Flirting with French

“Some Americans want to visit France. Some want to live in France. I want to be French.”

William Alexander, in his late 50s, decides to become fluent in French. He tries every strategy he's seen or heard about, and he researches new strategies and tries them, too.

In the end, he learns some French, but he's far from fluent. Still, he has progressed and he has hope that he will continue to progress.

And all is told in delightful ways that made this old French learner smile.

A bit of my takeaway from the book:

“When I want to say something in French, I think of what I want to say in English and then convert that into French. But such translation, I'd previously been told by David Birdsong, is self-limiting. You must remove the mental middleman of translation, for your brain cannot translate back and forth fast enough to keep up with a conversation. To achieve fluency, you need to speak—and think—like a bilingual, to switch languages, not translate between them.”

“(N)ot only does the ability to acquire a second language become greatly diminished after adolescence, but the degradation continues linearly. That is, with each year, each decade, that I didn't get around to learning French, the goalposts have moved further away.”

And my favorite:

‘Where do I go from here? Even if I want to continue pursuing French—and I'm not at all sure that I do—I don't know how much more time and money I'm willing to devote to this Sisyphean task. I figure that I've spent 900 hours—nearly double the 480 hours that the Foreign Service Institute estimates is required to achieve basic conversational ability—studying French. And that's not counting the hundreds of hours spent watching French movies and television and listening to French radio, not casually, but actively, trying to decipher what I was hearing. What else could I have done with those hours? Well, in just the first forty I could've built that garden shed I've needed for years. Then I could've finally gotten around to reading Proust. Tutored a struggling local student. I could have learned golf! There is a golf course right across the street from me. That's what older guys do, not French. Why didn't I use the time to learn golf instead? As proof that God has a sense of humor (as well as a peerless sense of timing), I'd returned from France to find the current issue of the New Yorker opened to an essay by Larry David, of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. Reflecting on his failure to achieve even mediocrity in golf despite half a lifetime of trying, he writes that he has finally come to accept that “I was never going to be good. Never. Think what I could've done with all that time. Learned French.”'

Well, I probably could have learned a decent amount of French in the time it took me to read this, but I don't regret the distraction. Flirting With French is a fun story of a late-middle-aged guy who takes on picking up French as a serious hobby. There are great tangents on linguistics, travel, food and his health that keep the story interesting and personal.