If you want to learn how to speak French there all kinds of ways – private lessons (best but expensive), local night classes, online French courses, French language software, take your pick. What none of them can prepare you for are the occasional – and mostly understandable mistakes – where we think we understand something and in fact we’re just a bit short!
For example, a friend of mine was in search of a French property. He thought that the place in rue du chateau d’eau sounded very attractive. It must be close to a chateau, you would think. What better for your French home than to be near one of these magnificent historical buildings?
Well mostly he was right. Rue de does indeed mean “the street of”. Unfortunately a chateau d’eau is a water tower. Now some people find them very attractive, and they’re an iconic part of the French countryside, but they’re not quite the fairy-tale castle he was hoping for!
It’s an example of how, when you learn how to speak French, you have to take in the whole French phrase not just the individual words.
Of course the individual words can trip you up just as easily. Another friend (who I must say now speaks quite good French) was visiting France on holiday. She came down to breakfast in her hotel and looked at the menu, seeking something typically French. Pampelmouse sounded particularly exotic so she ordered that, only to be rather disappointed when a plain half a grapefruit arrived!
Any language will always trip you up occasionally – we just can’t know it all at once. If you want to learn how to speak French I would suggest that in addition to any other lessons you always carry a small French to English dictionary with you, or one of the excellent pocket electronic versions now available. It will just give you the ability to check before making those little faux pas (that’s mistakes, by the way, just in case you didn’t know). You need to look out most for the things you almost think you know but aren’t quite sure of.
A cochon, for example, is a pig. You might think that a pig lived in a cochonerie but it doesn’t, it lives in a porcherie. OK, a bit of an error but no problem you might think. Trouble is a cochonerie is somewhat difficult to translate – as happens with French sometimes – there’s no literal translation. It’s like making a cock-up, or saying something very rude. If you ask a French person to visit your cochonerie or you tell a builder you want to convert the cochonerie (which was what we wanted, we thought) you’ll get some very strange looks!
On the subject of electronic dictionaries, we got one of these. It’s endorsed by Larousse who are the French dictionary company.
It’s an absolutely superb piece of kit. Not much bigger than a mobile phone it slips easily into a pocket or bag so you can translate anywhere. It’s got about 50,000 French words in it and it can also conjugate French verbs (good for practice if you’re on a long train trip or something like that).
We’ve had ours five years and it’s just about on its last legs but it’s been everywhere with us. It has frequently been dropped and bashed about and has only got through two sets of batteries in all that time.
For us it’s been quite a good conversation starter with the French as well. People think it’s a calculator (it actually has a calculator function built in too, by the way). You then explain what it does and voilà – there you have it, a conversation starts – and nothing beats actually talking with the French as a way to learn French!
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