Château Beginnings: Chapter 4

Musings from the Turret: How to speak French fast: I survive my first French strike, linguistic embarrassment and medical French

“I don’t think I’ll ever learn French,” said one of my British ex-pat friends with a sigh over tea in the château kitchen. She has lived in France since 2016 and yet speaking French continues to elude her. Years of sporadic academic French lessons meant that while she could quote irregular verbs and her grasp of French grammar could rival Molière’s, she still couldn’t have a basic conversation in the boulangerie so she was convinced that I must be a “natural” at languages. Absolutely nothing could be further from the truth. I do speak French now but not because I am a linguist at all and I fully believe that if I can learn French then really anyone can and so I told her my tricks.

French medicine

When I was at medical school, students had the opportunity to take a 2-month sabbatical in another country in our final year of study to learn about another medical system. A lot of my friends went to Australia and New Zealand, which seemed to be a delightful treat of half medicine, half beach: the perfect break before our final exams and the world of work. I decided this could be an opportunity for me to go to France and learn French on the job. I had French friends living in Grenoble and so this seemed a fun choice and so I applied to one of the hospitals there and also to Paris for the second half.

Photo by Marc Wieland

I was extremely transparent about my French (or rather its non-existence) but I had the back-up of my French friends in Grenoble with a student flat-share and I was assured that the hospital was, in fact, bilingual so the whole experience would be in a mixture of French and English, which seemed like the perfect supportive environment to learn. Armed with my trusty English-French medical dictionary, Edith Piaf warbling in the soundtrack in my head and the romance of the French culture in my heart, what actually happened was I arrived in Grenoble in what seemed to be the middle of some kind of civil war: a countrywide strike. While people were burning cars in Paris and lobbing cobble stones at the riot police, in Grenoble, there were no supplies.

My friends didn’t feel the need to warn me (“What was the point of worrying you, hein?)” And by some miracle, air traffic control were working that day. However, there was no transport to the city centre because there was no petrol from the blocade. My kind friends had saved up enough in their car to pick me up from the airport but when I arrived in the centre of Grenoble, the shelves of the supermarkets were empty, the postal service wasn’t working, rubbish was overflowing in the streets from dustbin disposal services on strike and I felt as if I had stepped behind the iron curtain in some dystopian novel while my medical school friends were sending me messages from the beach asking “how are the croissants?”

I phoned JB to tell him about the madness of his country on the brink of some kind of revolution I supposed and I could almost hear his shrug over the phone: “Bah oui, this happens in France. Bof.”

My French friends also laughed at my classic British shock and shrugged off this national strike with the casual Gallic indifference of kids who had been born in a country where there was traditionally no school throughout the whole of May because that was when the teaching workforce “booked” their annual strike. A strike was just the norm in their culture in the same way that a baguette was a staple necessity at each meal.

I also learned that my promised student flatshare had fallen through and so I was actually going to be living with their neighbour who I had never met and to this day I think she was as shocked to be hosting a random English girl as I was to be living with a stranger! That evening, we had dry pasta for dinner from the food rations and I was assured that one of their friends was coming from a country village the next day where there were still fresh vegetables so they “might” be able to forage something more interesting for tomorrow. The black market had already begun but fortunately, the wine rations were flowing so I dismissed the madness of my arrival into the fray as an hilarious adventure washed down with a good Bordeaux.

My First Day in a French hospital

The next day was my first day at the hospital and so I arrived early (by foot of course. Still no petrol or buses) with my learned phrase of introduction in French. I knew everyone spoke English but I thought I should make the effort to be polite and to demonstrate that I wanted to learn. However, as I arrived in the department I found, to my horror, that actually no one spoke English at all except the Professor of Medicine who had been answering my emails and clearly had an inflated impression of his colleagues’ English skills and who was, in fact, on holiday. I still remember this dumbfounded moment of wondering how this could be happening and how I would survive with my level of French that extended to “my favourite colour is purple and I have a brother.”

