Existing in a foriegn country without knowing their language

I enjoy the challenge of living in a country with a different language than my mother tongue. I never dealt well with foreign language studies in school. There were less than 900 people in my town of Orleans when I was growing up on Cape Cod in the 50s. The graduating class of 1960, of which I was a member, had exactly 60 students and it took five different towns to gather that many.

In school you had two foreign language choices; Latin or French. I had to deal with French. I like to say that I took four years of high school French which is true as far as it goes. The reality is that I took two years of first year French and two years of second year French, failing the first year of each course and barely scratching out a D+ the second time around.

I was exposed to Spanish when I came to south Florida in 1961 to go to the University of Miami. I had a Cuban roommate and a Cuban girlfriend that year. They both spoke excellent English but being around them with their Cuban friends I picked up a few phrases here and there, most of which could not be used in polite conversation. For a brief time in 1964 I worked as a copy boy (yes, there really was such a creature) at the Miami Herald and lived in what was to become "Little Havana." That was like being in a foreign country without needing a passport. I was one of only two American citizens in my apartment building and the only one natural born . At the bottom of the grocery receipt from the "bodega" around the corner it said gracias! I got to love arroz con pollo and picadillo along with those little thimble-sized cups of a tar-like substance that was called coffee. To me the sound of the snow cone man who peddled around the neighborhood on his three wheeler with a cooler with a block of ice in the front and a rack of the most garishly colored syrups for toppings. Two tin pie plates were attached to the handle bars and you could hear him coming down the street yelling "Hielo! Hielo!" and then hitting the pie plates three times, clack! clack! clack!

After a 12-year hiatus from south Florida I returned and decided to take a course in conversational Spanish at an adult education class held evenings at a local high school. I enjoyed the classes and was actually learning something in the six months I attended, just before being offered a job as captain of an 85' sailboat in France!

I landed in Nice, France, February 11, 1989 and would have been able to tell them at Customs and Immigrations that "my aunt's pen was on my uncle's desk," and I could count to ten without a mistake. Since there was no school at the airport I couldn't tell them that I had "entered the classroom." That was essentially what I was able dredge up from my four years of high school French nearly 30 years after the fact.

I have to say, in all honesty, that for the first few months I was in France I made almost no effort to learn the language. The job was presented to me as, "how would you like to live in France for six months or so?" Fortunately it is quite possible to live in Antibes, France, without having to use the language except in a superficial way. The boat had been, and continued to be in litigation in the French courts system. It had been built at Chantier Naval de Biot, in a town of the same name not far from Antibes, and upon being launched it was discovered that the boat was dangerously unstable and of course the lawyers entered the story.

It was a sad story, all in all. The owner and his wife loved to sail, and I had met him nearly 13 years earlier when I was asked to crew on his 65' boat in the inaugural Fort Lauderdale to Key West race. They had designed the boat and it bombed. Subsequently, the owner's wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer and he had absolutely no interest in that particular boat anymore. None. The boat was actively for sale and I was there to assist with the replacement of the keel and to protect the owner's interests. Three years after being launched, and before I left the States he told me, "don't call me. Call my lawyer, call Tommy (his captain for almost 20 years), call my accountant. Don't call me."

During my early days there French wasn't necessary. There was a broker in Antibes, an Australian, who had lived there for decades and spoke perfect French and he handled most of the dealings with the builder and other entities where it was necessary to use French. A large chandlery in town, Antibes Ship Services, was were I collected my mail and could send faxes to the States. Most of the people working there spoke excellent English so I was given a pass on having to learn French in order to buy supplies for the boat.

Antibes is a very cosmopolitan town with the largest, by tonnage, marina in the world, and a large proportion of the yachts flew the red ensign of Great Britian with English and Australian crews. There were three pubs close to the harbor that I would describe as "expat hangouts." The common language in Chez Charlie's Pub, Le Rouf and the Blue Lady was English no matter what country the habitues came from. I soon discovered that English was widely and fluently spoken by the Dutch, the Danes the Swedes and Nowegians I met there, and to a lesser degree by the Germans. If you have graduated from high school in Holland, Denmark and the Scandanavian countries you have had a mandatory 12 years of English instruction. I also learned that in general the English and Scots spoke English and the French spoke French. Period! And neither side was much inclined to compromise.

Going to the grocery store was an adventure in learning what is like to be a functional illiterate. You do your shopping by what the labels look like. Spaghetti sauce is pretty much spaghetti sauce everywhere. You know you're buying a can of tomatoes because there is a picture of a tomato on it and so it goes. There are some problems, though. It's pretty easy to buy laundry soap, but if you don't speak French you have no clue that bleach is "javel," but you learn. Produce is no problem because a bunch of grapes are the same the world over. I loved shopping at the fruit and veggie market where everything was so fresh and appetizing. But I soon learned that the number one isn't represented by the index finger (nor is it the middle one, either) but rather by the thumb. Two is thumb and index finger respectively and so on.

