In this episode, I continue reminiscing about my college days at IUPUI. Specifically this week we talk about my trouble learning a foreign language.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 44 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue my series of reminiscences of my college days. We will discuss my difficulties in trying to learn a foreign language.

I don’t remember the comedian who said, “I am a bilingual illiterate… I don’t read or write two foreign languages.” I always identified with that statement. I expected to be learning lots of languages in college and I did. Upon graduation, I had mastered, “FORTRAN II, FORTRAN IV, BASIC, IBM 360 Assembly language, Algol, Pascal, PL/I, COBOL, and PPL.” For those of you who are unaware, those are all computer languages and most of them are obsolete and no longer in use. Notably missing from the list are, “C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, HTML/CSS, and others” none of which had yet been invented when I was in school.

Unfortunately, I didn’t start taking any programming classes until my second semester. There was one other language I took in college and that was French. That’s what we are here to talk about this week.

Right after posting last week’s episode about my first days at IUPUI, I realized that my memory of events 50 years ago isn’t what I wish it was. While many of my classes were quite memorable, I couldn’t remember all of them or what semester I took a particular class. I got to thinking wouldn’t it be great if I had a list of all the classes I took? Something like a transcript? Duh. Get yourself a college transcript, Chris.

I had no idea how to go about it. The website for IUPUI still exists even though the school doesn’t. The website is transitioning to an Indiana University at Indianapolis website so it is very IU oriented. I wasn’t sure I could get a Purdue transcript. Some Google searches led me to the right pages. Step one was “Login with your IUPUI username and password.” When I went to IUPUI, the internet didn’t exist so I knew I didn’t have a password. I finally got to a section that would ask me questions to verify my identity. It was one of those multiple-choice questions where you have to pick the one that applies to you. Okay, I know my home address and that the other address listed I never lived there. I forget what the second round question was the one that worried me was “Which of these classes did you take?” Hell, if I could remember what classes I took, I wouldn’t need the damned transcript in the first place.

Fortunately, I recognized “Formal Compiling Methods-Purdue CSCI 661”. After clicking on that, it decided I was who I said I was and took my application for a transcript. Total cost $0.00. I was surprised it was free and I figured it might take days or weeks but within a few hours, my email contained a PDF of my official transcript.

I mentioned last week there was a writing course I took. Its formal name was “Basic English Composition W117” The transcript says I was awarded an “S” for “satisfactory” which means I tested out of the class.

The math class I took was “Elementary Math for Engineering and Physical Science – Purdue MATH 151” I earned an “A” and 5 credit hours. I knew that the class would not count towards my math total for my degree but I didn’t care. Spoiler alert… I should have cared. More on that in future episodes.

One of my other first semester classes was “Elementary French FR F101”. That’s going to be our primary topic for today.

I knew that I took 3 semesters of French but I did not think about the fact that the French class was taught at the downtown campus. I thought my first semester I was exclusively at 38th Street. I wish that the transcript told me the class times in the location of the class. There is probably an archive somewhere with the old course catalogs but I searched all over and couldn’t find anything that old.

I know that many semesters where I had classes on both campuses I would go to one school in the morning, transfer to the other campus around dinnertime, take more classes in the evening, and then come home. When VocRehab agreed to pay for my transportation, they would only give me 2 trips per day. CareVan wheelchair van service would take me to one campus in the morning, transfer me to the other campus around dinnertime, and then my dad would pick me up in the evening at the second campus.

The School of Science required three semesters of foreign language. Again they wanted you to be a well-rounded individual and not just a science nerd. Most science students took German because, in the third semester, they could take a course called “Scientific German” which was mostly scientific and engineering vocabulary. I seem to recall my friend Dennis going that route.

I had taken two years of French in high school and did terribly. We got report cards every six weeks. My report card went A, B, C, D, D, D… and then straight D’s for the rest of the two years. I didn’t want to start over with German since I knew I was no good at foreign languages to begin with.

The instructor was a very nice woman named Mme. Chang. Yet she was blonde-haired and blue-eyed. Married to an Asian guy. She realized quickly I already knew some French even though this was an introductory course and most of the students had no previous experience. I explained to her how poorly I had done in high school French and that’s why I was starting at the beginning. At one point she warned me I was resting on my previous knowledge and that next semester I would be working my ass off.