The doctor in front of me, who had tried to explain the situation via hand gestures and some sort of personal Esperanto, had stated to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation coupled with the strike and I suddenly saw the funny side of it all and the opportunity to really learn by immersion.

It was too late for academic linguistic work - I needed fully formed sentences and a huge dose of courage. I relied on medical Latin, rolled up my sleeves and those 4 weeks were some of the best moments of my time in France. The experience hugely jump-started my French from a baseline of zero and I met an incredible number of kind and patient people who went out of their way to help this lost English student. When I arrived in Paris, under the kind tutelage of an excellent surgeon (who is also JB’s uncle) just at the end of their car-burning era, my French was eccentric but finally communicative and I felt I was on track to climb the steep French learning curve that was exciting rather than daunting.

I returned to the UK feeling pretty happy that as a useless linguist, I had (somehow) survived fully speaking in French for 2 months, had experienced my first French strike and now I had enough French for basic conversation. Plus, I hadn’t needed to spend hours rote learning irregular verbs because I was learning by copying sentence construction. It wasn’t academic- it was survival and this seemed to be a kind of secret trick.

Getting rusty

I think the mistake I made then was letting my French slowly drift so when I finally moved to France half a decade later, my French was back to embarrassingly school-girl and useless for daily life in rural France. And suddenly I had The Fear. Youth provides misplaced confidence but now I doubted my ability and the exciting feeling of advancing up the steep learning curve wasn’t there - I had plateaued. While I wanted to learn, my scientific brain pushed language-learning into a series of fearful academic rules that made me feel that it was better to say nothing than to bear the “humiliation” of being wrong with my mis-genders or eccentric use of tenses. I tried to listen to French but it sounded to me now like a blur of guttural sound, slurred together in liaisons and I struggled to tune into any discernible words and so I shyly avoided conversational effort, worrying that I wouldn’t understand or that I would make a basic error that would be embarrassing for everyone. I also had the fortunate back-up of JB whom I could hide behind, as he navigated the headache of French administration on my behalf, and so I could get away with living in our English-speaking private world, even though I felt my lack of French ability as a daily shameful frustration.

A French Breakthrough

It was my kind and patient Mother-in-law, Sylvie, who really helped me with my confidence. Before we moved to Château de Bourneau, we started our French adventure at Jean-Baptiste’s family organic farm, Clos de Rochy, in Burgundy, while we searched for our future château.

(You can read about our château searching adventures in my “Château Shopping” series:)

It was there that my Londoner eyes were opened to the beauty of homegrown and the particularly French rural charm of the “potager.” For a household of 7, a supermarket shop was amazingly rare because the family were almost entirely self-sufficient: we ate seasonally and the potager, in the large kitchen garden, prolifically grew a wide variety of produce throughout the year from sun-blushed tomatoes and strawberries to potatoes, leeks, asparagus and pumpkins. Salad was cut fresh from the garden minutes before it was washed and plated, hectares of orchards shared their bounty and stocked the cupboards throughout winter with a hive of jarring and jamming, chopping and pickling. Every morning, Sylvie and I met in the farmhouse kitchen to prepare a family lunch and she taught me about the beautiful countryside culture through the language of food and wholesome cuisine. Over the potager and vegetable preparations, she spoke slow articulate French and shared her language with me, patiently and non-judgementally. She made gentle corrections, explained grammar rules but not in a manner that was discouraging and as we prepared the lunch, what started as pragmatic French of “pass me the butter” or “peel the carrots” insidiously grew into conversation. It was her care and kindness that tuned my ears into the language again and boosted my confidence.

The challenge around the dining table

One-to-one conversation is very different to being part of a group. If you have ever moved to a new country and tried to learn a new language by immersion, you will know that feeling of being at the dining table among a group of native speakers and understanding the gist of the conversation but the frustration of not being quick enough to contribute. The conversation passes on and you are the mute guest, nodding along but unable to be part of the action. I sat down with books and tried to learn the grammar, pre-formulating correct sentences that I could test out but I soon realised that seeking perfection, as I struggled to conjugate everything correctly, meant the moment to speak had passed and so I said nothing and therefore no one spoke to me because they assumed I didn’t understand. Like my British ex-pat friend, it seemed easier to slot into the anglophone ex-pat community. Some of my compatriots had lived in France for 20 years without speaking a word of French and declared this like a badge of honour but I was determined not to fall into this category and I needed the magic bullet to move my French level up a notch but I wasn’t sure what the key was.

