The Wrong Kind of French

It’s that time of year….you know, the one where someone from Network Rail  or some BBC reporter stands in a street full of snowdrifts and tells us we’ve got no trains/electricity/gas/sanity because of “the wrong kind of snow” (who knew?). Over much of the UK and Europe, people have been waking up (or even going to bed) to a blanket of white. Most of them seem to have eschewed the idea of grabbing a blanket, hot water bottle or extra firewood in favour of a camera. Facebook is a veritable winter wonderland of “views from my window” shots of whiteness. I am typing this very blog entry whilst gazing out onto my white-ish back garden. Spots of colour are peeking through, though, ‘cos it’s already melting. I’d add a photo but it’s already too late and one person’s snow-covered garden looks very much like another’s, so I feel I’m sparing you.

But I’ve just found out that the snow isn’t the only thing of which we can have a wrong kind. No, apparently, there’s also the wrong kind of French. 

My morning scan of some of the Internet’s vast number of Francophile forums revealed that a number of  people appear to be having problems mastering the French language because, back in the UK, they’d poured their hearts and their money into learning the wrong kind of French. And to top it all, the French haven’t been sent the memo, so they’re being most uncooperative and speaking some lazy colloquial version of their own language, showing no regard for those who have learned proper French as she is spoke.  In a typo sent from heaven, one person complained that her French acquaintances appeared to be speaking “patios”.  An interesting thought, but about as unlikely as a talking conservatory.

I’ve been to this place called Patios, though. And no, it’s not a Greek Island. People aren’t speaking patois as often as they are slang, and I well remember having to come to terms with the realisation that French slang has an alternative word for almost everything. On my first long-term stay in France in the mid-1970’s, I met so much slang that I was initially convinced I’d been sent to the wrong country. After a while, though, it does fall into place. And it’s not nearly as confusing as discovering that your college tutor, happily married to the same woman for a fair number of years, calls his wife “Vous”. Now, if that doesn’t fly in the face of what the textbooks say, I don’t know what does.

Now that I’ve become what might loosely be described as a “teacher” (I admit to feeling somewhat embarrassed to use the term in case a real teacher comes along and I get found out), I do see both sides of this situation. Of course, when we learn a foreign language, we are taught the correct way of using the grammar and of forming sentences with grammatically proper structures. But, as we know with our native language, rules are made to be broken. I’ve just counted the number of sentences in this post that start with a conjunction, for example, and if I was a better person, I might feel shame. But I’m not ;-)

With my adult learners, though, I seem to run into a regular problem. Many have a strong foundation in French, well-remembered from their schooldays. They also have the benefit of maturity and wisdom commensurate with their age. Why, then, do they so often seem to go into some sort of mental meltdown if I tell them that they MAY have learned to say “X”, but that the majority of French people say “Y”?? Sometimes, I will get as far as being able to convince people to use a more relaxed and informal turn of phrase, only to meet them again for the next lesson and find that they’ve reverted to speaking like Louis XIV because that’s what they learned thirty years ago.

There is a beautiful illustration of this phenomenon in one of my favourite French films ever, “Etre et Avoir”,  (To be and to have) the story of a teacher in a single-classroom school in rural France. Originally made as a documentary, it charts a year in the life of this school and its extraordinarily dedicated teacher, Georges Lopez. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to do so. Even with subtitles it’s well worth watching.  It contains the following scene, which goes some way to show that the French do try, very hard and from an early age, to learn the RIGHT kind of French, but unfortunately, the wrong kind of French is deeply ingrained. Meanwhile, this side of the Channel, we’re learning the right kind of French and, if numbers of British migrants to France increase enough, who knows, one day we might be able to save the French language from dumbing down…..

I can’t find a clip of this with English subtitles, and you’ll need to watch it from about 2 minutes 20 into the clip, but the children are using the word “ami” or “amie” (friend) to learn the difference between masculine and feminine noun endings. However, one small boy is NOT prepared to give up easily on using the word “copain”  (mate). He will probably be in his late teens by now (as the film was released in 2002), and actively engaged in confusing well-meaning British people who have learned all about “ami” and “amie”, but are blissfully ignorant of “copain” and “copine”…