Parlez-vous Français? ¿Hablas español?
Trilingual conversations have become a part of my day-to-day life. Not because I am in any way trilingual (or even bilingual), but because I’m a native English speaker living in France with two Spanish-speaking roommates. A common joke in my apartment is “you came on this trip to learn French, but you’ll come out of it speaking Spanish!” I don’t know how accurate that is (I needed to ask my roommate’s help just to type the title of this blog post), but I definitely feel like I’m understanding more and more Spanish as the days go by.
I think the strangest language-related experience of my trip so far was when I went with one of my roommates to Orange, a French phone company, so that she could buy a French SIM card. After determining that the sales attendant spoke English, she started asking him questions about the card and I drifted off to the side to make use of the store’s free wifi. A few minutes later, it became clear that the attendant couldn’t answer all of her questions in English, so she called me over to translate his French. I took French in high school, and I consider myself semi-conversational, but in no way fluent. Still, I understood him well enough to explain the details of the plan to my roommate (100 minutes of calls, 10 gigabytes of data, unlimited texts). She asked me if the plan worked in the United Kingdom, I asked the sales attendant, he confirmed that it would, I relayed that information to my roommate, and we left the store with a new SIM card.
As we were waiting for our train home, she turned to me and said “you know I asked you that question in Spanish, right?” Somehow, between being flustered by the translation and knowing the context of her question, I hadn’t even noticed. That was a triumphant moment for me.
Of course, it hasn’t always been successes. My first day in France, fighting my way through a crowded metro station, I bumped into a woman. “Excusez-moi!” I said, darting on my way. She glared at me before stalking off, muttering under her breath. Another student had a similar experience in a restaurant, waiving over a waiter to ask for the bill with a what-she-thought-was-polite “excusez-moi.” She was all but shouted at, and the bill was thrown on the table.
We later learned that French has three levels of “I’m sorry.” There’s “pardon,” which is what you’re actually supposed to say when you run into someone, or when you’re calling over a waiter. There’s “désolé” which is more heartfelt (the kind of thing you’d say after spilling a drink on someone’s new white shirt). And finally, “excusez-moi,” which puts some of the blame on the person you’re saying it to. This is what you would say if you were trying to get off of a crowded train and everyone in front of you was refusing to move. I thought that this was really interesting, as it’s something that can’t be conveyed through English, except through tone. Still, it would have been nice to know the difference before coming to France!
