Joyce Simons

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Five Favorite French-isms

A year or so ago, I became a member of the TED Translator program. Since I love to learn new things, you can imagine my delight at having the chance to translate some of my favorite TED talks from English to French or from French to English, and to help others with their translations. What startled me at first was how many idiomatic expressions we all use all the time. Some can be translated easily, some require finessing to capture the meaning and tone of the expression. Very few, if any, can be translated word-for-word. I participate in a weekly meetup of francophones of all levels, so I get to hear some pretty colorful mistakes. A frequent one is translating an English expression word-for-word and thinking it’s French.

If you try this tactic and a French person understands you, you’re ahead of the game. (Voila! An idiomatic expression!) But best to learn a few popular French expressions and try them out on unsuspecting native speakers. They’ll be duly impressed with your grasp of argot (slang) and might even teach you a new phrase or two.

To get you started, here are five of my favorite French idiomatic expressions…

Un panier de crabes

You might say that translating expressions into another language opens up a can of worms. Except that in French, the notion of a can of worms in nonsensical. Instead, the French talk about a guêpier, which is a wasp’s nest, or a sac de nœuds, which is a bag of knots. But my favorite French equivalent is un panier de crabes, which is a basket of crabs, because it’s so visual. You can just imagine what happens when you put a bunch of live crabs in a basket. Pinch, pinch, pinch. Definitely a situation you want to avoid.

crab

Etre aux anges

On the other hand, if you’re euphoric, you would not be on cloud nine or in seventh heaven because those phrases don’t translate literally (though I’ve heard beginners say, Je suis sur le nuage neuf or Je suis au septième ciel). In French, you would be aux anges, which implies you’re hanging with the angels. Which is how you might feel if you succeed in slipping a well-translated expression past the discerning ears of a native French speaker.

angels

Un secret de Polichinelle

Polichinelle, the French version of Pulcinella, is the commedia dell’arte character that evolved into Punch of Punch-and-Judy fame. If you’ve ever seen a performance of these puppets, you’ll know that Punch is a bit of a dimwit. The audience is forever trying to clue Punch in on the “open secret” that another puppet is sneaking up on him from behind to clobber him over the head or deliver a swift kick farther south. Un secret de Polichinelle is an especially timely expression these days given TIME Magazine’s choice of person of the year: the silence breakers who blew open the “open secret” culture of sexual predators.TIME Magazine's person of the year

Se coiffer avec un rateau

It used to be that tidy hairdos were a good thing. Then bedhead (cheveux en bataille, literally “hair in battle”) became the rage. But whether you spend two seconds or two hours making your hair look neat or intentionally messy, you probably don’t want people whispering behind your back that you do your hair with a garden rake. I have a friend who translates this expression as, “to comb one’s hair with a nail,” which I find hilarious. There’s actually a woman I’m acquainted with who seems to comb her hair with either a nail or a rake. I’m not sure what kind of look she’s trying to achieve, but every time I see her I’m reminded to rake up those last few autumn leaves that have fallen on my lawn.

Nick Nolte mug shot

Etre bien dans ses baskets

In English, one can feel good in one’s skin. In French, you could say the same thing (être bien dans sa peau) but I prefer the equivalent expression of être bien dans ses baskets, or to feel good in one’s sneakers. I don’t know why sneakers and not every other type of shoe. Personally, I feel perfectly at ease when I’m running around at home in my sheepskin-lined slippers or out in public in my suede lug sole loafers. Put me in a pair of sneakers and I’d certainly run faster but I wouldn’t feel as good. Hence, I “feel good in my sneakers” when not wearing sneakers.

Converse hi tops

So there you have it: five useful expressions to try out on your French friends. Bonne chance! as they say in French (Good luck!), though I prefer Bon Courage! because it implies that the thing you’re setting off to do isn’t easy. But at least trying out one or more of these expressions should be easier than combing your hair with a rake.

Merci beaucoup this week to my friend and linguistic exchange partner, Anne Catherine Desmichelle Chardon, who taught me un panier de crabes and who gently corrected me when I referred to combing one’s hair with a nail. I think I’ll just stick with my old standby—at least when talking about myself—and continue to refer to waking up with Edward Scissorhands hair.

Edward Scissorhands

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Are You Different in Different Languages?

If you speak more than one language, you may have noticed that the way you present yourself to others varies depending on which language you’re speaking.

For instance, I’m a confident speaker of my mother tongue (English). I consider myself articulate and, being a native New Yorker, there’s a certain boppity-bop-bop to the way I speak. When I recently asked a group of friends for a list of adjectives that best describe my personality, “direct” bubbled to the top, which is consistent with my speech style. I tend not to beat around the bush.

But when I asked my French friends to do the same, their list was surprisingly different. According to them, when I speak French I come across as “cheerful.” Hmm, how did “direct,” which I sometimes have to temper lest I inadvertently say something that rubs someone the wrong way, morph into “cheerful?” I like to think I’m fluent in French. But I make frequent mistakes, struggle occasionally to find the right word, and almost always laugh at my foibles. So there’s a certain amount of humility that plays into my forays in la francophonie. Hence, my cheerfulness.

Eiffel Tower

Expressing your style in written French presents a whole new set of challenges. According to one of my former French professors, the French language has 30% fewer words than the English language. So what we anglophones might sum up in an adjective might be said in French with a verb phrase, for instance. And even when you can find an appropriate word-for-word translation, it often doesn’t sound like something a native French speaker would say or write. Oh la la.

A couple of years ago, a Parisian friend living in Nice came up with the idea to publish an anthology of short stories (nouvelles, in French, not courtes contes, which translates literally as “short stories” but is more accurately translated as the nonsensical “limited fairytales”). Each story would be a first-hand account of how a world-famous monument came to be. She gathered a group of writers from the countries where the monuments are located, and went to work assigning one monument to each of us. She found a French-speaking Egyptian to write about the Great Pyramids, a Parisian to write about the Eiffel Tower, etc.

But when it came time to write about the Statue of Liberty, she told me that another writer— who was only half-American— wanted to write it. So I told her how I had an unobstructed view of the statue from my home in Brooklyn Heights, NY. That’s all she needed to hear: I got the assignment (the other writer was assigned Big Ben), and she gave me the option to write it in either English or French. I chose English and produced a short story whose tone blended an appropriately woe-is-me attitude with some home-brewed NYC snark. As soon as she read what I had written, she asked me to write the French version. Zut alors!

Here are just a few of the challenges I faced:

  • Research shows that French translations are about 15-20% longer than their original English text. So if you’re trying to match or fall below your English word count, good luck with that.
  • There are three clearly defined levels of French: familiar, standard, and soutenu, or formal. In English, we have one. So when translating from English to French, you have to choose the appropriate level for the text and be consistent within it.
  • French is rife with faux amis, or false friends. What might seem like an accurate translation could end up having a completely opposite meaning. For instance, if you feel “blessed” in English, let’s hope you’re not blessé in French because it means you’re injured.
  • While there are myriad ways to say something in English, there may be just one way to say the same thing in French. And that one way might have more than one meaning. For example, French may be considered the “language of love” but the word for “love” (aimer) is the same as the word for “like.” Je t’aime means “I love you.” But if you want to say, “I like you,” you’d say je t’aime bien, where bien means “well.” So loving someone well means you like them. Go figure.

My favorite adventure in translation came at the end of my Statue of Liberty story, in which the last line made it clear that Lady Liberty may have been born in France, but she has become a dyed-in-the-wool, potty-mouthed New Yorker. Which presented two new challenges. First, French people seem to think that New Yorkers are elegant folk. The only thing plus chic than being Parisian is being New Yorkais. But in my experience, scratch the surface of anyone born and raised in the tri-state area, and you’ll find a hint of vulgarity beneath even the most elegant veneer. Second, after I toned down the vulgarity of my last sentence at my friend’s request, I had to find a decent translation for “No one messes with Lady Liberty.” (You can easily guess which verb I originally chose.) The problem was that there’s no obvious translation for “mess with.” So I asked some of my French friends for their ideas, and the result was an exercise in hilarity.

Here are some of the options we came up with, translated word-for-word from French:

  1. Whore, don’t touch Lady Liberty.
  2. Don’t joke around with Lady Liberty.
  3. If you look for Lady Liberty, you’ll find me.

In the end, we agreed to go with option 2, though I pushed hard for the infinitely more vulgar option 1 because it packs a punch that the other two don’t.

So there you have it. I may be direct in spoken English and cheerful in spoken French, but I lean toward vulgarity in written French. Merci mille fois to my friend Iveline de Normandie for teaching me these things about myself and for bringing our anthology of monument stories to life. If you want to read it, it’s available on Amazon in English (as The Wisdom of Monuments) and in French (as La Sagesse des Monuments). And if you do read it, please post a review on Amazon or send me comments because I love the feedback— especially if you want to propose an alternative translation for that last line. Just don’t be surprised if the style of your translation says more about you than you imagined!

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So You Want to Learn French?

When I was six years old, I started to learn French in school. It was mandatory. And even though there wasn’t an urgent need to speak French in Brooklyn Heights where I grew up, I’m so thankful I was made to learn a foreign language. According to physiological studies on the benefits, it makes you a better multitasker, decision-maker, and English speaker. It also makes you less likely to suffer from dementia. The down side? It’s not easy to acquire any degree of fluency in a country where you can live your entire life without visiting another state, much less another country where English isn’t understood.

Fast forward a few decades, and I’m finally fluent in French. It was an uphill climb. The way languages were taught in my school focused on the insidious rules of grammar. After 12 years of study, I could read every novel ever written by French Existentialists (Camus, Malraux, Sartre, etc.). I could draft a thesis on suffering and the human condition. But I couldn’t carry on a simple conversation with a native speaker or carry out any of the practical tasks of daily living: making a restaurant reservation, using a cell phone, welcoming friends to my home, watching a French movie without relying on English subtitles, etc.

Zut alors !

I should mention that I didn’t just sit around whining about my inability to do these things. I was proactive about rectifying the situation to justify my whining. I took classes at the Alliance Française in NYC. I spent two years of my youth in Montreal before realizing that the Quebecois accent is unlike anything I learned in school. For years I subscribed to Paris Match, the French equivalent of People magazine. And those things helped. A little.

Now I’m a big believer in foreign courtesy. To me, that means when you visit a foreign country, you at least try to communicate in the native tongue. That’s why I learned a smattering of Italian before visiting Italy, Swedish before visiting Sweden, Dutch because my extended family is Dutch, German because Germany is so big that sooner or later you’re bound to travel through it, and even Czech though I was hard-pressed to find a vowel in much of its vocabulary. It’s why I’m currently learning Japanese because I have a hankering to visit Japan (thank you, Anthony Bourdain and Parts Unknown).

So after visiting France for the umpteenth time and feeling like l’idiot du village for my inability to follow a conversation in French that I could read and write with ease, I decided enough is enough. Trop, c’est trop ! I asked my manager if I could work remotely for a month, and enrolled in a four-week French immersion program in the South of France. A year later, my new manager let me spend three months working remotely, and I moved to Nice for the autumn. Every weekday I took classes at the Alliance Française de Nice, worked at my job in the afternoons and evenings, and then went out with French friends whenever possible. I learned French slang and French customs that they don’t teach you in grade school. I went to the movies and enjoyed French films without subtitles. I sat in cafés and debated topics for the sheer joy of being able to hold up my end in French. It was like waking up one morning and discovering that I could breathe under water.

And then I came home. And felt everything I had learned start to slip away from disuse. Oh. Mon. Dieu.

