Swamp
Confessions of an Academic Pseudo-Giraffe
14.10.06
Pardon my French
I’m studying French. By now, I have about ten hours behind me on this slowly progressing beginners’ course offered by the Alliance Française. It’s extremely refreshing to start studying something from scratch after spending several years on a somewhat more advanced project. My ultimate aim may be to read Foucault (and Barthes, Bourdieu, Levi-Strauss, and Bachelard; and Rousseau, Pascal, and Montaigne; and others) in the original language, but for now I’m mostly repeating simple phrases aloud. This is the method we’re following, and it does make sense.
Having studied not so many different languages (two domestic + now three foreign ones + elementary Latin) but language in general quite a bit, I am interested in principles – the langue behind the parole, to use Saussurean terms. Whenever I spot something surprising, even at this elementary level, I have questions popping up in my mind. For now, I’m trying to repress most of them. Our teacher is a very practical guy, and I don’t think he’d be interested in explaining the systematic rules behind a particular phonetic assimilation.
To begin with, we had about five students in the group, all of different nationalities. The teacher is Rwandese. The other day, the number suddenly exploded. This was after several full lessons. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden there were new beginners walking in through all doors. I mean that literally. We switched into this larger room that has several doors: two leading outside, and another two into other rooms in the building. After the class started, there was someone knocking on a door every once in a while, requesting to join the group. And funnily enough, it was never the same door twice in a row. It was almost as if someone had distributed the people behind the doors at given moments, according to a premeditated plan. I think the lesson ended with twelve students.
The same building houses a Ugandan-German cultural society, and yesterday a couple of guys entered the classroom to take pictures for a brochure they’re making about the association. Someone wiped out the board and filled it with simple German expressions (Guten Tag, eins zwei drei, achtung, ich heisse Frank, etc.). Then we pretended to be students on a German course. A Ugandan member of our French group was posing as the teacher (he happened to be wearing a tie). It was quite funny actually: he didn’t know a word of German, and actually I wonder how many African guys there are in the world who teach German in an international setting. But he did well, looking very authoritative, I’m sure, in the still photographs.
The course might prove to be useful regarding my current identity problem. I’ve been wondering what to write in the “occupation” slot in the immigration card (whenever traveling in East Africa, one has to keep filling out these cards continuously). Recently I’ve been fluctuating between “student” and “researcher,” but I’m really properly neither. A published dissertation and a blog hardly constitute the grounds for calling myself a “writer,” although writing is what I do every day. Often for a full working day. But in the French course, with my current level of skills, it’s extremely easy to answer this question unequivocally. Quelle est votre occupation? Je suis étudiant. Je suis dans le cours de français. 11:19
Having studied not so many different languages (two domestic + now three foreign ones + elementary Latin) but language in general quite a bit, I am interested in principles – the langue behind the parole, to use Saussurean terms. Whenever I spot something surprising, even at this elementary level, I have questions popping up in my mind. For now, I’m trying to repress most of them. Our teacher is a very practical guy, and I don’t think he’d be interested in explaining the systematic rules behind a particular phonetic assimilation.
To begin with, we had about five students in the group, all of different nationalities. The teacher is Rwandese. The other day, the number suddenly exploded. This was after several full lessons. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden there were new beginners walking in through all doors. I mean that literally. We switched into this larger room that has several doors: two leading outside, and another two into other rooms in the building. After the class started, there was someone knocking on a door every once in a while, requesting to join the group. And funnily enough, it was never the same door twice in a row. It was almost as if someone had distributed the people behind the doors at given moments, according to a premeditated plan. I think the lesson ended with twelve students.
The same building houses a Ugandan-German cultural society, and yesterday a couple of guys entered the classroom to take pictures for a brochure they’re making about the association. Someone wiped out the board and filled it with simple German expressions (Guten Tag, eins zwei drei, achtung, ich heisse Frank, etc.). Then we pretended to be students on a German course. A Ugandan member of our French group was posing as the teacher (he happened to be wearing a tie). It was quite funny actually: he didn’t know a word of German, and actually I wonder how many African guys there are in the world who teach German in an international setting. But he did well, looking very authoritative, I’m sure, in the still photographs.
The course might prove to be useful regarding my current identity problem. I’ve been wondering what to write in the “occupation” slot in the immigration card (whenever traveling in East Africa, one has to keep filling out these cards continuously). Recently I’ve been fluctuating between “student” and “researcher,” but I’m really properly neither. A published dissertation and a blog hardly constitute the grounds for calling myself a “writer,” although writing is what I do every day. Often for a full working day. But in the French course, with my current level of skills, it’s extremely easy to answer this question unequivocally. Quelle est votre occupation? Je suis étudiant. Je suis dans le cours de français. 11:19
