language as a part of my core curriculum for my degree. As an English Major,
I always felt that this was unnecessary. I am a student of the English
language, not of French or Spanish or German. I didn’t come to college so that
I could spend four semesters sitting in a classroom suffering through verb
conjugations, vocabulary, and whole knew sets of grammar rules. I did that
enough in high school. But as it were, I happen to be in the process of
achieving my Bachelor of Arts—meaning that, even though my focus is on English,
I’m stuck taking math, science, and foreign languages classes because my degree
is essentially a liberal arts degree and encompasses more than one subject of
study.
And perhaps my frustration with the idea of taking so many
foreign language classes stems from the fact that I am not good at learning
them. I took three years of Spanish in high school and, today, could barely
have a three-minute conversation with a native speaker at best. I only got A’s
in my first two classes because I had easy teachers that graded based on
completion and participation. I dragged my heels through every required class
and the minute I finished what I needed, I dropped foreign language from my
mind, thinking I would never have to deal with it again.
So when I came to college and found out that I had to study
French, Spanish, or German, I wanted to bang my head on the wall and cry out of
frustration. I wanted to take Spanish, since I had experience with it, but
after looking at the classes before registering, I realized that my chance of
getting into a Spanish class was slim. German was only offered every other
semester, and I didn’t want to spend my entire four years of college taking it.
So, I was left with French.
My first class ended up very much the way I thought it
would: I stumbled out with a C thanks to the generosity of our teaching
assistant and learned next to nothing. But then my second semester rolled
around and I happened to pick a professor who taught the class in a way that
worked well for me: It was structured, activity-based, engaging, and she liked
to do lots of pantomime when speaking, which only helped to increase my
understanding (I am a visual and kinesthetic learner). Over the course of the following year, I
found myself no longer dreading French class and actually becoming interested
in what it was that we were learning. I took a History of the English Language
class which helped me to not only
understand where my own language came from, but that French is actually more
connected to English than we think.
With that in mind, here are some things that I learned from
taking three semesters of French:
French is hard. As I said before, I’m terrible when it comes
to comprehending and applying foreign languages. I can conjugate verbs all day
long, but speaking casually strikes me dumb every single time. French itself is
a challenging language because it isn’t very phonetic—most of the last letters
or groups of letters in their words are not pronounced. For example, the verb
“parler,” to speak, would be conjugated as “parle, parles, parle, parlent” for
“I, you, he/she/it, and they,” respectively. You know how they’re all
pronounced? “Parl.” Just like that. I can’t explain why this happens, but it
takes a long time to get used to it. Their sounds are also very nasal, which
isn’t often found in English, and therefore their vowels sound much different
to us. “Je,” for “I” is pronounced more like “Juh,” than “jee” or “jay.”
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| William the Conqueror |
French is, in large part, where our connection to Latin
comes from. The Norman Invasion of
England brought about the introduction of the language to native English
speakers in, well, England. An Anglo-Norman dialect, which was a northern
dialect of Old French, became common amongst the nobility and very few people
learned to speak English, not even William the Conqueror, the guy who was
responsible for the invasion. However, the poor and other classes of people that
relied heavily on trading between the two peoples began to integrate French
words into English, and in some cases, it’s likely that many were bilingual. French
itself is a Romance language, which means that it was a decedent of Latin. The
French words that were added to our lexicon are the source of most of our Latin
roots.
There are a lot of cognates in French. As anyone who has
taken a foreign language will know, there are often times where a word in
another language bears a strong resemblance to an English word. English has the
unique quality of being a bit of mutt—it’s blending of Romantic and Germanic histories
gives us a massive vocabulary, one of the largest in the world. Here are some
examples of just a few French cognates:
Commencer (to commence or begin)
Dormir (to sleep; be “dormant”)
Finir (to finish)
Ètudier (to study)
Fumer (to smoke)
Lever (to get up; “levitate”)
beige
bible
absence
accent
adolescent
applicable
attention
le campus
la cigarette
le crime
la culture
le film
gourmet
pardon
bleu (blue)
aimable (friendly; amiable)
beau (beautiful)
l’estomac (stomach)
du bœuf
(beef)
du
poulet (chicken)
la
glace (ice/ice cream)
comprendre (to understand)
And the list goes on. There are literally thousands of
French/English cognates, many of them spelled the exact same way (but
pronounced differently). This makes vocabulary often easy to grasp, but the
matter of applying it can be a bit more complicated. It’s also interesting to
think of the French words as the origin of many English root words.
You don’t truly learn a language until you envelope yourself
in it. This is why so many teachers and professors stress to their students
that studying abroad is important. There is no better way to become fluent in
another language than to actively be speaking with people who have it as their
native tongue. When you learn a language in a classroom setting, it’s giving
you the bare basics to begin the real understanding. Many times, the concepts
you learn in class are extremely formal and not used on a casual, day-to-day
basis by native speakers.
