Parlez-vous Francais?

Not quite sure where to start, but these last few days have been a bit rough around the edges.  I now have an appreciation for how little French I really know, and that is humbling, and makes my day-to-day-interactions, well, ripe with opportunity. 

I am trying my best to continue to speak French with the shop-keepers and, for the most part, they are very helpful in this regard.  The women in the boulangerie have taught me the words for sliced bread, change from my purchase and some of the different types of bread.  The farmers in the outdoor market have helped me to learn the words for a bunch of fresh herbs and free-range eggs.  The people in the super-markets have taught me about my grocery cards and other more official shopping categories. 

And my landlady, my poor landlady, has helped me to learn some amenities and plumbing words right off the bat.  I have never ached so much for an iron, nor was so happy to see one, as this afternoon.  And who knew that the word for drain was tuyau – that doesn’t even sound like a word to me!

And the conjugations, oh the conjugations, of all my verbs in all of their various tenses.  Let’s just say that it was enough impetus to get me to sign up for a two-week language course.  It is even better than the Alliance Francaise in Toronto in that the students come from so many different parts of the world that it is actually easier to try to communicate in French during the break than in other languages. 

It turns out that some people have the easy facility of plowing through sentences and others, like me, get caught up in the grammar of the situation and are very halting and plodding.  Put into a grammatical exercise I can work my way through in my own time.  But the speed and facilty of my thoughts are so much faster than the speed and agility of my language ability that I stop and start and stutter.  No wonder my landlady continues to want to switch to English. 

I don’t think I have always been this way, but I am more hesitant here in Aix than I have been in other foreign language environments.  Maybe I have heard too much about how proper the French like their speech, or maybe I am just a bit overwhelmed by the desire to help my family settle in comfortably. Or maybe it is just me being older.  But I am hoping that I can push through this little block I am feeling and dive back into embracing all the moments of my day, instead of pondering the mistakes that come on an almost minute-ly basis.  The inner critic is the harshest one. 

But, and this is a big but, I am making progress, even in this short time.  I find that words with which I can make a connection all of a sudden start to pop up in other places, simply because I now notice them.  In Vauvenargues last week I looked up the word “carrefour,” which means crossroads and both it, and the word “chemin” appeared in the article that I hope to present to my French class next week.  And I have to admit that for the girl who could not understand almost a single dialogue in many of her previous French classes, I am getting much more of the casual conversation than I would have anticipated.  Accent, still terrible, worry, still present, but desire and sheer stubbornness still reigns strong.