Qu’est-ce que c’est what?

I’ve been obsessed with French culture for about a decade, and have been collecting language-learning tapes, CDs, CD-roms, and exercise books for several years, always expecting that eventually I’d settle down to serious French study. I have Berlitz, Pimsleur, Living Language, Learn in Your Car, and a few others, not to mention the entire audio and video and textbook collection for the Capretz “French in Action” method. In my French learning daydream, I’m always on a chaise by a swimming pool, wearing earphones and sunglasses while I practice pursing my lips to get a good “ou” sound and trying to make the back of my throat do that rolling “r” thing that is so impossible pour moi. Without that “rrr” I can’t even swear properly. Merde!

Two years ago, before we housesat for a month near Salon-de-Provence, I worked my way up to lesson 8 in the Pimsleur audio-only course, which in real-life France got me about as far as saying, “I would like to buy a stamp.” And “Would you like to get something to eat now? Or later?” We had a great time anyway, probably because we went around saying things in French like “Do you have a table for three?” and “I love to eat French food” and “It’s so beautiful” all the time. Or maybe that my French vocabulary was much better suited for menu reading than it was for everyday conversations. Or maybe it was that Reed, who was 4 then, seemed to eat with such gusto everywhere we went.
“The quiche comes with salad,” the waiter warned me, looking skeptically at Reed, who was red-cheeked and hungry after an entire morning of digging in the sand of the children’s area in Paris' Luxembourg Gardens.
“It’s okay, he loves salad,” I assured him. Our service improved rapidly after that, until by the end of the meal, as we were enjoying our apple tart, the waiter was practically sitting beside us, discussing the fine points of how to translate the menu for English-speaking customers.
“’Legumes’ to Americans means lentils and dried peas,” I explained. “Not vegetables.”
The twenty-something waiter practiced saying “vegetables.”
“And a tart, to Americans, is kind of like a pie, only without the crust on top,” I enlightened him.
“Pie,” he practiced.

Outside the restaurants, things didn’t always go so well.
“Are you English?” they’d ask, in French.
“American,” we’d say, also in French, sort of.
“On vacation?” they ask, in French.
“Oui, on vacation!” we’d answer, in French. After a few encounters like this, we started announcing our status as vacationers right off, to save them time.
“We’re Americans on vacation,” we’d say in French, with a beautiful accent. Only later did we realize how stupid we must have sounded. In an encounter with a hunter in the woods behind the Provencal villa we were housesitting I decided to confirm my suspicions about what he was after, only I didn't know the word for wild pig. So in a flash of brilliance I scratched on the ground with a stick, since everywhere in the woods we'd seen signs of their rooting around trees. The hunter lit up. "Oui! Porc!" he grinned. We all smiled at each other for a minute, with nothing else we could say. "Bonjour!" he said, continuing on his way. "Bonne chance!" I said to his back, not quite loud enough for him to hear, since I wasn't quite sure if I was saying the right thing. Then we went back up to the house, to make sure we didn't get shot.

We determined, like Patton, that we would return, and furthermore, that we would return better able to communicate in la langue Francais. Now I’m writing emails to French farmers, asking them if we can work on their farms, looking up the French words for things like “handyman” and “healthy” and the verb conjugations for future conditional tense. It has been an intense education, but addictive. Now that I’ve actually communicated in basic, mangled French with French people, it frustrates me not to be able to say and write whatever I want, without spending a hour with the dictionary.

Walt, who has quietly determined not to be humiliated in French as badly as we were last time, has been working hard in his studies, and suffers alternately from elation about his progress and hopelessness about the sheer number of verb conjugations to learn. But he suggested just a few days ago that instead of making plans to visit Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the Netherlands during our year abroad, we should concentrate on France, with just our originally planned side visits to Italy and Ireland, which I'm starting to think of as English-speaking breaks. (The farm we're visiting in Italy operates in English.)
“If we really want to learn the French language,” he said, “we ought to spend most of our time in France. Bien sur.” Of course.

So we will. Here is our schedule so far:

September 5-17: with host Hermine, at the Chateau de Sacy, in Sacy-le-Petit north of Paris
September 17 – October 15: with hosts la famille Colin, at Le Ferme des Fromentaux, near Retournac in the Haute-Loire region, between St Etienne and Le Puy
October 15 – October 28: with hosts Anne and Pierre Magnani, outside the village of Saint Isidore, in the hills west of Nice