After a few days of being around French-speaking people, my ear does not tune in better. It actually seems to get worse, as exhausted as my poor legs are after walking up and down hills in Vieux Quebec for the past six days. Strangely enough, my eye seems to be better focused; I find after a few days I can read and understand French almost as easily as I did in the days when French was not so much a foreign language as an exotic one - one I used only in special circumstances.
My children are bilingual. They are comfortable in both French and English, although French is mostly restricted to the world of academia and profanity (they are kids, after all). I bought them books, in French (although translations, this time, from English authors they already know). They will roll their eyes, and thank me with a long-suffering tone, I know. But there is a difference in the intention of words when you heard them in a different language. And I want them to remember that, because it is important.
Today I was reading a sign, which talked about le dommage done to a building after a fire in the 1970s. I remembered my French lessons: C'est dommage (That's too bad). But in the first instance, damage is intense; in the second, it is merely a polite saying. I am sorry in English becomes Je sui desolé in French. How much worse does desolated sound, compared to merely sorry?
Je suis desolé que my langue Français est pauvre. I speak baby talk in French, laced with numerous errors and English interjections. Even when I work a phrase painstakingly out in my head, I stumble and trip over the pronunciation (not helped by my ever-so-snotty children). One day, I tell myself, I will learn to converse in French.
A la futur. Peut-être.
No comments:
Post a Comment