You walk into the classroom, full of nervous students pawing the desks and chattering hurriedly amongst themselves. You are afraid too. Alone, you take the spot in the corner where next to you, a girl is busy flipping through the book you were to study today. As you sit down she looks up briefly and throws you a glance. You smile at her, a little awkwardly and in a way that you hope is friendly. She does not smile back.
The teacher walks in, eyes bright, step brisk, overly cheerful, you think.
“Welcome, class! Bonjour, tout le monde!” she chirps at the students, who have suddenly grown extremely silent and instead of greeting her are staring stiffly down at their books.
“I’m very pleased to have you all in my French class. For the next month we’re going to go through the basics of the French language, and see for ourselves what it has to offer.” She gives a smile, a scarlet, lipsticked smile that looks as fake as her makeup. “My name is Madame Brighton, but you can call me Madame for short. Now today, we’re going to start with the alphabet.”
A few hours later you find yourself at home, your notebook in your hand, trying to replicate the sounds Madame made in the classroom. They’re the same letters that you’ve seen all your life, the same English letters, yet it marvels you what a world of pronunciation can lie behind a single one. You sound them out one by one, the b that rings on your lips, the d that jumps on the roof of your mouth and hops off your tongue, the amorphous vowels, in turn, but it’s the r that evades you, the strange conso-vowel that is the r, the rasping that starts from the bottom of your throat and rattles inside your mouth. The vocabulary words are frustratingly simple—book, chair, notebook, clock—yet the words themselves are so different that it is difficult for you to understand that the English words and the French words refer to the same thing. You recall the story you read in your Korean text book, about the man who decided to call his bed ‘a chair’ and thus changed the names of everything else, who as a consequence became unable to communicate with anyone else, quietly enveloping himself in his words. If he had met another person who, like him, decided to call things differently, then this may have very well become a new sort of language. After all, what is language but a complicity of sorts?
Your mother wants you to master French, so that you can take the DELF, take the SATs, take the AP. The austere girl who sits next to you—who is also Korean, as it happens—is studying for the same goal. She pores over her words, memorizes her vocabulary impeccably, knows every grammatical rule by heart. But what is the use? you wonder. The most important thing is not whether avoir is an irregular verb, or whether the subject comes before the object or vice versa. No language in the world can be broken down to its essentials like that. Those are mere technicalities, mere rules that are as light-hearted as the ones children make up for themselves. No, what you really want to do is to grab a Frenchman, take him by the collar, shake him a little, and ask “But why, sir? Why must a clock be an horloge?” And he will shake his head, shrug perhaps, because for him it is so blatantly obvious that a clock is an horloge, as obvious as it is for you that a clock is a clock. How is that less important than regular verbs or obtaining the DELF?
The plastic figure of a teacher offers no explanations. She continues to hand you your abysmal grades on quizzes, with the same red smile plastered onto her face and the same, trite encouragement to ‘keep trying harder, dear’. The girl next to you watches, with an unmistakable smirk. She is the teacher’s favorite.
The lessons drag on forever, Madame in her terrible falsetto chanting out rules and exceptions. The whole experience is tortuous for you, the grammar unbearably boring, and the students looking as if their bodies were mere shells, their souls succumbing to the torpor.
“Now, class,” the teacher continues in her overly peppy voice, “let’s all pay attention now. Don’t doze off, or we’ll have another quiz tomorrow.”
Always more quizzes, more homework. She says that this is the only way to learn a language, by endless memorization, testing and repetition. Need it be so boring? You ask. Where are the quirks in the language? The idioms you learn must have some kind of basis, some kind of origin, derived from the wits of many linguists and citizens alike. Certainly there are reasons my dear becomes translated into my little cabbage. And why do they say to have the heart on the hand instead of wearing it on the sleeve? If Madame ever had the sense to tell the students those things, you’re sure that there will be less dozing off in class.
So you decide to find out for yourself. And what a jungle it is! Philosophers, kings, queens, poets, writers, artists; their arms and legs are jumbled up in a chaotic mess, shaping the language for what it is. Finally you can understand what a Proust’s madeleine is, or why so many words come from Latin, or why the letters are pronounced the way they are. You see that tomber dans les pommes (fall into apples), a strange way to say to faint, comes from George Sand, les fleurs du mal (the flowers of evil, or a masked evil) from Charles Baudelaire, and that the majority of the strange French words take their origins from Greek and Latin. Some are names you’ve never heard before, or words you can’t even pronounce, but the language faithfully reproduces them, makes them come alive in a colorful dance before your eyes; a secret is uncovered.
The last class comes sooner than expected, and nothing seems to have changed. The students are as unenthusiastic as ever, save for the Korean girl who is eagerly reading over the final teacher’s comments. You are still slumped over on your desk, not wanting to read yours, but the scarlet letters reminiscent of her lipstick glare into your eyes: “Good job, but needs to try harder.” You know what you have done, though, so you do not regret anything.
As the bell rings and the students shuffle out, you turn around for one last thing. Madame Brighton notices.
“Yes, Joelle?”
You hesitate, swallow, unable to get it out. Then,
“Merci.”
You know it is not addressed to the teacher herself but rather to the entire classroom, the words scrawled on the blackboard, the conjugational tables stapled to the walls, the French vocabulary charts that you’ve grown used to reading. It is a thank you to the French language itself, because for all the failed tests and boring lessons and horrible hours spent with Madame, you’ve grown to love it. And all these words, their history, the secrets that they’ve been whispering to themselves and that no one, not even the teacher, bothered to uncover, are now yours.
So you say, “merci”, the r rising from the bottom of your throat, from the bottom of your heart, jumping out of your mouth and finally sounding just right.
