Gone in 60 Seconds

Ever feel like you’re sixty seconds behind in a conversation?
Ever say ‘yes’ to things you really shouldn’t say ‘yes’ to?
Ever wonder what everyone was laughing at and only getting the joke ten minutes later?
Ever feel like you're regressing to childhood, with that familiar sense of humiliation when you not only get the answer wrong but answer a completely different question because you had no idea what the person was saying?

After almost three years in Europe I'm learning to live with my linguistic ineptitude and the looks of pity from European colleagues that slip gracefully between three languages in one sentence when conversing with each other. But the sense of loss at not being able to understand other people's life stories because I simply cannot understand a series of sounds that convert into a language was too much to bear.

So I have made it a project to learn French. My second year is almost up. I can read Le Monde .... well the giste of it anyway. I can ask for anything in a shop but have no idea what the response is from the shop keeper. I can find my way around French towns but have no idea where the lost French drivers, who always stop and ask me for directions, want to go. The words I painstakingly look up in my dictionary are gone from memory in sixty seconds, but the time delay between thought and speech and back again can make one sentence last an eternity.

When people speak to me in French I wish with all my powers of concentration that it will miraculously, osmotically, make sense. It doesn't. I speak with the best French accent I can muster but it is the illegitimate offspring of Crocodile Dundee. Despite my mum's best efforts and the expense of elocution lessons, we antipodeans are deafened at birth by a strine that could cut glass. And while that might be great at hampering any attempt at European pretension in an effort to enforce our sense of egalitarianism, it is by no means practical any more in a global world. It's time for drastic action and the compulsory learning of another language, preferably two, one Asian, one European. No common borders with any other country is not an excuse!

So off we go to spend some of my summer vacation at language school in Normandy, north-west France. And it's not all bad. It’s France after all and I get to eat dessert twice a day and have a glass of wine with lunch and then fall asleep in the next class. I get to drink my coffee from a bowl. I don’t have to do anything practical in the optional schedule and can therefore ignore subjunctive conjugations and choose modern French Poetry if I want. Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ is akin to Elliot’s ‘Wasteland’ to give you an idea of how much fun it was to translate. And I can eat my cereal with a teaspoon because that’s all they have in the refectory (the French being more into croissants for breakie so why would they bother having a stash of grandes cuillères pour les Anglais). Your man from Ireland threatened rebellion on the first morning unless he got a big spoon. Ah the narcissism of minor difference, Mr Freud.

At language school we can also learn to overcome the feeling of humiliation (except maybe 'big spoon man') because we soon learn, among the conjugations and reflexive pronouns, that there is nowhere else where all linguistic, syntactic and grammatical mistakes are forgiven. There is nowhere else where one can be completely and utterly joyfully lost in translation – because ignorance is bliss and completely free of all responsibility. And if all else fails, sign language and ‘merde’ are generally understood by all.