Author: Stephanie Dodaro

Language Learning Never Ends

Posted on by Stephanie Dodaro

At some point in one’s language learning, it seems as if there is nothing left to learn, yet fluency still has not been attained. However, never forget that there is always more to a language than vocabulary and grammar.  There is the way that it is used everyday in that descriptive, poetic, idiomatic way that just never seems to be taught in school.  I have studied French for thirty years.  Granted, not all of that time has been spent in school.  Many of those years were outside the classroom, in my many travels to France and Francophone countries, through my many subscriptions to magazines and newspapers, in all of my reading and through all of the movies and news programs I have enjoyed since finishing school.  Yet there were times when I still felt my French was grammatically hyper-correct, that kind of “book French” for which my friends mocked me, yet not colloquial. I had never mastered the idiom.

 

Thanks to the Alliance Francaise, I discovered  Claude Duneton’s La puce à l’oreille: anthologie des expressions populaires avec leur origine. Perfect! It was just what I needed. I highly recommend this for the advanced French language student who is looking for a deeper understanding of the language and where certain expressions come from and why the French express things in certain ways.

This is not your typical book of idioms. A typical book of idioms will give a student a list of idioms and the meanings as best translated in English.  On occasion, however, after discussion with a native speaker, I have determined some of the “translations” in such books to be inaccurate, not quite grasping the original meaning, or just not quite the equivalent. Understandably, it is very difficult to translate some popular expressions.  Yet a simple “dictionary” of idioms does not make for easy memorization, either.  This book by Duneton reads like stories.  They are memorable stories, about the history of certain expressions, tracing their origins back to old French words with the occasional or eventual change of meaning that sometimes takes place. It was so memorable that maybe a few months later, at a film showing at the Alliance Francaise, I heard one of the characters using several of these expressions in the movie, and I did not need to make use of the subtitles to catch the meaning.  That might not have happened had I not just recently read this book.

 

A fairly common idiom that a student might even learn at school would be something like tomber en panne.  We learn this to mean “break down”, but what is a panne and why does it have to fall?  We will learn from Duneton that this is a nautical term and the fascinating story of what panne means.  Some of these expressions are very old and rarely used, but not too many.  I regularly come across some of these in books, even in ones that I have read even recently, like tenir le haut du pavé or se mettre sur son trente et un. You will also learn the origin of an expression which is very common even in English, le cordon bleu.  Putting the cart before the horse (which in French comes to: mettre la charrue avant les boeufs) may have its origins in old French labor idioms.  These are clearly explained in this book, and now I know them when I see them.  It makes my reading that much more enjoyable.

Another unexpected outcome and welcome realization is discovering why we say in French grand-mère without the extra e on grand.  Mère is feminine, why is grand not in the feminine form? Grand at the time was invariable and took masculine and feminine nouns.  There are other gems that we will learn here, like why ouvrier means worker, but ouvert means open, literally open for work.  Yet, there are words for work and those are now travail and travailler which used to mean “torture”.  I find this fascinating!

 

I cannot sufficiently sing the praises of this work.  You will simply have to discover it for yourselves. It is most definitely for the very advanced French reader, and you will certainly need a very good dictionary if you want to search for some of the words used that are simply not so common in French today.  Despite the difficulty of the text itself and the sources cited in old French, I do highly recommend it for anyone who wants a more fuller experience and glimpse into the highly colorful colloquial French.  We never stop learning a language.  It is a life-long experience.  I find it very exciting to learn new words or phrases, and common expressions, especially the colorful ones!  Vive le français!

Why New Orleans Matters to Me

Posted on by Stephanie Dodaro

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to meet the author of Why New Orleans Matters, Tom Piazza.  He was hosting a book club meeting at my neighborhood bookstore, so I got there early for the chance to talk with him, thank him and tell him how much I appreciated his book and to hopefully get him to sign it for me.  (Yes, I am a bit of a fan girl!  I make no apologies for that. Several other women lined up behind me for the exact same thing.) In honor of this fortuitous moment, I took the opportunity to reread it.

 

This book, Why New Orleans Matters, released quickly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, is less of a novel and more of a very elaborate essay on the importance of this city and why it needs to be protected at all costs.  In the days and months, and even years, after the hurricane and my subsequent displacement elsewhere, I felt a loss like nothing I have ever felt in my life.  No one really understood why I was so unhappy, or why I was so unable to settle into this new city and call it home.  I told them I could never call it home, and that it would never be home no matter how long I stayed there.  I tried to explain to them why I felt that way.  I tried to find the words to explain what it was that was missing there, what it was that I had found in New Orleans that I could not seem to find there.  Mr. Piazza gave me the words to say what it was I was feeling. He effortlessly and eloquently put his finger on that timeless thing that makes New Orleans so unique, puts into words that intangible feeling, that mysterious quality that we all love and appreciate so much about this place we call home.  And it is very hard to describe for someone who has never been here.

