For the legion of new learners of French across the world, the language can provide contradictory experiences — highly lyrical and resonant on the one hand and an utter tongue-twister on the other with its unique rules of pronouncing consonants and vowels.
Given the French cultural overhang on life in this city, learning the language that has produced both epics and the epicurean masterpieces, is something of second nature here. Not just that, in fact, long years after the British legal system was subsumed into Indian judiciature, the French legal system held its own in this territory.
There is no dearth of institutions offering courses in French learning, though the axes of cultivating proficiency in French being Asia’s oldest Alliance Francaise institution and the Auroville Language Laboratory where learning French is a virtual default choice through the year for its residents of diverse nationalities.
The other day, when a hall full of young students were given a walk through on the essence of spoken French, the exercise brought to relief both the sheer phonetic beauty and the befuddling riddles of a majestic language.
“Spoken French is like pure silk on the tongue and pleasant to the ear,” said French tutor Arunkumar from the Lingua Mystica Society of Language Experts.
The students in the room were not convinced yet though they had just listened to some encouraging words from R. Venguattaramane, former Dean of Humanities, Pondicherry University.
The wizened professor had told them not to worry if they were unable to ever speak like native speakers. “With practice, you can approximate the phonemes,” he said.
Soon after Arunkumar took over, the learners were flexing their vocal chords and their tongues in hitherto unexplored ways as they joined their tutor in pronouncing popular French words and phrases.
Obviously, the teacher’s approach was to make learners feel good before presenting them the flip side.
It all looked simple at the outset when he escorted the class through a credible classification — the golden rules of syllable division as he termed it — of the permutations and combinations of consonants (C), vowels (V) and sounds (S)---CV, CCV, CS and the double consonant CC.
Then came the groundrules that ‘tr’ is always being pronounced as in ‘three’ rather than ‘tree’ and mandatorily keeping silent all consonants that conclude a word silent with the exceptions being words that end with c, f, l and r.
“Mastering this much will take care of about 70 per cent of one’s ablity to converse flawlessly in French,” Arunkumar said.
After engaging students in repeating pleasant-sounding words and, as an example, convincing them why the conjoined l'animal was so much better than the split up ‘le animal,’ the tutor proceeded for the next half hour to present the peculiar challenges that has produced both epics and the epicurean masterpieces of French pronunciation.
Universally, French learners have turned dyslexic when it has come to pronouncing the ‘R,’ which, unlike its English cousin, needs to be uttered with a gurgling of the throat. The French ‘U’ can also deceive beginners who find it impossible to distinguish between the pronunciation of ‘tu’ and ‘tout.’
Many more examples of the nuances of spoken French followed and at the end of the day, students were also made aware of the fact that in a former French enclave like Puducherry, proficiency in the French language could even get them jobs, especially in the tourism and hospitality sectors.
Even being functional will do. But certainly not confusing the pronunciation of the ‘R’ in amour (passion) with the way it is expressed in mort (dead)!
