22. Picard and Dathon at French Class

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Darmok, Picard et al meet with a race called the Children of Tama, or Tamarians. Thanks to the Universal Translators, these little gizmos built into Starfleet personnel's comm badges, they appeared to speak English, but what they said made no sense. In an attempt to forge an alliance Dathon, the Tamarian captain, kidnaps Picard and the whole episode hinges around the meaning behind language instead of the words themselves. It's a great episode and I thought about it a lot this week while attending my French classes.

"Now see here! You cannot just kidnap a Starfleet officer, give him a dagger,
 and expect him to-- what was that noise?"

Our class is held at an elementary school, and so our classroom's walls are hung with colorful maps, lists of reading groups, posters that seem to be reports on places like Versailles and Yellowstone. The chalkboard has the date written in careful cursive up in the corner. The desks are two-seaters, with little cubbies underneath, and the scuffed wood and holes for inkwells speak to their age.

We students instinctively sat one to a desk, eschewing the forced intimacy of sitting where our elbows might brush. My seat in the back was at a newer style desk; no inkwell, sat three. I shared it with a Russian girl, the third seat creating a buffer for our elbows.

Caroline, our teacher, doesn't speak anything but French to us. She speaks English but will only use it after class. This is fair; while most of the people in the class speak at least a little English, only two of us are native anglophones. I don't think I would appreciate it if she were trying to explain something in French, realized we weren't getting it, and switched to Japanese in order to clarify.

She started class this way: “Bonjour. Je m'appelle Caroline.” Big arm gestures toward herself. Then pointing dramatically at one of the students. “Et vous?” The intent seemed clear to me, but then, je parle un petit peu francais: I speak a little French. After some repetition the student got it, and we got to go all the way around the class, each of us saying, “Je m'appelle Nathaniel. Et vous?” Each of us using our own name, of course.

During this another pair of students showed up, coming right in and one of them saying “Bonsoir!” all interruptingly. Two guys, bundled up against the cold outside and disrupting in their energy. They began scanning the class for an empty desk set so they could sit together, but Caroline spouted French at them that I and they took to mean, “No, no. Don't dawdle. You sit there and you sit over there.”

One sat in the middle of the class, and the other sat between me and Daria. See, I knew her name now. I didn't know she was Russian. I found that out next.

After we finished the Je m'appelles Caroline added, "Je suis francaise.” And now we went around the room again, this time saying, “Bonjour. Je m'appelle Nathaniel. Je suis americain. Et vous?” Everybody. Sara. Eunyong. Hajime. Swopnil. Cubaine. Coreenne. Japonais. Indien. After that we added our age. Then our marital status, going around the whole class each time.

While in some continuities Jean-luc marries Beverly, he remains single,
 or celibataire, for the entire run of the series.  The episode Darmok
introduces this variant captain's uniform for the first time. I love this outfit.

Inside I wanted to claw my eyes out, to pull out my book and read. Actually, I did open my notebook and write some stuff for this blog: names, descriptions of the class, that sort of thing. It seemed to me that you didn't actually have to say all this stuff to get it, or maybe not each person all by themselves. But I could tell, by the way some of the people said their spiel, that this was maybe the first time they had spoken this much French at once. I was in the very beginning class, after all, and if for now this level was a bit below my capabilities, it wouldn't take much more complexity before I was struggling, too.

I glanced over at Alejandro, the guy who'd come in late and sat between Daria and me. He had a computer tablet out; you know, one of those things that's somewhere between a superphone and a netbook? He had his out and was doing internet stuff! At first I thought, “Maybe he's just using it to take notes, or look up a phrase or something.” But no; if that was the case then why, whenever Caroline looked our way, did he hide it under the desk? Why did his body language scream that he was bored, that he hated being here?

While the round-robin, everybody-speaks class drill was frustrating, I began to dread that it would end and Caroline would give us a short dialogue exercise to do with a partner, or something like that. Because Alejandro, the obvious choice for my partner, sat there seething with, “I don't give a damn about any of this.” He reminded me of students I've taught who treat school like a prison, hate all teachers merely because they are teachers, actively don't participate in class, and are openly contemptuous of any student who's “buying in” to class activities. I did not want to have to try to do some dialogue exercise with him.

