Five years ago, when I was in my final year of GCSEs, my French teacher dedicated one of her lunchtimes to a half an hour phone conversation with my mother. I don't know if she made some small talk or whether she just dove straight in there, but the purpose of the call was to establish why I was so bad at french. Take a while to consider that. She phoned home to ask why, it couldn't just be that I was bad, I was so bad that there had to be a deeper explanation!
"Anna is perfectly capable in other areas and I was just wondering if there was anything going on at home that might be affecting her ability in French."
"Anything going on at home?"
What my mother should have said, tearfully, was "At home? At..? Oh god I was afraid of this. You see I've recently taken a French lover. It's tearing the family apart but I just can't leave him. Anna's french was perfect before Pierre came into our lives but now she can't bare to use the language that she hears us speak when we make love."
What she actually said was
"What? No. I can't explain it, sorry, she's not good at French. There it is. Bye Mrs C-"
This annoyed my teacher who I think had genuinely expected a reason, maybe not Pierre, but something to explain my complete inability to pronounce "soeur" ("sir" it transpires, not "sewer" or "sue-eeeur-r-r-" In my defense look at those vowels! Freakish.)
There were in fact a few reasons; the one that stands out for me is that my french teacher was one of the most singularly terrifying and intimidating people I have ever met. There was nothing necessarily formidable about her physically (she wasn't some sort of broad-shouldered, leather-clad, Ratched-figure like The Head,) but she was tall and severe and just generally gave the impression of being wound up tighter than a clockspring. Unspeakably intense, she would, before an oral, adopt what I can only assume was her "interested listening position" it involved grasping her jaw-line tightly with one hand, bending her trunk forward so her face ended up about 30 cm from your own, and glaring.
Some people were fine with this but no matter how many times I saw her adopt it I never started an oral without thinking "Ho-lee-Christ, woman!"Another and perhaps more genuine reason was the one flagged up by my mother; I have no natural skill with French just as I have no natural skill with any language. As far as I'm concerned it was only sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of my parents that meant that I managed recognisable English. I learnt to speak pretty fast, considering my deafness (I was a complete dud of a child,) but in my haste I failed to appreciate the finer points of phonetics. After four years of being "Anna Thavory" a women came once a week to bridge the terrible gap between my loose bundle of speech impediments and actual spoken language, teaching me, with the aid of balloons, how to pronounce Hs, Vs, Ss, Ths, and Bs. A lot of the process involved holding my head against the balloons, talking into them, and feeling the syllables sort of knock playfully against my five year old face. This was fun but looking back I'm really not sure it was an approved technique.
It worked though and "I'm not an animal I'm a fu-thum-fuman b-being." became "I'm not an animal I'm a human being." Obviously that was just a sentence for the sake of comic example. I wasn't given that to say, as few speech therapists like to draw vocal comparisions between their pupils and the Elephant Man
(how ever apt they may be.) It's just not good practice.
I want to say that perhaps if Mrs C- had been aware of my lack of talent for accurate sound making she would have accepted it as the reason she was seeking. It explains "sewer" at least. But it wasn't just pronunciation with French, it was everything. Sense, word order, number of words required for a sentence, the whole haphazard and contrary business of gendering things (vagina is masculine. Why?) Words on their own were fine, I couldn't say them but I liked them, pamplemoose for example, what's not to love about that! Ecchymose, hilarious! But no matter how much I like the constituent parts of the sentence it would be beyond me to say "my grapefruit is bruised." I don't know what sex grapefruit is for a start, and for all I know fruit bruising has a different term. I just can't do it. There is no explanation.
About once every two years I'll forget all this and make tentative steps towards learning a new language before remembering about a month in when things get beyond words and phrases and into construction "Oh right. I'm really bad at this. It's all coming back to me now."
This summer I tried Hebrew and Arabic, I liked the latter because "My name is Anna" translates as "Ana ismee Anna." as in "Anna! It's me! Anna!" and I liked the former because to my mind it is what Bob Dylan would speak to me in the passionate throws of our love making ("Ken! Erev! Ken! Oh, Yekiri, ken,... ahuv sheli." and so on.) Both of them feel more natural in the mouth than French ever did, both make use of the sort of guttural chokes and lispings that I was obviously trying to go with when I first learnt English. I want to say I'll be good at them but deep down I know I won't. There is simply no future for me in Gaza Strip diplomacy.
I know it. Mrs C-, if she's out there, glaring intensely at the screen, she knows it, although neither of us are able to work out the reason for it.
That's all.
Leila Tov and Jayyid Sa'adat.
No comments:
Post a Comment