My fondest memories of that class were 2 jokes I was able to make in French. at first, she thought I didn’t understand the question but then I said, “That was my attempt at a French pun.”

She asked in French, “Comment trouvez-vous la musique rock?” Which loosely translates, “What do you think of rock music?” But a more direct translation is, “How do you find rock music?” In the sense, “How do you find” is like do you find it too loud, too annoying, too cool, etc? I replied, “Je le cherche dans ma chambre.” Which translates, “I look for it in my room.” I said that because that’s where I kept my record collection. She thought I didn’t understand the question. I was making a joke. Once she understood I was making a joke, she told me that the French phrase for “pun” is “bon mot” which is literally “good word” or “right word”. Google translate disagrees but that’s what I learned in French class. Maybe it’s a dialect idiom.

The other phrase I was able to use in class of which I was particularly proud was we were taught the French word for frog which is “grenouille”. In a conversation about frogs, I commented spontaneously, “Ce n’est pas facile étant vert.” Which translates, “It’s not easy being green” quoting Kermit the frog. I was so proud of myself that I knew how to translate the present participle of “to be”. I also thought it was cool that my French translation of the sentence still fit the music. I’m not going to try to sing it. You should thank me for that. Anyway, I thought about trying to translate the entire song but I never got around to it.

By the way, Google translates it as “Ce n’est pas facile d’être vert.” So I thought perhaps I had remembered étant wrong and it should have been d’être. So I googled how to conjugate “to be” in French and learned that indeed étant is the present participle. If you use Google Translate on the sentence the way I remember it from French class 49 years ago “Ce n’est pas facile étant vert.” it translates it back into “It’s not easy being green.” So I guess either way works.

Late update… I found a YouTube video of singer Andrew Bird singing “It’s Not Easy Being Green” in both French and English. Here’s a brief sample of his version. He used “d’être“ and not “étant” like I did. I don’t know if he translated it himself or perhaps used Google Translate and that’s why it came out that way. Any French-speaking people out there listening please leave a comment and tell me which version you prefer. I provided the links in the description to various Google Translate and to the Andrew Bird YouTube video.

By the way, my favorite version of the song is the one done by Ray Charles, a man who has never seen green or any other color but still sings the song with great passion. There is a link in the description if you never heard it.

Although I never translated the entire Kermit the Frog song into French, in high school I spent considerable time trying to translate the words from a Beatles song from French to English. The 1965 Beatles song “Michelle” from the album “Rubber Soul” contains the lyrics…

Michelle, ma belle

These are words that go together well

My Michelle

Okay, I already knew “ma belle” translated to “my beautiful” or “my beauty.” The song then continues…

Michelle, ma belle

Sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble

Tres bien ensemble

One day in high school I sat down with my French/English dictionary and tried to translate “Sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble”. It took me about 30 minutes before I realized it translated, “These are words that go together well.” Well, literally, “Are the words that go very well together.” But you get the idea. The song has already been translated for you. If I had been any good at French, I would have recognized it immediately.

One of the problems I had when studying a foreign language was that I didn’t understand some of the technical language terms in English grammar. Things like participles, gerunds, and pluperfect stuff. Throughout grade school and high school, we didn’t get into that very much. We didn’t conjugate verbs in English. I spoke and wrote proper English because my parents were reasonably good students and high school graduates. We didn’t have any ethnic or cultural background in our family that would lead me astray from standard English. So I never bothered to learn why I spoke the way I did in English. When I went to French, I had to learn all of that grammar stuff in both English and French. Then you throw in the idea that all nouns are either masculine or feminine and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to that, I was constantly struggling to figure out the gender of inanimate objects.

I wonder how they are tendering that kind of stuff these days when gender seems to be so fluid. Can tables be both masculine and feminine? What are your pronouns table?

My college transcript reports I was awarded a “B” in the first semester of French.

My second semester French wasn’t as difficult as Mme. Chang suggested it would be. I had a little old lady for a teacher whose name escapes me. She stood about 4 feet tall and could not have weighed 90 pounds dripping wet. When she walked, she shuffled her feet reminiscent of the way Tim Conway used to play that old man in sketches on the old Carol Burnett show. She was a very easy teacher. I wasn’t so much relying on my previous high school experience in French as I was that the class was simply easy. It wasn’t tough at all.

