It's impossible to understand French.
Reading I can get away with allright from four years of Spanish, but when people actually get around to speaking French, they hhve this nasty habbit of leaving off half the letters in every word.
Somewhere along the line these people must have gotten together and decided to say to the world "Oui. Oui! Ve are French and jew ahre naht ahnd ve ahre very importand and dew not have zie tyme tew say every letter on every word. Vat ees zie matter l'american? Ave Jew nevar heard of a silent z before?"
This of course makes French to English dictionaries completely useless with the end result that I have no idea what anybody is trying to tell me.
Yesterday I approached s man about directions and said: bonjour monsieur! Parles vous anglais? To which monsieurreplied: jfhfcgbn jgycgjjgj chdsfjkphgxdwqfchjk.
For the most part, I smile and nod encouragingly, hoping people think Im too mentally handicapped to respond and not just foreign.
Oh but I love it! Its an entire country of people who sit around and speak wildly beautiful gibberish. Speaking French feels like eating cotton candy; the words fill up your mouth with delicious fluff and then softly fade away. The syllables drip off your tongue, rich and decadent. English sounds so flat and ugly in comparison.
The Frenchman behind me on the plane was talking on his cell phone before we took off, muttering: "oui, oui...poutain. oui"
What a beautiful word! I thought to myself. Poutain! (Pronounced like poo-tahn). I said it under my breath the entire plane ride. Poo-tahn! Walking through Deauville Garrett and I passed back and forth the fve French words we knew hoping that pasderbys would think we were native "binjour!...arvoir!...poutain!" It wasn't until five hours later that the kindly hotel receptionist pulled me aside to explain that "poutain" loosely translates to "fuck " and could we please not say it quite so loudly since many of the guests had young children nearby.
Chalk one up for the ugly American.
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