Parlez-vous français?

My classes at L'Atelier 9 began in earnest on Monday, October 5.  It's a short subway ride from my local station, Solferino, with only one change of line and about 8 stops altogether.  I've been put in the B2 section of French, a level higher than the one I was in last January.  For the most part, I'm keeping up, but it has been a blur of conversation, comprehension, grammar and vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary.  More words than I will ever remember.  I've started putting the new ones on post-it notes around the apartment (e.g. the kitchen cupboards and the bathroom mirror), but am still overwhelmed.  The first week, my class consisted of 7 students (now reduced to 6 due to the departure of one of the Americans)  -- a Danish physician in her early thirties taking a sabbatical, an Australian retiree, and the rest Americans of various stripes, all much younger than I.  One of them, Shannan, is a lawyer in Philadelphia, in her early thirties I would guess, who is going after French with a passion and she is just amazing given that she didn't study the language in school.   Shannan, Lea (the Dane) and I have become pals who lunch together once in a while and share information.  And we don't speak English, though it is a language that is also common to us.  Our "prof" Chloë, like Vanessa in January, is a superb teacher, full of jokes and fun, correcting but not beating us down -- in other words, absorbing a certain amount of mistakes as long as our meaning is clear and the errors not too egregious.  I really like her.

Late last week, and continuing into this one, we started learning French expressions and slang.  I felt like saying, "But I haven't learned proper French yet!"  And when Chloë on several occasions advised the young adult students, "You're mother would never use this expression," I felt like saying "Wait a minute, I am your mother!!!"  Nevertheless, this is the language used constantly in films and TV programs, so it is necessary to have a working knowledge of what is known as 'familiar' French.  There are actually three kinds:  soutenu (stuck up or academic), courant (standard), and familiar (familier) -- well, actually there's a fourth, vulgaire, which probably doesn't need a translation.

One thing is clear:  English words continue to pour into the French language like a river in flood.  At the beginning of the technology revolution, the Academie Française, which is the arbiter of the language, invented all sorts of words like "ordinateur" for computer and "couriel" for email.  But the French have abandoned many of them and "l'émail" has now been shortened to "le mèl."  The French love abbreviations:  ado for adolescent, velo for bicycle, frigo for refrigerator, and many more.

Here are four new Franglish words.  See if you can guess the meaning (I'll give the definitions at the end):

1. auto-stoppeur
2. la press People
3. nikel
4. un maniac

From my point of view, in spite of all my travails with the language, I am actually speaking more, being understood more, and feeling pretty good about it.  On Monday, I had a lunch with Cobi Camberlein (a friend of a colleague at Horizon House) and her French husband and we managed a civilized (though slow by their standards) conversation in French.   Wahoo! 

I'm trying in the midst of all this to pursue apartments, health care, the visa application process and such mundane things as a good stylist and how one gets one nails done.  What I've found out so far is the latter is still way more expensive than in the US, but many things are not (e.g. dry cleaning is actually cheaper).

So, while I struggle anew with sentences involving woulda, shoulda, coulda (how many times must I review this?), you are all enjoying (I hope) a wonderful Fall.

And for those of you who took the quiz, here are the answers:

1. auto-stoppeur = hitchhiker
2. la press People = self-made celebrities like the Kardashians
3. nikel = super clean, super, perfect
4. un maniac = a neatnik