The French Connection

I went to primary school in some dark ages where most people didn't even have telephone at home, tv was black&white, and we studied French as the only foreign language. French...who the hell speaks French nowadays? Apart from France, there still exists the concept of "la Francophonie", a kind of French Commonwealth based on the language that remains as a vestige of another lost empire. It includes pretty exotic countries, mostly in Africa, but also Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as Canada and its French-speaking territories, Quebec.



However, there is a new area of influence for French, i.e., the EU. Among the dozens of languages spoken in Europe, only three are the official languages of the EU institutions: English, German and French. Personally, I can handle English, a bit less confident with my rusted French, and totally lost with my forgotten German. That's why I thought it would be funny to go back to French classes, back to my adolescence!

Gladys is my French teacher, a very friendly and lively girl from the Jura department in the Franche-Comté region of France. The only thing I know about the place is that the word Jurassic comes from Jura, which is a mountain range itself. Anyway, she studied in Toulouse since she wanted to become a teacher of French for foreigners. However, there, she started to learn Spanish and, eventually, moved to Barcelona, to finish her studies. Or was it maybe because of her boyfriend is a Mexican guy living here?

Her Spanish is nearly perfect, grammatically and lexically, despite some detectable traces of French accent, far less strong though than in usual French people. Her new challenge now is to become a UN translator. She said it is pretty difficult since the level is very high and there is a lot of competition, but she wants to try her hand. In case she successes, she would be living either in New York or Geneva, with a pretty nice pay and lots of opportunities to travel.

Currently she is training with legal stuff of the European commission from our company, a real log that makes sheep sleep. My case is more mundane, I just want to brush up my French pronunciation, which is still terrible and keeps getting entangled with English all the time; I guess both languages are located in the same area in my brain. Hope they don't fight!