Tomorrow I leave for France to do a month-long residency as a Brown Foundation Fellow at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes — a tiny cliff town in the south. I’m anticipating a pretty sweet time there — the place looks beautiful on the Web site. It’s a chance for me to work with complete concentration in the studio (I shipped my art supplies over about a month ago). My goal is to complete a suite of 60 drawings (if you knew my drawings, you’d know this is ambitious), some of them to be included in a retrospective exhibition that opens next year at Scripps College in California. I’ll be given a studio, and a bedroom and cooking privileges in the common kitchen of the house. From what I understand, there will be about a half dozen fellows, both Americans and Europeans, in the maison during my stay.
I see myself now, shopping in the petit village for légumes and fromage. For one blissful month, there’ll be no worrying about home stuff like the cats (my daughter will take care of the needy little beasts) or watering the plants (ditto).
As soon as I learned I had been awarded the fellowship, I took stock of my mauvais French. I had exactly four months to rediscover what has always been mere survival French. Although I’ve studied the language, and been to France frequently — several times for extended periods — I was never great at French and it’s been 15 years since I was last required to use it.
I decided to take a $300 plunge and go with Rosetta Stone, whose ads make learning a language look like all you have to do is turn on your computer. They offer four levels of each language. For me, having been away from French for so long, Level 2 sounded just about right — past, present, and future tenses, intermediate-level vocabulary, and conversations between friends and with people you might encounter while traveling.
The program is sort of fun. You start with baby steps (look at that, the French word for “photo” is … “photo”!) and then build. There are four units, each with lessons covering pronunciation, vocabulary, phrases, listening, speaking, reading, conversation, and writing (hardly any, but the mix of actual and virtual keyboards makes it unnecessarily difficult). Some of the conversation demands fairly close listening, but it’s all manageable if you put in, say, 45 minutes a day. The words and phrases are recycled and reappear in different contexts throughout each lesson and from one unit to the next. The pictures are a little exaggerated (you’re supposed to be able to figure out what the people are doing, so visual subtlety is a no-no), but they do the trick.
But the voices of the “native speakers” (the two men and two women who cajole you to speak French) — that’s where the delight and torment reside. Within the first week, their distinct rhythms, inflections, and emphases snuggled permanently into a corner of my brain. One man’s voice is a lover’s — deep, mellifluous, seductive and, well, manly. But the second guy sounds like a misanthropic French postal worker who’s annoyed that you’ve even dared to ask him about purchasing some timbres. Then there’s the young woman who sounds like a beautiful little ingénue — the kind of 19-year-old girl who always shows up in French movies in a darling Alpha-Romeo. J’adore cette femme! She makes it clear, through her soft, charming voice, that she really, truly wants me to learn French. But the fourth one — oh my god, you never want to meet her across a desk. From the get-go, she’s a witch — venomously spitting out her impeccably formed French words, obviously wanting me to fail miserably. When I’m supposed to repeat her words, “Non, nous ne pouvons pas!” (or even when it’s merely concerning a restaurant reservation, “Nous serons quatres!”) I want to start bawling instead.
Does the program work? More crucially, will it have worked on me? Well, I’ll soon find out, right? When I ask my first perfectly intoned question, such as “Pourriez-vous me dire la location du TGV?” and receive my first perfectly intoned and complicated reply, will I ne comprends pas and freeze in terror, or will I gather together the essentials and say “Merci beaucoup”?
Despite such fear, I’m looking forward to an occasion where I can trot out my favorite sentence — “Je fais du cheval dans la neige” — in May, in the south of France. Of course, it’s going take some work to find an opportunity where it could possibly make sense, but I have the will, and there will be a way.
Oddly, the word I want to use the most — vin — doesn’t appear even once in Rosetta Stone’s French 2. But even without the help of Rosetta Stone, I think I’d always manage to get hold of some. We’re talking France, after all.
