I lived in France for quite a while before I could understand a word of the language. I couldn’t distinguish individual words; they seemed to be all roped together, falling overboard from people’s mouths. I used to listen to the radio constantly, until first the weather set in – vingt-cinq degrés, plein soleil, usually. Then les nouvelles, the news. Then finally the phone-in problems.
Some people find it easy to pick up a second language. For me it was grind; years of it. And even at the end, my patient martinet of a teacher simply shrugged her shoulders and said, “You will always make lots of faults. You must just hope that people find it charming.”
So I would recommend Lauren Collins’s lovely memoir to anyone who has ever tried and failed to learn French, or struggles to remember whether baguette is masculine or feminine (feminine; all the “ette”s are).
When Collins first meets her husband to be, Olivier, they can’t even say each other’s names. Stranded in Geneva, she sets out on a quest to learn French (he speaks English). The book recounts their story, but also tries to discover an answer to that most frustrating of questions: does the language you speak help define the type of person you are?
It is a highly engaging primer on language – in 1880, we learn incidentally, there were 641 German newspapers in the United States – and a touching and funny love story. She joins the usual painful classes, and moves towards fluency. She listens to her husband on the telephone:
Little fragments of dialogue sing out, as though someone has fiddled with the volume knob on the background music to our life … He seems to be saying “quoi” a lot. Even as it dawns on me that I may have pledged lifelong devotion to a man who ends every sentence with the equivalent of “dude”, I’m taken by an eerie joy. Four years after having met Olivier, I’m hearing his voice for the first time.
Some of the more traditional memoir elements are a little sketchy: did she really just pop a letter off to Princeton University to gain admission? And did she just fall into a staff writing job at the New Yorker? One moment she is on the language nursery slopes; the next she is sitting in on meetings of the Académie française, the organisation that finds french equivalents for English incoming words – la beuverie express, for example, for binge drinking.
To anglophones, this kind of thing seems funny: in fact, as Collins points out, when you have a world in which English is the language of the rich, and French – or any other language – that of the poor, then you have a serious class problem, and not only in France.
The snippets of language anomalies are fascinating: I love the remote tribe that has no terms for “in front” or “behind”, instead using cardinal points. It’s full of good lines (“expats are just immigrants who drink at lunchtime”), and Collins is excellent on what it is like to finally command a different, more reserved language, then re-emerge blinking into English, when everyone thinks everything is CRAZY AWESOME AMAZING all the time and speaks in exclamations.
In English, she muses, she loves “my friends, hydrangeas, podcasts, clean sheets”. In contrast, in his more precise, painstaking French: “Olivier has only ever loved me.”
This charming book is not just about the language gulf, but the gulf between all human beings, and how we all try to learn to walk in another person’s shoes; “se mettre dans la peau de quelqu’un”.
• When in French is published by 4th Estate. To order a copy for £12.99 (RRP £10.65) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
