Today I visited my local market, Le Marché Popincourt in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. Until recently I didn’t realize that each arrondissement has a name as well as a number. The 11th is called Popincourt, a name I find charmingly French. What is even more exciting is that I know how to pronounce it with my improving French accent using a long “o” and no “t” on the end.

At the marché I bought eggs and cheese and vegetables - all while speaking French. I’ve heard many Americans say that even though they try to speak French in Paris, the locals most often reply in English. I’ve had that happen at times, but at local markets and stores, I find that vendors are happy to hear my basic but comprehensible French. And being French, they can’t help but correct my pronunciation if needed. What a treat. Delicious food and free language lessons.

For the last few years I’ve been studying French because it’s a beautiful language, and I love France’s culture. This love began after my first visit to Paris when I was thirty. I knew enough to say bonjour and merci but little else. I resolved to communicate better the next time I visited.

I was working as an insurance claims adjuster, a job I hated. I decided learning French would add joie de vivre to my life, so I took classes at City College in San Francisco. Those lessons gave me a basic understanding of the language which sufficed for many years.

Fast forward to my retirement in 2020. The desire for French bubbled up again. And I’ve been working away at the language ever since. At first I was happy with online apps. Then my sister Lori and I started taking classes at the Alliance Française in Portland.

This year I took even bigger leaps. First, I took a class at the Alliance Française here in Paris. Then a bigger adventure: a French immersion excursion in the southern Ariège Region of France. Lori and I spent ten days based in the village of Foix with a small group of friends from our Portland French classes.

Led by Baptiste Delvallé, a native French-speaker bilingual in English, we ate breakfast together, took tours of local sites, ordered meals at restaurants and even had discussions about our lives. All in French.

Baptiste is a gifted teacher who never translated into English when we needed help or didn’t understand. He used examples and explanations in French. It reminded me of my years teaching English as a second language.

With him, our group spoke, read, and listened to French for about 75% of each day (okay, I admit in the evenings, we reverted to English. We had to. We were exhausted).

And every day our French skills improved.

Foix with the chateau lit in pink for breast cancer awareness month. Photo by Robert Basham.

My biggest challenge speaking French has been my fear of making mistakes. This is not an uncommon fear, of course. But I’ve let it keep me tongue-tied. For those ten days in Ariège, making the commitment to speak (mostly) French meant I had to overcome my fears of using the wrong verb tense or garbling sentence structures. My human need to communicate wouldn’t let me remain silent, especially my desire to tell stories and hear the stories of my companions!

This experience reminded me of the book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall. Every story I told meant I had to twist my lips over a new French word with five vowels and unpronounced “t.”

But my intrepid friends and I persevered because we needed to share with each other. This experience reminded me once again that our stories make us who we are.

Storytelling is not just for people like me who call themselves writers. It’s how we connect with each other.

That is why I’m studying so hard to learn French. I want to hear the stories of people who have been shaped by a different culture and language, who view the world differently from me. And I want to be able to share my stories in new ways.

I’m happy that I’m finally able to listen to peoples’ stories here in Paris. For now, they’re mostly about the vegetables and cheeses I buy or the food I’m ordering. Someday they’ll be deeper as word by word my French skills improve.

BOOK RECOMMENDATION

I didn’t know that not only is Baptiste Delvallé a talented teacher, he’s also a writer. How fun it was it discuss writing in French with him. He’s not only published two books in French (email me for the titles if you’d like to read in French!) but also this book in English.

The Feeling of Home is a mixture of memoir and guide for readers who are searching for a feeling of home. Having lived in several countries, Baptiste offers some real insights about what home means and how one can cultivate that feeling no matter where they find themselves.

Buy it HERE.

How do you make connections with people and places? I’d love to hear from you.

Beyond Bonjour

Always say, “Bonjour.”