Neil Diamond and Turducken

We’re Coming to America

I had a real Neal Diamond moment on Monday.  I’m sure you are all familiar with Diamond’s hit song, “America”.  I had it during my French class I had referenced in a previous post.  It was actually quite refreshing to be in a class where people were actually excited to be there.

There were people from all backgrounds and ethnicities.  All but one were adults.  The one kid was 10 and was there because her mom had made a deal with her.  They are going to visit Paris sometime, but first they both had to spend the time in class to learn the language.

Another student was here from Ghana.  She said that English is an official language there but all of the surrounding countries speak French so that is why she wanted to learn.

Another student, likely from Indonesia by her looks, was having troubles speaking in English.  She could actually use ESL classes first, but she was right there with everybody trying to pick up as much French as she could.  Her pronunciations were terrible, but it was enlightening to know that she cared enough to try and get better.  There was one point where she and the teacher were going back and forth on how to say a specific sentence.  The first time through I couldn’t even tell if she was trying to speak French.  By about the tenth time you could actually make out what she was trying to say, but it was still with a heavy Asian accent.

Turducken

In almost every French class you take, at some point the teacher will instruct you on how to use the phrase, “Comment dit-on _______ en français/anglais?”  This translates as “How does one say ______ in French/English?”  They do this so that you don’t have to break into full English just to ask for a translation of a specific word.  Of course, the more you can force a student into using only French the better.  As a part of this class, she went to every student and had them ask for a translation of whatever word they wanted.  She was also using this opportunity to hear the pronunciations we used and to correct for other small things.  Other students were asking for simple things like peach, horse, neighborhood, ice cream, and others.

I took the opportunity to ask the same thing I have asked with every French teacher I’ve ever had: “How do you say turducken in French?”  I have always gotten the same response, “Je ne sais pas” – “I don’t know”.  Despite never having had turducken, I like the word.  It perfectly describes what it is through word play.  It is a chickEN, inside of a DUCK, inside of a TURkey – TURduckEN.  The same word play in French would be something like poulet inside of a canard, inside of a dindon, so maybe a “dincanlet”?  This spelling doesn’t show up in my massive French-English dictionary, and neither does turducken translate directly, so I guess I just made up a new French word. 

I did definitely make a mistake towards the end of class. In general, I was trying to fit in with the theme of what the instructor was trying to teach.  For a beginner course you usually just stick to the present tense to begin with.  We were discussing the Eiffel Tower using simple sentences like, “I like the Eiffel Tower”, “I go to the Eiffel Tower”, and “The Eiffel Tower is beautiful”.  We were then talking about Gustav Eiffel.  The teacher asked if anybody knew what role he played in its creation.  Nobody was answering.  I had been waiting on others to respond first to many of the open-ended questions.  I did this since about half of the class had never had a French class before.  I didn’t want to be dominating the class because I had a lot of French classes before.  They needed the practice.  – I’m not trying to sound arrogant here, my French needs a lot of work as well, but I would be better suited for an intermediate class which is only offered in the spring and fall – The silence lasted for a while so I responded with “Il était l’architecte” – “He was the architect”.  I used the Imperfect tense and I used a pronoun other than I or we.  Until then we had been repeating the noun many times.  Also, I think the teacher was looking for a response in English.