I distinctly remember that I took the class in the evenings at the downtown campus because when my dad came to pick me up one night, he had the hold open the door at Cavanaugh Hall for some little old lady who was too frail to push the door open. I told him, “That was my teacher.” He was amazed she could get around the building at all.

As part of French class, we were supposed to spend time in the language lab listening to tapes. That would’ve made me stay very late at the downtown campus. You could bring them a blank cassette tape and they would speed copy the lessons onto your tape at double speed. When you played them back, they came out normal. I persuaded them to allow me to use the tape copies to fulfill my requirements. The guy in the lab checked off my name and gave me credit for picking up the tape copies but I don’t think I ever listened to a single one of them.

One of the things this second-semester teacher praised me for was my excellent pronunciation which in her opinion was the best in the class. I suppose I was resting on my previous laurels in that regard. My transcript says I was awarded a “B”.

I remember a funny story told by a gal in my second or third-semester French class. I can’t remember which. For one summer during high school, she participated in a foreign student exchange program where she went and lived with a French-speaking family in Canada and a French-speaking student came to America in an exchange. It was an opportunity to immerse herself in a French-speaking culture. She said it was quite an enjoyable experience. Although it was in Canada, the family spoke French consistently.

On the eve of her departure, they prepared a lavish dinner as a farewell gesture. At the end of the meal, she leaned back in her chair, patted her stomach, and declared “je plein” which was her way of saying, “I’m full.” The entire family was shocked and began talking so rapidly that she couldn’t understand a word they were saying. She didn’t realize that using that particular way of saying that your belly was full was an idiom for saying, “I’m pregnant.” They thought she was making some big announcement with a smile on her face like it was something to be proud of. After being responsible for the girl’s well-being they were terrified she had gotten herself into trouble on their watch. She eventually learned that the proper phrase under those circumstances was “Je suis satisfait” which translates more directly as “I’m satisfied or “I’m sated”.

Hearing that story made suffering through those French classes worth it. It’s one of my strongest memories from my college days.

Finally, in my third semester, my luck ran out. According to my transcript, the class was called “2nd Year Conv Comp & Reading 1 FREN F203”. I’m not sure what “Conv Comp” meant. Perhaps conversation and composition. I just remember it was mostly reading short stories in French.

We had a professor named Dr. Burke who was a former Jesuit priest. He had lived and worked in France for many years. He was the most arrogant, pain in the ass, stickler for perfection I’ve ever met. Although I was top of the class in pronunciation in my second semester, he thought my pronunciation was absolutely horrible. He corrected me constantly.

He also had a horrible reputation with female students. Legend said he always picked one girl in the class who he would berate viciously. It was as though he was determined to get her to cry on a regular basis until she would eventually drop the class. Someone said they kept a stack of forms in the foreign language department that were already filled out to drop out of or transfer from Dr. Burke’s class. There was further speculation that “gender female” was already checked on those forms. That is the extent to which he had a horrible reputation with female students.

I was maintaining a “D” average on the homework and quizzes. I absolutely had to pass the class to graduate. At one point about two-thirds of the way through the semester, I stopped by his office. I told him, “You and I both know I’m not any good at this class and I have no motivation to get better. But I absolutely have to pass to get my degree. I show up every day. I do the work. I put in minimal effort. You are giving me ‘D’s consistently. Can you promise me that if I continue to show up to every class, do every assignment, and produce work at the same horribly substandard level that I have been doing you will give me a ‘D’ for my final grade?”

He said, “Yes I can promise you that.”

I thanked him. Left left his office. I continued to perform terribly in his class and was awarded my promised ‘D’. The class wasn’t that terrible. I did enjoy a couple of the French short stories we read. When it was all done, I was glad to be done with foreign language once and for all after 2 years of high school and 3 semesters of college French.

I still barely know anything of French. Occasionally when someone is speaking French on TV such as the recent season of the Darrell Dixon Walking Dead series I can pick up a word or two. In hindsight, I wish I had taken Spanish because my neighborhood and my church have a growing Hispanic population. We have mixed English and Spanish services at St. Gabriel now.

According to my transcript, the other first-semester class I took was “Principles of Sociology SOC S161”. It was in that class that I met one of the best friends I ever had. A guy named Mike Gregory. Next week’s episode will be a tribute to my dear friend who sadly is no longer with us.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.