Day 141 - French Words

image of Eiffel Tower by wlappe, via Flickr

One similarity between the university system in Romania and in the U.S. was that there was a break between sessions around the end of the calendar year. It wasn't referred to as a Christmas break, just the end of term. And there wasn't much incentive for me to stick around in either Iasi or even Bucharest, so I made plans to travel to Paris and Yugoslavia. I had friends living in both places, a strong incentive for picking them as destinations.

When I mentioned to the French lecturers that I planned to travel to Paris, one of them, Lionel*, suggested I practice my French with him before I went. I told him I didn't speak French. He looked at me sideways and paused thoughtfully, after which he said, "But surely you speak French words." After giving it some thought, I realized he was right. My French repertoire consisted at least of the following words and phrases.

Conversational Phrases

• Bonjour. (Good day.)
• Bonne nuit. (Good night.)
• Au revoir. (Until we meet again.)
• Tres bien. (Very good)
• Adieu. (Farewell)
• Comment allez-vous? comment ça va? (How are you?)
• Merci beaucoup. (Thanks very much.)

Clothing and Cosmetics

• beret (hat)
• chemise (blouse)
• pantalon (pants)
• jaquette (jacket)
• haute couture (high fashion)
• parfum (perfume)

Food

• pain (bread)
• gâteau (cake)
• biscuit (cookie)
• chocolat (chocolate)
• orange (orange)
• limon (lemon)
• coq au vin (chicken in wine)
• pâtisserie (pastry)
• quiche (quiche)

Adjectives

• petit (small)
• grand (big)
• blanc (white)
• rouge (red)
• noir (black)
• bleu (blue)
• beige (beige)
• violet (violet, purple)
• brun (brown)

Phrases

• Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? (Oh, come on now, don't try to tell me you don't know what this means.)
• chassez les femmes (chase the women)
• influence d'argent (influence of money)

Then Lionel pointed out the additional French words that I knew, perhaps without realizing I knew them, because they are also Romanian, Spanish, or English words, borrowed from French.

• cadeau (cadou in Romanian, gift)
• hier (ieri in Romanian, yesterday)
• the names of the days of the week

And suddenly the light went on. I could speak French. With Lionel's encouragement, I added a few more words and phrases:

• Parlez-vous anglais? (Do you speak English?)
• Je suis désolé, je ne parle pas français. (I'm sorry. I don't speak French.)
• Vouz avez [fill in the blank]? (Do you have [fill in the blank]?)
• Je veux [fill in the blank]. (I want [fill in the blank].)

Armed with overconfidence, I decided I could travel to Paris and make my way around with ease. I made plans, contacted my friends Shellagh and Bill who I met in Tehran before Bill was transferred to Paris by his employer, IBM. Shellagh told me how to get from the airport to an area near her office where she met me and showed me how to get to their apartment by metro and bus. After a quick lunch, Shellagh went back to work and I set out to explore.

Using my French words and phrases, I managed to accomplish the following all in that first afternoon: I brought a pair of boots to an atelier de réparations de chaussure to arrange to have the heel that snapped off as I got off the bus in Iași at the train station replaced, I brought a film to a boutique de photo to turn in a film to be developed, I made an appointment at a salon de coiffeur to have my hair cut, and I found a boutique that advertised l'anglais est parlé ici so that I knew I had an excellent opportunity to make myself understood as I looked for new clothes.  I returned to Bill and Shellagh's apartment that evening with a new dress, a black velvet pant suit, as well as the hair appointment and arrangements to pick up my repaired boots and developed prints the next day.

The rest of my stay in Paris, I toured the normal places: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Montmarte, Sacré-Coeur, Notre-Dame, Champs-Elysées, Centre Georges Pompidou. I took photos. I spent hours in front of artwork in museums, reading the titles to figure out more about the French language. It was helpful that most paintings had descriptive names, not just Untitled.  Riding the metro and buses offered more language learning opportunities. I got pretty good at figuring out the meaning. I still had trouble speaking and understanding when others spoke.

After Christmas, I flew from Paris to Belgrad, Yugoslavia, where I caught a bus to travel to Novi Sad, the capital of the autonomous region of Voivodina which is entirely surrounded by Serbia. A friend from San Francisco State University, George, had been at the university there for more than two years as a Fulbright lecturer. My roommate Annie and I had previously visited him from Iran on our trip at the end of our first year in Tehran. George invited me to join him at a New Years' Eve party with his colleagues and some of their students. I thought I could try out some of what I had learned about speaking French words while in Yugoslavia. After all, I had studied Russian at Concordia, so I thought I could make some sense out of Serbian through its similarity to Russian. Serbian uses the same Cyrillic alphabet as Russian, and I had had that earlier trip to Voivodina to build on. So imagine my surprise when one morning while listening to the radio, I heard the announcer say, "Ora este ora unsprezece," Romanian for "The time is now 11 o'clock."

That put thoughts of trying to learn more about Serbian and get back to Romania to concentrate on that language.

*a name, not necessarily the right one