Reading French is not that hard. After all, English is about 60 percent Latin, and French is pretty much vulgar Latin spoken with a sneer, so any English speaker with a robust vocabulary should be able to pick through a body of French text and get the main gist. For example:
Les pharmacies sont en rupture de stock de l’hépatite A vaccin fortement conseillé pour les séjours à l’étranger. En période de départs en vacances, ça tombe mal.
All you really need to understand is rupture de stock de l’hépatite A vaccin to understand that the rest means “if you’re taking a journey to a strange place, you’re screwed.”
I’ve found that reading about war and politics is much easier than reading about the arts. Unless you’re reading a feature story about Boy George called “Bitch Boy” (here), and then comprehension is eerily replete:
Qu’est-ce qu’une bitch ? Littéralement, une salope. Un substantif, usé jusqu’à la corde par une écrasante majorité de rappeurs américains subtils, pour désigner les femmes en général… Une insulte homophobe, aussi, que se sont réappropriée les insultés pour faire échec à la bêtise de l’ennemi. Fier d’être une bitch, comme le proclamait Sir Elton John, qui intitula un de ses albums The Bitch Is Back. Mais dans cette catégorie très particulière, où il faut bien le reconnaître, les Britanniques excellent, Boy George est jusqu’à nouvel ordre l’indétrônablequeen, la reine des abeilles des langues de pute.
Of course, the colloquialisms are impossible — I puzzled over Sois un peu un homme (“Be a little man?”) before Mr. P clarified it as “For once, be a man.” But the hardest thing is, of course, the verbs. Conjugating être (to be) is like doing math: Rote memorization, eschewing all eloquence, a doggerel rendering of foreign morphemes.
No, I’m a lover of language, of words, and when I read the French newspaper I busy myself with looking up all sorts of flourishing words that are essentially useless to the beginning speaker. Like foudroyant, which I instinctively know isn’t a common French word yet I still ache to decipher (“staggering.”) Like cicatrices (“scars”), rabaissant (“belittle”), and essuyer (“to wipe.”) A lot of good those words will do me when I’m struggling to order 10 centimeters of terrine at the charcuterie.
Beautiful words, and I want to know them all, but right now they are floating in my head, unconnected, like a bag of flour that has been spilled on the floor. Now comes the exertion, to gather the mealy grains, to forge a dough like a boulanger kneading in the early-morning hours with my effort rolling down my arms in salty rivulets, giving the end result a taste of my sweat.
