How Learning French Has Shaped the Way I Think
By: William Sidnam
Tags: Self Improvement, Education, French, Writing, Language

How Learning French Has Shaped the Way I Think

Some random observations about the French language

Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

When you learn a new language, you don’t just pick up a bunch of new words and grammar rules. You also learn things that aren’t even directly related to the language in question: things like cultural differences, ancient worldviews, and how comprehension can shape how a language sounds.

Without further ado, here are some random observations I’ve made while learning French.

Learning French words can change how you see the world

Every language offers a unique perspective on the world. So when you begin speaking a new language, you’re forced to grapple with how it makes sense of the world.

You can see a cultural difference between English and French by how they talk about missing someone. While we might say ‘I miss you’ in English, the French say ‘Tu me manques’ (‘You’re missing to me’). So while the English makes ‘miss’ an active action, with the subject ‘doing’ the missing, French puts the focus on the person being missed. It’s more passive, in a sense, and yet the same idea is being expressed.

The same goes for ‘survive’. The English word comes from the old French ‘sourvivre’, which itself comes from the Latin ‘supervivere’. Yet what most English speakers might not realise is that our ‘survive’ is a coming together of the French ‘sur’ (over) + ‘vivre’ (to live), which literally means ‘to overlive’.

Of course, it’s unlikely that modern French speakers think about the word’s etymology while using ‘survivre’ — in much the same way that English speakers don’t think of ‘however’ as ‘how + ever’ or ‘nevertheless’ as ‘never + the + less’ — but such discoveries are always fascinating as they make one wonder about the worldviews of the peoples who originally formulated such concepts. Were the people who came up with ‘survive’ stoics? Did they believe that lives had an allotted length of time and that those who lived beyond a certain age were contravening the laws of nature? Without a historical investigation, we can only conjecture what they were thinking, but it’s nonetheless fun to do so.

The French equivalent of an English word can still mean something different

While an English word might have a French equivalent, the words may still vary in meaning and usage. That might sound counter-intuitive, since anyone can access an English-French dictionary and find direct translations; but due to cultural differences, the French equivalent of an English word can still mean something subtly different from what we might take it to mean.

To give one example, the French word for ‘no’ is ‘non’, and yet an English ‘no’ is not always the same as a French ‘non’. In France, it’s perfectly normal to respond to a yes/no question with a flat ‘non’, as that answers the question as directly and efficiently as possible. But if placed in the same scenario, most English speakers wouldn’t dare answer with a blunt ‘no’. That would seem unnecessarily rude and confrontational, after all, as if the speaker were in a foul mood or simply disliked the one posing the question. For reasons of social propriety, then, English would require a more indirect form of communication in this particular context, and so it wouldn’t be uncommon to answer a yes/no question in the negative with ‘sorry’. After all, an apology would still convey the idea of ‘no’ but in a softer way. And yet, answering a yes/no question with ‘sorry’ would seem slightly odd in French.

Another communication hiccup arises for adjectives like ‘important’. While English adopted the word from French, the former doesn’t use it in quite the same contexts as the latter. For example, in French you could say a city has ‘une communauté italienne importante’, which would literally translate as ‘an important Italian community’, but this actually means ‘a sizeable Italian community’. That’s because French’s important can also denote the size of a particular object, while English’s important primarily deals with its value or prominence. However, since French and English share so many words, it can be hard to know when a French word is being used to mean something slightly different from its English analogue. You could easily hear ‘une communauté italienne importante’ and assume that the community held some authority or value in the city, as that would still be a valid, albeit slightly unusual, concept and be none the wiser.

Then there’s the case of ‘savoury’. The French translate ‘savoury’ as ‘salé’, which literally means ‘salty’. But while it’s not hard to understand why French would call savoury food salty, as savoury food is often full of salt, there’s always the risk that while speaking English, a native French speaker might use the term ‘salty’ to describe a savoury dish, only for their native English speaking interlocutor to take it at face value and think that the dish itself is seasoned with salt, when that might not be the case.

Sometimes a ‘get’ is all you need

Although ‘get’ might be considered an inelegant verb in English, with many writers avoiding it as much as possible, it is incredibly useful. But due to having multiple meanings, finding the French equivalent can cause all sorts of linguistic headaches.

That’s because the verb ‘get’ simply doesn’t have a single equivalent that conveys the full range of meanings that ‘get’ can. And so while speaking French, you’re forced to learn a whole range of different French verbs to express all the various ideas you could easily convey in English with this one versatile word. To ‘get up in the morning’ is ‘Se lever tôt le matin’ (lit. ‘To lift oneself early the morning’), but to ‘get down the stairs’ is ‘descendre les escaliers’ (lit. ‘to descend the stairs’). To ‘get in a car’ is ‘rentrer dans une voiture’ (lit. ‘to enter into a car’) but to ‘get on with a friend’ is ‘s’entendre avec un ami’ (lit. ‘to make yourself heard with a friend’). The French verbs bear no relationship with one another, and yet English brings them all together through the use of ‘get’.

French isn’t all that beautiful

Like most people, I used to think French was the one of the most beautiful languages in the world. Nowadays, I’m not so sure where I stand on the issue.

That’s not to say I don’t think French can be beautiful when spoken in a particular way. But having lived in France on and off for about a year, I no longer really appreciate the aesthetic value of French words being spoken. And I think I know why that might be the case: when I have to focus my attention on trying to understand what someone is saying, I don’t have time to think of aesthetics. It’s similar to if you had to count the number of syllables in a Shakespeare sonnet. While you were doing it, you simply wouldn’t be able to enjoy the sound of the words being spoken, as the job of counting syllables would take up all your mental energy.

But even then, I’ve noticed that while most non-French speakers might say that French sounds beautiful, few French people say the same thing about their native language. That’s not to say they think it’s ugly, but they’re definitely not as enamoured of it as one might imagine. And I think one reason for this is because languages are always more beautiful when you don’t know what is being said. The lack of comprehension enables you to focus purely on how a language sounds, but once you have some understanding of the language, the mystery disappears.

I think that when something has an aura of mystery, we may find it more beautiful because, without a means to make sense of it intellectually, we end up projecting our own ideas onto it. Take the example of the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós. Many of their songs are sung in a made-up nonsensical language called Vonlenska that manages to convey emotions without conveying any intelligible meaning. And so while listening to these songs, you’re free to hear them in purely sonic terms, without the baggage of meaning complicating your appreciation of them.

A language you don’t understand always has an aura of mystery about it, which can make you love or disdain it on purely aesthetic grounds. But once you start understanding it, you come to realise that actually most conversations are pretty banal. In fact, I’m willing to bet an imaginary house that 80% of all conversations are banal. And it doesn’t matter what language one speaks; most sentences people utter tend to be about pretty everyday matters, as one could expect. After all, it’s not like French people are going around speaking like Victor Hugo; if anything, they’re much more likely to be talking about food or complaining about bureaucracy.

One reason I think this ‘ignorance is aesthetic bliss’ theory holds water is due to the potentially surprising fact that while native English speakers think that French is beautiful, native French (and Italian) speakers tend to think that English is too. As a native English speaker, I’ve never held that opinion. But that might support my point, as the fact I speak it natively means I’m unable to hear how it sounds independent of meaning — just as how French speakers can’t hear how French sounds from a purely aesthetic standpoint. So while a sentence like ‘Dispose of the lice-ridden body in the swamp’ might potentially delight French ears, it sounds awful to mine — and that’s simply because I’m aware of what it means, and hence recoil at the mental image it evokes in me.