One Step Closer to Fluency

Written on November 21, 2010


Now, for a little update on my linguistic progress.
I was on my way to work, waiting for the train at Chatlet les Halles, which happens to be the biggest and busiest train station in all of Europe, when the PA system started to sound. Now, I have to admit that the last time I was in France I had a lot of trouble understanding announcements on public PA systems. The quality of the PA is normally bad, the sound quality muffled, and you have to compete with the sounds  of the station to understand what's being said. So you could imagine my surprise when I was able to understand every last word that crackled out of the tinny speaker.

Votre attention s'il vous plaît, suite a un incident technique dans la voie du train, le trafic du RER B sera fortement perturbé. Merci.

Instant comprehension! "Due to a technical incident with the train tracks, the RER B will be experiencing major delays." Holy crap, I understood everything! My French is on fire!

Wait a minute. The RER B? That's the train that I need to take to get to work. Major delays? Oh shit. That means I'm going to be really late. It also means that the train is going to look something like this when it finally arrives:

As if this wasn't enough linguistic progress for one day, I also had a charming encounter with a local French gentleman on the train. You see, I believe that in the midst of all the commotion to squeeze onto the train my backpack had somehow become entangled with his own.


Now, I must admit that I didn't catch everything he said to me the first time around. They just speak so bloody fast, these Frenchies. It's also a bit intimidating when you are in such close contact with so many native speakers who you know are judging your every grammatical mistake. What I heard first sounded something like this:


He...fi.. depu..leve...ton...ac...de...mer...!

Pardon?  Said I, wanting to make sure that I truly caught everything that was being said to me. Thankfully the Monsieur in question was nice enough to repeat his sentence word for word, and very clearly, so that I could understand.

J'ai dit enleve ton sac de merde, fils de pute!


Ah, yes, of course. How could I have missed it the first time?

Take off your f**king backpack you son of a b**ch!


Fluency here I come.