MSI Press Blog

  French Although French was technically the fourth language I began to study (after English, my native tongue, Latin, and Spanish), in some ways it could also be considered my second language or even a shared first language since I was surrounded by French from birth. I was born in New Hampshire some 60+ years ago and grew up in a small village there until I was 14, at which time my parents moved across the Salmon Falls River to a farm in Maine. In the 1940s and 1950s (and even in the 1960s), Maine and New Hampshire were strongholds of French-speaking Americans, not immigrants but families who had been there for generations, often with relatives in Canada (like we Anglophones among them), and an interesting mix of languages developed. Growing up in a francophone region in a New Hampshire village and, later, on a Maine farm meant that I always had heard French around me. I did not pay much attention to it, however, my parents usually frequented Anglophone haunts. I decided to t...

My brother, Charles, visited Paris a few weeks earlier than I did in the spring of 1988. Before my trip, he instructed me three or four times to buy a French phrase book. I didn’t understand his insistence on this matter. He spoke fluent French, so his advice wasn’t based on his own needs. After being told for the umpteenth time to buy the book, I went to a bookstore and purchased one. This was two decades before smart phones were available, which can now translate for travelers. My brother must have been psychic, because my host in Paris, a friend from high school, had a family emergency and had to return home to the U.S. after the first day of my six-day visit. My trip to Paris would have been much more challenging without the little phrase book. Eight years later, I worked for a large AIDS Service Agency full of young people with extra cash. My colleagues were always darting off to Europe on vacation. I lent my little phrase book out several times, and it was always recei...