Thoughts on William Alexander's "Flirting with French"

 

Last week, I finally caught up to the 2014 book by William Alexander, Flirting with French, in which Alexander sets out to learn French with relatively high expectations and a mildly discouraged but quasi-scientific outlook. 

At 57, is Alexander too old to realize his dream of embodying French language and culture like a native? Alexander seeks out the advice of linguists, psychological researchers, native speakers, and a multitude of other anecdotal resources, completes all the levels of Rosetta Stone French, visits a Meetup group (!) and enrolls for two weeks in a luxury immersion school in France (Millefeuille Provence https://www.millefeuille-provence.com/home/) in an effort to "BE French." Unlike most French speakers, whether native or second-language learners, he never goes to a traditional class or follows a textbook, however. 

As Alexander details picking up a new project and facing the inherent struggles toward his targeted level of mastery –– much like his other memoirs on a year of bread baking in search of the perfect loaf and on attempting to grow the perfect tomato –– the writing is often funny, even if most of the situations are an exaggerated cover for the real goal of creating a memoir to sell. At a primary level, Alexander's book is contrived priv-lit for language learners, but it does have some basis in actual research, which can shed light on our own advantages, abilities, and personalities, while showing us the ways we might define our own goals. There is an included bibliography that serious language students may find worthwhile.

As most speakers of a second language can guess from the start, at the end of a year, Alexander falls short of his lofty ideal, and he is never clear on whether he will continue trying to learn French or not. He even suggests that he's not sure it hasn't all been a waste of time. Still, Alexander's contacts made it possible to create a limited neurological study of his brain during the project. MRI scans made before and after a year of actively practicing French showed that his brain activity and cognition had increased by the end of the year. 

For me, this book was a window into a series of alternative processes and approaches. It was at times very funny, and it reminded me of the real situations in which I have found myself negotiating the conflicts of faulty language recall, false cognates, unexpected slang, fatigue, misunderstood accents, and anxiety that all get in the way of fluid conversation. 

As for language-learning, reasonable goals and long slogs don't exactly make space for a writing a quick and dirty memoir that might reward us financially, but I think we perhaps don't all need to undergo MRI analysis to tell us that our brains are getting an intellectual workout and that we are able to make personal and intellectual connections with a broader population. Ultimately, we all have to seek our own rewards.

Alexander is correct that language is deeply intertwined with identity, but he glosses over the fact that being bilingual, or multilingual is inherently a synthesis of cultures and vocabularies, not a distinct set of interchangeable personalities that can be put on like different outfits, like picking up a beret. But his goal is towards an extreme, and his narrative allows us to sit back and watch as he tries it anyway.

Regular Lexington Francophone members have heard me say many times that my accent is an irrevocable part of my identity –– a condition of the ways in which I learned the languages I speak. We are always going to have some part of our language that is based on the places we are from and have lived, and that, to me, is the most interesting part of conversation, in any language. 

The other day, I came across yet another of the countless daily examples of the importance of identity in shaping our language. I have lately started practicing Greek, in order to familiarize myself with simple phrases and written words. As I shared my contact information with a local professor, who has lived in KY since age 18, and who was educated at UK, he said gently, "more slowly, I'm Greek!" This was, to me, a striking reminder that some interactions –– such as recalling strings of numbers and letters –– will probably always be more comfortable in our native language. Slowing down isn't a sign of failing, it's a sign of being self-aware and of treating ourselves kindly for who we are.