Je ne parle pas Francais tres bien…
Je parle… un peu. Un petite peu.
I know just enough French to tell people my name, and that I don’t speak French very well.
There was a time when I was a little better at it. I got an A- on my French NYS Regents exam, and then took another year of it in college, scoring myself a nice 5 credit “D” my freshman year that ruined my GPA for years.
It wasn’t entirely my fault. When I was growing up my school district didn’t even offer classes in foreign language until 7th grade, at which point we were all 13 and much too interested in the opposite sex and hair growing in funny places to want to waste our time memorizing basic verb conjugations.
Such was the suburban public school system in 80’s America.
But I always liked French. It is a beautiful language, and there were always pretty girls in French class to flirt with. There was a time I could hold a decent conversation in it, but I never practiced over the years, and what little skill I had faded away like smoke, which I learned much to my chagrin on my trip to Paris last year.
Still, I read much better than I speak, and I had hopes that, since I am so close to the source material, that I could read l’Homme Rune, the French translation of The Painted Man, which went on sale recently from the new Milady imprint of publisher Bragelonne.
I love Bragelonne. France was the first country to step up and buy translation rights of my books, and not only that, but their illustrious leader, Stephane Marsan, wrote a long personal note about how much he loved the book, and talked it up to everyone he met. It was a huge show of support at the beginning of my career that I will be forever grateful for.
He also took half a day off work to show me and my buddy Myke around Paris. Can you believe that? A gentleman and a scholar. I met the whole staff at their office, and you’ve never met a nicer bunch of people, and they all love fantasy and that passion shows in their work.
For instance, I got my sample copies yesterday, and the book is beautiful:
So I sat down and tried to read it. And it’s weird. I can kinda understand it, but kinda not.
That is, the French is totally beyond me. I’ve forgotten FAR too much. If I was reading anything other than my own book, I would be totally lost.
But it IS my book, and I know the corespawned thing backwards and forwards with my eyes closed and music blaring. For the most part, I can stare at each sentence, remember its English equivalent, and then use what little French I know to figure it out. It’s an exhausting process, though. Takes like an hour to read a couple of paragraphs, and it feels like I’m cheating on a test somehow.
I think if I were left on a desert island with only this book for a year, I would probably speak passable French when I was rescued. It is my Rosetta stone.
I know my monolingualism is due as much to my own laziness as the lack of schooling, but as an adult I really feel like I’m missing something. If I do nothing else right as a parent, I am going to make sure Cassie has access to foreign language classes at an early age. She’ll thank me when I take her to Paris as my translator in 2020.
It’s difficult to read in a foreign langage, even if you have studied it.
I remember when I first tried to read a book in english! I was in college, stydying english since junior high school. And… it was a Star Wars book for the 8 to 12 years old!!!
And… after two sentences, I almost put the book away, because I couldn’t understand a word of it!
But I really wanted to read this book and improve my english, so I persisted. At the beginning, it took me un hour to read a single page, and I was always in my dictionnary to find what this word or that means.
It was boring, tedious, but the more I read, the less I needed the dictionnary.
I discovered letter that Science Fiction is not the best kind of books to beging in a foreign langage!
After a few months of reading children’s books, I tried to read a fantasy book in english, and if it was really difficult at the beginning, due to all the specific vocabulary, I didn’t needed the dictionnary anymore in the middle of the book.
Now, I love reading in english so much that it’s very rare I read the french translation. It’s like I’m so proud to finally be able to read in this langage, me who was so not good in english in junior high school and high school!
Thanks Jess. I’ll stop whining about my poor language skills now. 🙂
I think it’s already amazing that so many persons choose french to learn a foreign langage (and a lot of authors apparently!)! I didn’t think it was often chosen. I think it’s a complicated langage to learn because where in others langages you have a rule, an few exceptions, in french it’s the contrary : a rule for a few cases and all the rest is exceptions!!! But I learned Russian in addition to english, and I found it more complicated than french with all the declensions. I studied it for 7 years and when I went in St-Petersbourg, I was lost because we didn’t learn how to say usuals words! So I was forced to use a mix between french, english and russian for the people who housed me to understand me!!!