I’ve heard it said that one of the biggest gripes of a language learner is to attempt to string together a simple sentence in a foreign language, only to have the listener reply ‘Do you speak English?’ in English.

This isn’t a problem for me. I don’t seem to run into the English speakers.

In fact, I’ve been guilty of doing it to someone else.

You see, I live near Musée Marmottan in Paris. It’s just across some gardens that are facing my apartment, but that’s really all I knew about it. I spend a lot of time in those aforementioned gardens “playing” as I’m here working as an au pair, and I’d constantly be asked for directions to this Monet museum. At first, I only bothered acquainting myself with the signs indicating the direction to the museum, because wherever I was I could always point to a sign.

Luckily, I stumbled across the actual museum one day in my wanderings, so now I’m pretty much set as a local tour guide.

But one day I was greeted by a group of women as I left my building, who stopped me and launched into all the trappings of what seemed to be a very well-phrased request for directions. I tried not to look too panicked and silently implored that I would know where the place in question was and how to give the directions.

Blah-blah-blah, the lady went on, until she uttered the crucial words – Musée Marmottan – in the thickest American accent I’d ever heard. I don’t know how to convey it in text so you’ll just have to imagine.

I did it. My reply was ‘Do you speak English?’ and all five of us let out a collective sigh of relief and laughed too heartily as a nervous reaction.

Gosh I felt like a little do-gooder that day!

A cross-cultural “education” works both ways though – it’s not only the juvenile retort of dans ton cul from the previous post. Guillaume and I still (like scores of Brits) laugh ourselves silly at Monty Python, but particularly at the ferocity of the French taunting in Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

If you aren’t familiar with the argumentative French ‘k-nnnnniggets’ scenes, it’s basically John Cleese in all his silliness as a Frenchman guarding the castle of Guy de Loimbard. He verbally jousts with King Arthur (Graham Chapman) who seeks to enlist their master’s support in the quest for the Holy Grail by food and shelter for the night.

On arrival, Arthur declares his intents and noble quest and the French knight (pronounce every letter in that word though!) replies that his master already has a Holy Grail and that it’s very nice.

Cleese then stage whispers to his fellow chivalrous countrymen (who are standing next to him and would have heard every word) ‘I told him we already got one!’

Well, well, well… It’s been over two years but this joke is still going strong between us. If either of us announces that we already have whatever item is featured in the conversation, it is inevitably followed up with ‘it’s very nice’ and then ‘I told him we already got one and it’s very nice’.

But corny jokes know no boundaries (as proved by the previous post), and we not only subject ourselves to this, but anyone who happens to be listening: friends, family… a little American boy whose conversation we overhear at the Eiffel Tower…

There are some things that just shouldn’t be translated.

Humour is one; obscenity another. If you must – not to the parents. And if it’s an awful joke, one that only raises a grimace rather than a giggle – don’t persist with it. Especially not with me, because before you know it, you’ll have created a monster.

Introducing dans ton cul (“in your arse”), the most infuriating answer to any “where?” question asked. Hilariously funny (or at least a humour staple) in France, I found that dans ton cul is the most infuriating answer to an oft-voiced question.

Guillaume points it out to me every time it’s mentioned in a film, just to confirm that it’s so widespread. Even in the French lessons of American film 10 Things I Hate About You, it’s there.

It’s particularly annoying because when you’re looking for something and asking someone else if they know where it is, you’re not really concentrating on anything other than the search, and quite possibly not realising that you’re issuing forth the vague question.

- Where are my keys?
- In your arse.

You see the problem? This guaranteed answer, delivered deadpan, was driving me crazy until I realised that the approach was not to get mad, but to get even.

These days, there isn’t a quicker dans ton cul slinger this side of Francophonia, and I’m not afraid to use it with accompanying pantomime. My first hesitant attempts to bring the phrase outdoors with a few unorthodox examples at a party weren’t such a rip-roaring success though.

For instance, on hearing our group’s conversation in English, a guy approached us with a shock-mock accent and asked:

‘Ecks-q-ze me for eh my bad Freench hacksent, but where iz ze eh oranzh zhuce?’

I couldn’t resist. ‘Dans ton cul?’ I quipped. Went down like a dead weight.

So I thought I’d try again when asked by a girl, incredulous that Guillaume and I didn’t speak French to each other, what exactly he had taught me to say.

Always believing honesty to be the best policy, I replied ‘dans ton cul’ and her jaw dropped.

She muttered, a little stunned, ‘ummm… I don’t think I understood you… What has he taught you to say?’

I had to hastily explain that my French education was also “cultural”!

I was recently reading a continuous chortle of an exploration of French culture through vocabulary. Entitled Pardon my French: Unleash your inner Gaul by Charles Timoney, it outlines all those little essential facts and factors of establishing a life in France.

But one particular entry comes to mind frequently (although I wish it didn’t because Guillaume and I then kill ourselves laughing for no externally discernable reason) and I’ll include it here to taint any future experiences in French cafés for the rest of you!