From time to time his friend would lean forward and catch his eye, giving him a conspiratorial “Isn't this stupid?” look. What the hell were they doing here? They didn't have to be. Could an employer mandate they take these classes? Could you get in trouble and have to go to language classes before you could be tried? Was I sitting next to someone who'd boosted a car and before he could be put on trial he had to be taught French? Whatever the reason, this was going to suck. If I got out of this alive or without being regressed back to middle school when the bad kids picked on me, I had to be sure never to sit near him again.

Not these guys, but damn! wouldn't that be cool? And scary at the same time?

The class meets twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday. This all happened in that first class, when we were told about the textbook and workbook we needed to buy and that we wouldn't pay until March 6^th. Alejandro didn't show up on Thursday. His friend did, but he seemed much more involved without his buddy to joke around with. We'll see how things turn out in later classes.

There are...well, I was going to say there are some very interesting people in this class, but really they're just people. They are interesting, but it's not like the cast of Summer School or Welcome Back Kotter.

There's Marina, a 60-something Filipina that lives in Paris with her Britsh expat boyfriend. He walks her to class each night, doing the French speaking because, well, she wouldn't be here if she could handle that part of it.

There's a Korean couple taking the class together. They sit in the back and talk quietly back and forth. It sounds like they're saying, “What did she say?” “I don't know; I don't speak French.” The lady's name is Eunyong, and Caroline kept saying it wrong, apparently, because Eunyong kept correcting her.

“Ing-yun?” Caroline would say.

“Eunyong.” Said Eunyong.

“Oon-yoon?”

“Eunyong.”

Caroline paused. “Onion?” Caroline didn't say onion, she said oignon, which is the French word for that particular vegetable.

“Oui. Eunyong.” said Eunyong with a little dip of her head.

“Oignon.” repeated Caroline, and I saw her keep the smile off of her face purely by force of will. It reminded me of when I worked at a call center where people who had bought something off an infomercial at 4 am would call and complain that it didn't work. For some reason I spoke to several guys whose names were Phuc Yu.

Cultural sensitivity, right here.

Denise is an Australian lady who just moved here so that her husband can work at their Embassy. I didn't understand why she was having so much trouble with things like the difference between je m'appelle and tu t'appelles and vous appelez until I thought of where she was coming from. In the US and Europe, even if you don't speak them, you often come into contact with some romance language or another. I would bet that every American knows the difference between yo hablo and tu hablas. We're aware of the way verbs in languages like French and Spanish and Italian conjugate, even if we can't do it ourselves.

In Australia, the languages you're most likely to hear besides English (I'm guessing) are Asian ones, and they have (from what little experience I've had with them) a completely different grammar. So Denise is up against something that's proportionally more alien than the rest of us. But don't worry; she sits near me, and I'm going to help her. I'm a teacher, and I figure out how to help people learn. (I like to remind myself of that sometimes.)

But Denise, for all her difficulties, is at least working with the same alphabet. It seems like, based on my exposure to it through TV and movies, that Japan mixes the Roman alphabet in with its kanji fairly liberally, but what about poor Daria? I don't know how much they stray from the Cyrillic alphabet in Moscow.

At least Captain Picard had a common language to work with when he was trying to establish communication with Dathon. Roddenberry bless those Universal Translators. Of course, that the Tamarians only spoke using metaphors alluding to their mythology made things difficult.

If you're feeling frisky, there's a longer clip of the show, focusing

 on the language difficulties, available right here.

As the class drew to a close Thursday night, Caroline said something that had us all whispering to each other, “What? What did she say?” Which was fun, because most of us didn't know each others' languages well enough to explain, even if we had understood what she said. But eventually I figured out that we were on vacation until March 6^th. This is one of the times of year when the French people go on vacation. It's not universal, of course; somebody's go to work in the cafes and run the banks (although they don't work too hard at that begin with). But if you've got the ducats, the tail end of fevrier (February) is a time to get out of...well, Paris, anyway, because it's nasty and cold. Megan and I lack the ducats, so we'll be sticking around.

I have more homework, and I've got the textbook and workbook now, so I should get on that. Things will get more difficult soon (I hope), and I don't want to be struggling because I'm not doing the assignments. Talk to you'uns later.