i feel just like peter mayle, only i don't think i'm making any progress.

With all of our talk of two-month marks and the stresses of August, I didn't even realize that it was September. But maybe that's a good thing, isn't it? Amanda is probably right - we are reasonably organized and we are being pretty efficient. We're looking ahead at the final month to our wedding with no illusions. We are prepared to face it together. Just 36 more days, then a big party (with, you know, a ceremony and some minor speaking roles for both of us), and then we are off on our honeymoon, free to relax is Montreal.

IF ONLY WE KNEW HOW TO RELAX IN FRENCH!

Suddenly, September isn't quite enough time to accomplish everything we need to, which now, in my mind, consists of gaining conversational fluency in French.

In high school, I took French for four years because it seemed like a better way to meet girls than Spanish class. I traveled to Paris and Rennes and watched Beethoven dubbed into French with the young daughter of my host family. And I understood it. I continued studying the language when I went to college and there I plateaued. In intermediate classes it felt like we were covering the same rudimentary grammatical rules ad nauseum, but to move up to the next level of courses meant translating 50 pages a night of A Remembrance of Things Past. At a certain point, the classes became far too much work for a non-major - nightly essays, five days a week of instruction time, conversation circles, presentations. "Patrice," the professor would say, "we need more majors like you - those literature courses are when the language really gets interesting." I dropped French that year. I planned on keeping up with the language on my own, reading Tintin comics, convinced that the classes weren't all that useful. "Study abroad?" I'd think," I'll just go somewhere English-speaking."


After returning from an American art school in Florence, I began to realize what a mistake it had been to abandon French. While I was Italy, I'd seen the result of an American education exclusively in English. It was bleached-blonde girl wearing her boyfriend's ASU sweatshirt and throwing up outside of the American bar across the street from Piazza Santa Croce. I was terrified - I couldn't be one of them, I was meant to be a polyglot. Remembering how easily French once came to me, I decided to audit an intermediate class, hoping to refresh my skills.

On the first day, the underclassmen around me passed the time until the class began recounting their high school boarding experience in the south of France. When I'd taken intermediate French my Freshman year, most students couldn't count past 17. As an icebreaker, we were supposed to say something we enjoyed eating that began with the same first letter as our first initial. Do you know what I said?

Je m'appelle Patrice, et j'aime manger du pizza.

There was no way I could blame that on just having lived in Italy. It was the only food I could remember. I slept through class the next day.

What can I say now?
Desole, je seulement parle un peu de francais.

* * *

Feeling ahead of the game, back in June, Amanda and I set out our plans for learning French. We'd listened to tapes before we went to Italy, and while we did struggle the first few days, we at least learned to yell "fire!" in a melodramatic Italian accent. I said I'd dig up my old conjugation guides and grammatical dictionaries and we could practice with one another. Amanda's idea had something to do with unlocking the subconscious learning zones of your brain, where language flowed intuitively. It also involved a bottle of wine for each practice session. After a few nights of rousing Amanda out of her early evening, French lesson slumber, we kind of let it slip. And now we have 36 days left.

The other day, I did a Google search for a campy image of an old "Learn French Quickly!" kind of ad, that I would put as the image for this post; something we could all laugh about. The image above is what I found and it in no way comforts me or soothes my nerves about my lack of French proficiency. Okay, deep breath, I recognize some of the words, right? Eat with pleasure ... without .... fatigue ... the good sausages ... of the ... prodigal pig? What the hell does that mean? There is no way I will ever be able to follow French directions if I can't even explain why the pig is so bountiful.

Understanding written words will probably be the least of my problem in Quebec, a province that has made a case for separatism on the basis of linguistic differences. From what I understand, Montrealers have surmounted much of the former divide between Anglophones and Francophones, but even if the two languages coexist in relative harmony, Quebecois French is a separate dialect (a basilect, in fact, since I spent so much time on Wikipedia today) known as joual, that developed pretty much independently from continental French since the 1600s. There goes any academic French that may still be lingering in my brain.
Additionally, the province has the Office québécois de la langue française, a governmental department that patrols signage and storefronts, ensuring that English does not eclipse written French either in order or size. Tirer must appear first and in larger letters than Pull on doors. Yes, they have english on signage, but I'll probably have to bring along a magnifying glass to find it.

So I am clearly in the right mindset for a honeymoon, eh? We could have gone to Hawaii and lounged on the beach, our lips veritably playing with the sounds of the Hawaiian language - words that are far from being essential to getting around on the islands. But no, I wanted to go to a city that will probably be waist-deep in snow when we arrive. I now spend my breakfasts studying my old textbooks and grammatical guidebooks. I whiled away most of a slow afternoon at work quietly reciting the name of a Montreal ice cream place to myself, trying to understand the bilingual double-entendre. Havres aux glaces. Havres aux glaces. Havres aux glaces. My tongue felt clumsy against the roof of my mouth with the -re sound. Late in the day, I found this demo of a natural-sounding online vocalizer that AT&T is developing. I listened to the pronunciation. That's it? Have a glass? I could have figured that out just by looking at it. Maybe I have less language troubles than I think, so long as I can figure out a way to have this program do all of my speaking for me. Still, if that's Montreal's idea of a pun, maybe humor won't translate.