No word for “awkward”

And then an opportune conversation with JB’s bilingual cousin, Guillaume, completely changed my perception of language-learning. I was lamenting my poor progress and how I felt awkward about launching into incorrect French when he looked slightly perplexed and asked:

“Why? And what does “awkward” mean?”

The French don’t have a word for awkward. This specific feeling of social unease seemed to be entirely reserved for the British. He was genuinely stunned at why I would care if I got something grammatically wrong. With that enviable French insouciance he shrugged:

“You’re not French and you’re learning so why would anyone judge you for saying “un table” instead of une? We understand you’re talking about a table. Language is just a tool for communication at the beginning- the key is confidence and not to care.”

This casual comment entirely altered my perspective on learning French.

Don’t approach language-learning like an impossible perfectionistic academic exercise: it’s better to say something grammatically wrong than to say nothing at all at that dinner table. And this was the sudden shift in persepective I needed and how I learned and improved. No one has once laughed at me for trying.

What’s the secret?

Babies don’t learn to speak by revising grammar. They learn by immersive copying and mimicry, hearing words in conversational contexts and not by revising the anatomical structure of the language and grammar rules. So why are we traditionally taught languages by academic analysis? It’s not too surprising that years of “learning French” results in being able to list verb tables but the inability to order a meal in a restaurant. I think the key is to learn to speak first and the grammar and the academic side can come later on to enhance what you’ve grasped conversationally. I think this is how it began for me all those years ago on my medical elective.

So, if you have been learning French for “decades” via dry textbooks, don’t be disheartened. Have the confidence to accept mistakes and not to worry about them. Also know that learning a language is tiring and frustrating at times. We all have “off” days when it feels impossible to string a sentence together and other days when language fluidity seems to magically arrive from somewhere. If you live in France, don’t hide within your own language community - they can still be part of your world but force yourself out of your comfort zone as well to learn French in fun ways: around the dining table with friends or neighbours, over oysters and wine at the market, join a local club or association. Listen to French radio in the background to help tune in your ear, watch French films, and take every opportunity to talk, even if it means pre-preparing some Smalltalk phrases to give you a boost of confidence. Find something you love and swap it into French so you look forward to your French learning rather than dread it. For me, it is reading and finding a series of French books that I’m completely addicted to, which has helped me to write in French by visualising spellings and sentence construction. Reading in French is no longer daunting for me purely because I had this gateway book series that was fun and not a chore and it removed the fear factor and the default: “I can’t do it. It is too complicated for me.”

I think this is how you bring your French from basic to conversational very rapidly. I have never had a French lesson in France but that hasn’t stopped me having French friends and learning the language thanks to them and sharing my own culture with them too. I also have French friends who speak fluent English but now our choice language between us has swapped to French and that has been one of my proudest achievements and it actually now feels strange speaking in English with them.

My foreigner linguistic crassness has also inspired our local friends to not be fearful about learning English. They know that JB and I would never judge them for their level in English and so we host a brunch club at the château where we always speak in English for the first 15 minutes and it’s wonderful to see their confidence in English grow over eggs and bacon.

So, have a go. Say the thing, get the grammar wrong, let someone correct you without being embarrassed about it because this is how you will learn real French.

And next time you feel “awkward” about ordering croissants in the boulangerie, remember that there’s no such word for awkward in French and believe it or not, the French find a British accent charming!

Best Wishes from Château de Bourneau,

Erin, The Intrepid Châtelaine

P.S Would you like me to write more about learning French and tips I’ve picked up along the way in more detail? Have you learned a second language? If so, what is your best advice? As always, I am delighted to hear all your suggestions.

Missed the start of my “Château Beginnings” Series? You can find Chapter 1 here: