Le francais qui n'est pas completement atroche

Back at school, instead of learning something useful like physics or something educational but pointless like classical history, I attended classes in French and Chinese for a number of years. The latter never really grabbed me (perhaps I'm a little lazy, because whilst I'm happy to learn a different spoken language, a written language that has pretty much nothing to do with the spoken language and involves simply memorising random scratches of lines in large numbers was simply one step too far), but I did enjoy the former. It wasn't ludicrously easy - although, Lexy*, it was a hell of a lot easier than Kev's Chinese, which is why people were more impressed by his efforts than yours - but it was interesting, and even taught me a lot about English and why it works the way it does that I'd never considered. (Studying the germanic Old English - the other half of what evolved into our language - at University was illuminating for a similar reason.)

That was fifteen years ago. And I've never really had the chance to use it. At University I did French for a year - which involved reading Sartre and various French novels in French - but was hopeless in comparison with the kids who'd gone to France after Year 12 and, eventually, gave it up to concentrate on Law and modern history and an eclectic selection of sillier Arts subjects. The French language part of my brain sat there, rarely used, degenerating, impatiently biding its time.

Which is why actually being in France and getting a chance to revive it is so satisfying. Sure, I'll get halfway through a sentence and realise that I have never learned the French for that particular verb or noun, and will have to try to explain it another way. (Try getting to "soap" without using gestures... it's the stuff that you use in the bath on yourself to get clean, oh bugger, what's the French for "clean"?) Or I will have known the word in the past but have to search deep for a fifteen year old memory to find it (I forgot "far" - "loin" - and took a good fifteen seconds to come up with "yesterday" - "hier").** Which might sound irritating, but actually it's a lot of fun. And I haven't really got stuck yet: pretty much everything I've wanted to say - even random conversational observations - I've been able to figure out, at least eventually. I'm enjoying stumbling my way through the language probably more than seeing the sights.

I'm nowhere near competent, of course. My grammar is way off, since I've long since forgotten how to conjugate most verbs, and have completely forgotten the esoteric rules that govern more complicated tense construction. And obviously the percentage of French words used in conversation by Parisians that I understand is much less than ninety percent (probably less than fifty) which is a lot of missed words when someone is talking to you. Even more since they say them so very fast.

But even after only two days here, it really feels like I'm learning something worthwhile. The part of my brain stuffed with previously unused and useless French is singing.

I wish I had more time.

*Has he finally quit whilst I've been away?! Awesome. What else have I missed?
**I probably should have brought a French-English dictionary, but I foolishly (a) thought it would be fun to wing it and (b) forgot.