Timoney writes:

If you listen carefully the next time you go to a café or brasserie, you will hear the double coffee order… [the waiter] calls the order to the barman who will then get it ready and set the cups on the bar. What is interesting is that the waiter repeats the number of coffees ordered just after the word ‘cafés’. Thus, instead of calling out, ‘Deux cafés!’, the waiter in fact shouts, ‘Deux cafés… deux!’

As I was rolling around in stitches reading out the rest of the passage to Guillaume, we reflected how true (and ridiculous) it really was. I mean, it’s not really a vote of confidence to the skills and perceptivity of the bartender now, is it?

Maybe the bartenders are a breed of their own, prone to dozing off and forgetting what they’re actually doing behind the bar. Slowly nodding off into a counter-top coma, perhaps they are only jolted to attention by the cry of ‘cafés’ but are at a loss to the quantity.

Did he say one, three or even four? That’s when the repeated number comes in to play, and he can happily prepare the daily caffeine fix for the clients.

Listen carefully next time you order your coffees and just try to suppress a smile.

With all my thanks to Jonathan Li for these wonderfully expressive espresso pix!

The bureaucratic process in France still continues to amaze me. Maybe this is because I thought that I had experienced it all when trying to get a last-minute Russian student visa in Mongolia without the appropriate documentation (it ended with an strange grilling / interview by the Consular in between the highlights of a Moscow Spartak football match… and a visa for me).

But – in my naïve world view – that was almost to be expected with dealing with two post-Soviet states in the wilds of the steppes. Silly me. I should have known better. Of course it’s exactly the same wild goose chance in enlightened and rational France – long live equality for all in painful hassles and ingratiated fawning!

Why the angst? Well after living in Paris and working as an au pair for over six months, I’ve finally collected enough documentation to apply for health cover. I went proudly to the social security today with my collected treasure trove (birth certificate, passport, bank account statement, documents that I’ve needed my diploma to apply for, first toe nail clippings, the Golden Fleece… you know, just the norm) and after waiting for my number to eventually grace the neon display was duly ripped to shreds by the woman working there.

I should have known. I was once told by a friend to play your documents against bureaucracy like it was a hand of cards – ie. never show your trump card until absolutely necessary. But I just went and laid it all on the table…

She barked at me what was wrong with my documents (bugger! I had forgotten to write the name of my employer!) and then sighed a few times whilst looking through the other papers and expectantly at me.

I thought that meant I should show some initiative (she wasn’t offering a pen, that was for sure), so I took one out of my bag and demonstrated how simple it was to rectify the omitted detail.

She waited till I had finished and then scolded me for filling it out… ‘and you’ve done it with a red pen!’

A rapid fire tirade followed. She obviously wasn’t of the “speak slowly and the foreigner will understand” school. Turns out I had filled out the entire thing myself in error, including the signature at the bottom. I’m sure last time I was there I was told to fill it out, and I’d shown it to both French boss and boyfriend without them picking up that it wasn’t me who was to sign.

So after the fuss and the sighs, a little indignation on my part (which is very difficult when balancing diplomacy with a limited vocabulary), and then me sitting there thinking forlornly that I would have to return, she took my phone number, photocopied a page and filed my documents.

I sat there still, wondering what to make of it all… ‘and now…?’

‘Three weeks’ she replied.

When I first received news about my au pair job in Paris, I was a little puzzled about the way it was reported to family and friends in French. You see, in all the conversation there was one repeating motif that stuck out in my (in)comprehension – and that was regarding my employer. Every time my future boss was referred to in a conversation, it was always as “la bonne femme” which in my limited understanding of the situation, meant “the good woman” who was taking me under her wing.

‘Hey!’ I wanted to cry out, ‘I’m not such a charity case! Even though I don’t speak French, I’m otherwise very employable!’

Until I found out that bonne femme just means “the (random) woman” or “that woman”, no personal character slur against me was intended, it’s just that the French seem to be very polite about strangers (innocent until proven guilty?), which makes funny situations where say, a car crash can be jocularly reported amongst friends as “oh yeah, I ran up the good woman’s rear.” Ohhhh-la-la…

Bonhomme is also in common usage, and can be frequently heard in the winter months with the term bonhomme de neige (snowman) inciting cries of glee from young children.

I was also reading recently that “Jacques Bonhomme” was an insulting nickname for the average Parisian city-dweller from Sorbonne students in the thirteenth century…

So – good people of the world – there you go!

Monsieur le President, you’re making it very hard for those working with children these days.

I’m not talking about any planned reforms, and I’m sure you think you have the youth of the nation in mind with your plans for the education system. No… I’m talking about watching your language.

(I’ll stick in a glossary of rude words below rather than explain it all mid-sentence.)

Look, I’ve had enough trouble trying to stand firm on stopping my au-pairing kids from saying a putain-intended punaise (‘But that’s what they say on The Simpsons!’); how can I stand firm on pauvre con (‘but that’s what the President says!’)?

Just when the attention had deflected from Sarkozy’s personal fiascos with an actual government measure (controversial, of course), he goes and sticks his foot in it by calling a member of the public a poor c*** and telling him to get out of the way. Who was I to think that politics could be dull?