What I learned to do is the same thing you can do if you want to learn French as a beginner. Here’s my top 10 list of ways you can learn French and have fun at it:

  1. Download Duolingo on your phone or iPad or laptop, or whichever device you use daily. It’s free and it takes just a few minutes a day to learn the basics before progressing to more advanced topics. And there’s no homework!   Duolingo
  2. Subscribe to Bien-Dire magazine. It’s a magazine written in French specifically for English speakers (though it’s also available for speakers of other languages), from beginners to advanced learners. Each bimonthly issue contains articles about French history, culture, politics, etc. It comes with a CD so you can learn by listening, not just by reading. And each article includes a set of translations into English so you won’t have to keep a dictionary handy.Bien-Dire magazine
  3. Find a tutor. Some of my friends have tried Italki but I prefer Verbal Planet. It’s free to sign up, and you can search for a tutor based on several criteria— like where they live, which languages they speak, how many 5-star reviews they get, how much they charge, etc. Some tutors even offer free sample lessons and volume discounts. You schedule your lessons on the site and your tutor contacts you on Skype. I spent a year practicing French with Eric Jego who lives and teaches in Besancon, and he was outstanding at keeping my French current.Verbal Planet
  4. Enroll in a class that focuses on conversation, not grammar. The whole point of speaking a second language is to be able to communicate in it. So unless you’re planning to limit yourself to pen pals, French conversation is the way to go. Community colleges and continued education programs can be a great resource for language classes. So are programs run by your local parks and recreation departments, or organizations like the Learning Annex. But be sure to do some online research to make sure the program you’re thinking of enrolling in is worth the time and money.
  5. Join a language exchange community. A friend introduced me to mylanguageexchange.com (it’s free), and there’s no shortage of native French speakers who want to practice their English in exchange for helping you practice your French over Skype. I’m fortunate to have friends in France with whom I do language exchanges, and I just acquired a new friend in this community.My Language Exchange
  6. Join a meetup near you. Nothing takes the place of meeting face-to-face to practice a language. Again, signup is free. Just search on “French” within however many miles you’re willing to travel, and you’ll find meetups for francophones. Then buck up and go to one. Your first time will be scary if you’re an introvert like me. By the second time, you’ll be a familiar face and find yourself making friends who are as passionate about improving their French as you are.Meetup
  7. Take free French lessons on YouTube. There are probably many more of these videos than I’m aware of, but one that I follow on Facebook is Comme Une Française. The teacher is Géraldine Lepère, an effervescent Parisian who’ll help you “cultivate your inner Gaulois(e).”Comme Une Francaise
  8. Find French friends. This is the one piece of advice given to me by another of my former French teachers. He told me that there comes a point when classroom training is less valuable than actually getting out and practicing your French. He neglected to tell me how scary it is too. But once you get over the initial hurdle of walking into a roomful of strangers and putting your ego on the line— because everyone makes mistakes when they’re learning another language— you’ll have so much fun that you won’t care.
  9. Find a really good dictionary. Some people swear by Larousse. I grew up glued to my paperback copy. And I don’t want a translation engine that makes mistakes. I want an online dictionary that I can carry on my phone, and which features a forum where native speakers contribute translations. That’s why I use Word Reference. It’s free, and it’s available in many more languages than just French.Word Reference
  10. Plan a vacation to France. There’s nothing like giving yourself a forcing function to inspire you to take action by a certain date. Maybe your goal is to visit Paris in the springtime and be able to check into your hotel in French. Or visit the Riviera in the winter and chat with your Uber driver in French. Whichever location and accomplishment will excite you, make a plan and then make it happen.

And one final word of advice. Do not start out by figuring out what you want to say in English and then trying to translate it word-for-word into French. It can get you into trouble. (Example: “I’m warm” translated word-for-word is “Je suis chaud(e).” Which means “I’m horny.” Want to guess how to say “I’m cold?” If you say “Je suis froid(e)” instead of “J’ai froid(e),” then you just confessed to being frigid. Oh la la.) The sooner you start thinking in French, even if you feel like you’re creeping along, the more authentic you’ll sound. Oh— and whatever you do, don’t go to a meetup and default to, “I’ll just say it in English” when the going gets tough. If you’re there to practice your French, then practice your French.

Bonne courage ! Special thanks go to awesome folks like Mike Colquhoun, Catherine Smegal, and Janine Lagardere Sullivan, who volunteer their time and energy to organize meetups for people like me to spend quality time with likeminded lovers of France and its language, culture, and customs. Especially when coffee or wine is involved. Merci à toutes et à tous !