Improving My French in le Pays de Galles

Though I am in Wales, I have met surprisingly few actual Welsh people. The host is from Manchester, the English WWOOFer is from Manchester, and the other 3 WWOOFers are French. Thus far, my encounters with the Welsh have mostly been characterized by both parties struggling to understand the other’s accent, with a lot of laughing and shrugging and apologizing, but not much actual comprehension.

            My French, on the other hand, is coming back to me rapidly. When we first met, I told the French WWOOFers that I spoke a little bit of French, but had forgotten most of it. However, as I’ve become accustomed to hearing the language spoken constantly, all those years of French class have kicked in.

            My French friends, however, have been acting under the assumption that I can’t understand a word they’re saying (there hasn’t been a single bit of fun gossip to overhear, which certainly helps my paranoia, anyway). So when, at lunch one day, one of them said “Comment dit-on ‘glace’ en anglais?” (“how do you say ‘ice’ in English?”) and I automatically responded  “ice,” everyone froze and stared at me as if I had just started singing opera.

It was quite entertaining, and now I’ve gotten into the habit of interjecting my responses in English to their questions and statements in French. It still gives them some pause, but it’s made conversations vastly easier knowing that if we reach a word or phrase that doesn’t translate well, usually someone can figure it out.

So while I’ve had very little exposure to Welsh culture, I’m learning all sorts of fun things about France and French culture. A couple of weeks ago, they taught me to play a French card game called tarot (similar to spades or hearts, but more complex). Well, I say they taught me, but after realizing that not even the suits translate well, I ended up reading the rules on my phone and then playing a few terrible rounds before finally realizing that they play aces low and have a card between the jack and the queen.

They also have sugar-addictions to rival my own, so we’ve spent many nights playing cards while grazing from a large pile of Kinder and assorted British cookies. At this point, it is simply implied that if one person eats a triangle of Toblerone or a digestive biscuit or a bueno, the others also want one, and I’ve been conditioned to stick my hand out expectantly every time I hear the rustling of candy wrappers. Let’s just say, it’s good that I’m doing manual labor all day.

Besides chocolate, we also share a love for Harry Potter. I was delighted to find out that in the French version of the series, many things and people have been renamed to make sense in French. So Neville Longbottom is actually Neville Londubat and Hufflepuff is Poufsouffle (for some reason Slughorn is still Slughorn, though).

The funny thing about the language barrier is that it takes a lot longer to learn much of anything significant about the people you’re talking to. It’s served as a natural division between the native French speakers and the native English speakers, even though everyone resents that such a separation exists. So even though we’ve been together almost constantly for the past month, I feel as if we’ve only just started to know each other.

On Thursday, I went to town with 2 of the French WWOOFers and we sat at lunch and talked almost completely unhindered for a couple hours, the kind of conversation where you don’t even notice that time is passing, then a couple hours after that while we walked around Aber until the next bus. Perhaps that sounds normal under, well, normal circumstances, but I think it was the first time it’s felt so effortless for everyone to be able to speak and understand for longer than a couple sentences.

Just in time for them to go back to France, unfortunately, but that does seem to be the nature of WWOOfing: to spend almost every waking hour with these people, to endure such horrors as mucking out the chicken coops together, to be each others’ sources of entertainment when the Internet inevitably stops working, to begin to understand each person’s quirks – who is afraid of spiders, who will always take seconds of dessert, who always forgets sunscreen - and, in seemingly no time at all, to return to “the real world” and once more become strangers.