By way of a glossary – the punaise / putain issue centres around the unassuming punaise (either a type of beetle or a drawing pin) happening to sound a lot like putain (whore) a far more loaded term which is often used as an expression of anger. Why I object to the kids saying punaise (it’s ok for The Simpsons, I’m not a prude, really!), is that they shout the first syllable, check to see if I’m listening and then end it accordingly with –naise if I’m within earshot, or –tain if they think I’m not around.

Pauvre con on the other hand, isn’t exactly how I translated it before, as in French it basically means “bloody idiot” or “stupid twit.” But it can’t be avoided that con was originally slang for female genitalia – so either way, not an essential phrase for any aspiring heads of state.

Didn’t they teach him that in President School?

When I was living in Russia, I started to take ballet classes. This was pretty remarkable in itself, one of those momentous taming of the tomboy life developments. It got pretty embarrassing at times (for more gory details, check out my Europe Trotter post and have an artistically-appreciative perve at the Farukh Ruzimatov video I rustled up from YouTube!), but the most embarrassing instance in my “ballet career” actually happened in France.

This is hard to believe, as most of the time in my St. Petersburg class I was pirouetting on thin ice in terms of the stuff-up stakes. It didn’t get off to a good start. I turned up to the first lesson with pink slippers (perhaps the Grishko sales assistants were trying to offload this unpopular shade of baby-bum on unsuspecting foreigners and dance novices), only to have it announced by our militaristic teacher that our “uniform” would have to match the colour of our slippers. I balked at this prospect, and instead wore all black for the duration of the course. She never mentioned anything, and if she did, I would have feigned a convenient language incomprehension.

But the worst was in France, in a little town called Hyères on the Côte d’Azur. I had just arrived there from St. Petes on a gust of icy Siberian winds, fresh from my ballet classes, and seeking a little respite in the sun. Guillaume, who was living there at the time, suggested that we find a ballet class for me, which I thought sounded like a great idea (I was thoroughly enjoying ballet at the time). We found a dance studio with an instructor who, ‘no problem at all, I can speak English’ announced that he had the perfect class for me when I told him that I had been only dancing for six months in Russia.

I went to the class, and to my surprise I found myself surrounded by lithe 15-year-olds, and not the frumpy, tracky-dacked adult learners I had been expecting. We started and then I realise what was wrong. He thought that I had been in Russia for six months to dance, not the actuality of only starting six months previously when I happened to be in Russia.

Merde! It was deeply, shamefully humiliating, to describe it in the best possible terms. On his encouragement I tried to stick it out for the whole class, but in the end I held my head high (and tears in) and made what I hope was a graceful exit. I packed my bag, ran home in tears, and never went back there!


My worse-for-wear Grishko ballet slippers (version II, in black). They’ve taken a battering since being converted to everyday house slippers!

I recently read that Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables contains one of the longest sentences in the French language: 823 words without a full stop.

Even though Hugo wasn’t banging it out on his laptop, it got me thinking how it’s much easier to be long-winded when typing in French. For all those unacquainted with the French keyboard, the layout is much more practical and conducive to verbal diarrhoea… all except the full stop. You can have a comma without a hassle, but to actually conclude a sentence, it requires a shift.

Furthermore, while it was a veritable cinch to swap to the French keyboard (once I found @, € and ?), I just find it so difficult to swap back to typing on a British one. There’s nothing funnier than watching someone try to type as they’re just realising that the keys have spirited away from under their fingers. On the flip side, there’s nothing more frustrating that the role-reversal discovery that you’re now in the hot seat and your formerly fleet fingers have turned into incoherent sausage tools of confusion.

Apparently… Timothy Fullerton claimed that the Les Misérables sentence was the longest in world literature in his Triviata: A Compendium of Useless Information (1975). Which IS utterly useless (he at least got one thing right), because there are doubts as to whether it’s even the longest sentence in French literature. Pfft!

This post is a celebration of the quick-fix. Once again, instead of reverting to the tried and true methods of learning French (practising with Guillaume, attending a class or studying with a textbook), I’ve settled for the far more reliable method of searching youtube for funny videos.

And here’s one right now:


Do you also find yourself making faces back at the “teacher”? I certainly did!

I like this method. It’s simple, effective, and I think results are virtually guaranteed.

Here’s a quick anecdote, just to prove how well this film hits the mark about making noises for the sake of hearing your own noise. (By the way of a recap, I’m earning a subsistence living here in Paris by working with children.) The three-year-old, for whom I work, has recently taken it upon herself to pepper her French conversation with all this guttural, throaty utterances beginning, mid and end of sentences.* I’d describe it as somewhere between a French ‘rrr’, a German ‘ch’ and a Russian ‘kh’. All in all, it sounds like an adolescent Scottish lion clearing its throat. As far as I can tell, it’s for no rhyme nor reason, for no discernable purpose other than to say “Look, my Anglo-au pair, see what sounds I can make that you can’t.” She’s on her first little tentative mews of the roar of national identity. Next it will be the incessant ‘euh… euuuh… euhhh‘ as so eloquently described on the film clip, I can’t wait for the day!

* Needless to say, I’ve been making fun of her, dropping a few phlegm-reverberating hocks in my conversation too, or pretending that we are in a circus cage with predatory big cats.