Never, never, NEVER, did I approach any French person with, "Parlez vous Anglais?" Not only is it extremely rude, but you are inviting the natives to be rude to you for not making the effort to speak to them in their own language. While I made no real effort to learn French in the first few months, I also refused to be an "ugly American" or just a plain jerk. I went to a book store and bought a Harrap's Mini dictionary. Just slightly bigger than a deck of playing cards it had thick plastic covers and fit comfortably in the pockets of a pair of Sportif shorts or the back pocket of a pair of jeans. I then learned two phrases: est-que vous avez? and Je voudrais avoir. The first phrase is "do you have?" This was extremely helpful when shopping. If I couldn't find what I wanted on my own, then I would look the word up in my handy Harrap's and then find a sales person to assist me. I'd approach them and say, "Bonjour, est-que vous avez du javel?" "Hello, do you have any bleach?" They would invariably smile. "Bien sur, monsieur, c'est ici," and show me where what I wanted was located.

The phrase, "Je voudrais avoir," works well at restaurants. Despite all the comedic situations in film and tv where someone with a smattering of high school French orders something from the menu and then end up with a plate of something best left in the dumpster behind the restaurant, dining out isn't a huge challenge. You can pretty easily figure out what most of the items on a menu are without knowing a whole lot of the language. Then, when the waiter comes to take your order you do exactly what you have done hundreds of times back home. You use the magic phrase for "I would like to have," and point with your fnger to the item on the menu. Worked well for me until I learned French and even then, I still pointed to the item I wanted on the menu to make sure there were no mistakes.

A little aside to the menu situation. Towards the end of my time in France one of my brothers and his wife came to visit and we went to one of my favorite restaurants that I had been dining at least once a week for the past two years. As we sat outside and chatted and new waiter on his first night, and hearing us talking in English came by the table and dropped off our menus. I opened mine and stared at it uncomprehendingly. It wasn't the menu I was used to. It was written in a foreign language and it took me nearly a minute to realize it was written in English. Sort of. They were very creative in their translation of the French menu. I called the waiter to our table and requested the menu I had been ordering from for the previous couple of years.
When you're first immersed completely in a language you don't understand it is nothing but noise. Blah, blah, blah. It makes absolutely no sense at all. But then one morning as you're making your way to the outdoor market a word jumps out of all that static and noise. You probably don't know what the word means, but it is definately a word and it is as if everyone in town got together the night before and decided they would teach you that word because that morning everyone is using that word. You look it up in your Harrap's and you're on your way to learning the language.

Then, if you're really lucky, you meet a native who takes a shine to you and they will start to teach you to speak properly. That mentor of mine wasn't my girlfriend, but a friend of hers. Robert was a little gnome of a man who sold artwork on the street across from the Bar du Port, just outside the marina and the second storefront on the left as you come through the huge stone wall and into the vielle ville d'Antibes. Robert spoke no English other than a few numbers so he tell les Anglais the prices of the paintings he had to sell. He took a shine to me and my early struggles with the French language. I distinctly remember the first time he corrected my mangling of his mother tongue. Florence, Robert (pronounced Row Bear), their friend Alain (who Florence had lived with for a couple of years several years before we got together) and I had been drinking Pastis on the sidewalk outside the Bar du Port. I was getting tired and zoning out from trying to follow their conversation. I said, "Je vais a le bateau," I said. "Non, non, non," Robert said, wagging his finger at me, "Je vais AUX (oh) bateau."

One last story about learning to speak French. When the time came to put the boat on the hard to change the keel Florence and I needed to find an apartment. We couldn't live on the boat. She told me one afternoon that Alain knew of a place for rent on Cap d'Antibes and he'd take me there. Alain directed me how to get there, but I didn't like the place. As Florence and I were driving back to the boat that evening I told her, in my mangled French that I had learned a lot about Alain. I had found out that he was from Dijon and that his birthday was only two days after mine. The same day as my mother's birthday. "And I did it all in French," I said proudly.
"You mean he didn't speak to you in English?" she asked. "Alain speaks excellent English. He lived in London for 12 years."

I kept that under my hat for the next six months or so until one day Alain and I were having a philosophical argument and I got lost in the language. I said, in English, "look, Alain, I don't know how to express myself in French on this issue, and I know you speak English, so here's the deal..."

He dipped his head with a slight smile and proceeded in excellent English. I didn't press him in English yet every day after that, when we met at the Bar du Port he would speak to me for a short while in English and then we'd continue on in French. By that time I found it difficult and uncomfortable to talk to French people in anything other than French even if they, themselves, spoke and understood English.

When we were leaving France for Spain (where the dock rent would drop from $6,000.00/month to $2,250.00/month) on the last day Alain and Robert invited me to have lunch with them. No Florence, though she was going with the boat. It was just to be the three of us. When lunch was over and as we stood up from the table Alain came to stand in front of me and said, in English, "when I first met you I hated you. I hated you because you were an American. I hated you because you were with Florence and I always hoped the two of us would get back together, and I hated you because you didn't speak French. But before you leave I want you to know I love you. You are my friend." And then he kissed me four times, twice on each cheek. I still get teary telling that story.

By the way, it's not true that the French all hate Americans. It's not. They hate EVERYBODY! They even hate each other. They are a very peculiar people, the French. And as I progressed in the French language (I never became fluent in French, but I did become very proficient) I wondered what poor, despairing Mr. Downey who struggled so valiantly to teach me the language would think of me now.