Precerpt from My 20th Language: L4 - French: University French
University French
After my wonderful high school French program, which I had
no idea was wonderful until I got to mix it up with students studying French at
Penn State and learned how little they had learned or were expected to learn in
their high school programs, I enrolled in a university French course the first
quarter of my freshman year. Since I had had high school French, the question
was whether I should be enrolled in French 2 (second semester beginning French)
or French 3 (first semester advanced French). The rule of thumb was that two
years of high school French equated to one semester of college French). Three
years was an odd number, so I could have been enrolled in either French 2, if
my high school program was weak, or French 3, if my high school program was
strong, i.e. equivalent to four years of a weak program. But my high school
program was neither. It was stellar. It was taken together with mostly native
speakers. It had involved creative writing, literature (some of it quite
demanding, e.g., Sartre), and grammar review from the point of view of erasing
inbred errors (for those of us without inbred errors, we got to learn it right
the first time around).
Fortunately, there was a test. It would tell the French Department
whether to place me in French 2 or French 3. It was a written test, with
instructions in English. I took my copy, along with a couple hundred other
examinees, and opened the booklet. I could not believe my eyes. I flipped
through the test to the end and still could not believe my eyes. There was
nothing there that would not have been covered in my high school French 1
(review of grammar) class. Sighing and wondering what kind of French course I
truly might expect, I picked up the pencil and dashed through the test. Imagine
getting a placement test for English and the texts being from the Dick and Jane
series! Seriously? I handed in the test while everyone else was still working.
“Finished already?” asked the proctor, a graduate teaching
assistant.
“Oui,” I responded. “Fini.”
She looked a little askance but took the test. The results
were posted a couple of days later, with class assignments listed. There was no
class assignment listed by my name, just a comment to see M. LeBlanc, the head of
the French Department. Huh?
I made an appointment for the next day, found M. LeBranc’s
office, and knocked on the door. “Bonjour,” he said, as he offered me a seat. I
sat down, concerned as to what the problem might be.
M. LeBlanc began asking me questions in French. Mainly, he
wanted to know what I had studied in high school. I dutifully described my
program: le premier cours de français –
révision de la grammaire; le deuxième cours de français – panorama de la
littérature française, de La Chanson de Roland à Les Jeux sont faits
(Sartre); le troisième cours de français – écriture creative.
“Je suis bouleversé,” he responded. And that is when I discovered
that my high school French program had been extraordinary.
He went on to say there was no way I belonged in any of the
beginning or advanced French-learning courses (first two years), so I could
exempt out of the language requirement (I did not want to do that), or I could
opt for some third and fourth year courses (I did want to do that). So, my high
school tradition continued.
My first college French course was Overview of French
Literature (some old friends among the works and some new ones). I took that
together with French poetry, an upper undergrad/graduate course with a very
popular and talented teacher that M. LeBland approved for my first quarter.
My second quarter I took stylistics, where I got into trouble
with my Acadienne dialect. Some of my expressions were considered obscene in
modern Parisian French. Oops! That is what happens when languages diverge over
time. When languages age, the older words often become obscene—they just had
not aged in Acadienne French. I also took 18th century literature,
where those words were not obscene (yet) and tracked with the dialect of French
I was familiar with so that even though I was the most junior in the class, I
had the least trouble reading works of Racine and his contemporaries (and
besides, I had read some of them in high school, anyway).
My third quarter I took French morphology with, oh, no, a professor
from Paris whose specialty was phonetics. He threw a book at me in frustration,
telling me, “Vous parlez comme une sacrée ‘Canuck’ [you speak like a g-d Canuck]," hurling the English word with a French accent as a barb.
“Mais je suis Canuck,” I responded and shrugged my shoulders,
but I never took another French course at Penn State. (Of course, I am not
Canadian, and my French dialect is not exactly Canadian, either. But he did not
know that, and I was not about to enlighten him.)
For more precerpts from My 20th Language, click HERE.
For more posts about language learning, click HERE.
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