 

New Orleans, he says, “has a mythology, a personality, a soul…” (xvii) that so few other places can claim to have.  “The past in New Orleans cohabits with the present…” (xviii) and its history is palpable; it is living and breathing its past.

 

It feels different in subtle ways.  Never before have I ever felt the air upon me as I do here. It hangs, as one friend described, like a damp wool blanket on my skin.   It sounds different even.  I remember after having been away for a while, that one weekend I was back in town visiting.  I remember telling a friend one morning that the sound outside was different from the place where I was currently living.  I, once again, could not find the right words. My friend immediately knew what it was that I wanted to say and said “it is organic.”  That was it.  Organic.  I could hear the banana plant leaves rustling in the wind, the sounds of birds (not cars and construction), leaves blowing in the yard.  It was the beautiful sound of the closeness of nature.  It smells different, too.  As I walk down the sidewalk, I smell the combination of a dozen flowers and fruit trees mixed with coffee and fresh rain from earlier in the afternoon.  An intoxicating elixir.

Reading how Mr. Piazza describes our love of food, music, festival and family, all of which are inextricably tied together, was a beautiful affirmation of what I had already believed and felt, but simply could not express as well as he had. The  “food of New Orleans is a language, and all those who prepare it and love it are family.” (22).  It is a big small town, with a community mindset.  We all here are family in a way.  We greet each other on the street like friends even though perfect strangers, yet in our way of seeing things, if I see the same person on the street every day, we are not strangers.

 

If you are one of the million or so people who experienced Katrina first-hand, I recommend only reading part one.  Part two starts with the aftermath, and while I did experience the storm and the coming home part where I saw images that I will never be able to erase from my mind, I read it anyway. It was a very emotional experience, indeed.  If you are one who wonders why we stay here, why we live here, or why we came back here, maybe you need to read this.  It was not a matter of whether I would come home despite what happened, but more of a question of when.  It took me long enough, but when I finally did, I knew it was the right decision and the right timing. Like Mr. Piazza, I knew this was home, “for keeps, no matter where I might travel.” (7)

In Honor of March as Le Mois de la Francophonie (Francophone month)

Posted on by Stephanie Dodaro

In honor of March as Le Mois de la Francophonie (Francophone month) where French culture and history are celebrated around the world, I decided to write about one of my favorite Francophone books La Civilisation, ma Mère!…from Driss Chraïbi. Chraïbi is a twentieth century Moroccan writer that I discovered in college during my graduate years.  It was one of the literally dozens of books that I read during that program that really stayed with me all this time, one that I still talk about and remember fondly. It is the touching story of a woman and her sons, who loved her so much that they risked everything to liberate her.

The whole novel is narrated in the first person, first by her youngest son in part one entitled Être (to be).  We assume this is Driss even though he is never named. Then part two, called Avoir (to have), is narrated by the older son Nagib, while the younger is in Paris to pursue his studies.  This is the part that is biographically true for Chraïbi, who did go to school in France and in fact never return to his native Morocco. In part one, we learn about the childhood of their mother, also biographically accurate, who was orphaned at a young age, raised by a family who make a maid out of her, and then married her to a much older man while she was just 13 years old.  She is a traditional Moroccan woman in the 1930s, whose sole purpose and joy in life is to serve her family and make a good home.  Her children go to school and her husband works, meanwhile she is more or less cloistered.  In fact, I lost count of how many times Chraïbi refers to the home as either her prison or her tomb.

But this is during the period of French control, and European “civilization” begins to change the lives of the people of Morocco, especially cities like Casablanca, where children go to French schools and learn French and other European subjects, and new technology begins to arrive. Here is where fiction takes a detour from the true story of Chraïbi’s mother.  Our two narrators begin to introduce, slowly at first, the newest products, like a radio, the telephone, the cinema, etc.  We begin to see, ever so slowly the evolution, the transformation of this woman, for better or for worse, sometimes even she does not know, due to the education her sons offer her, unbeknownst to their father.  At first she is frightened, but then she embraces it, and like a sponge, absorbs the information, and it empowers her.  So frightened was she the first time her sons tried to take her outside to a park, in a western dress and shoes they bought for her, that they had to carry her over the threshold.  Yet, in an absolutely endearing scene, she hugs all the trees, eats the grass and dangles her feet in a stream, like a child for the first time outside.  The world is finally open to her.  She can learn about the world from her living room via the radio, reach out of her cloistered space and talk to distanced family members via the telephone, and eventually find her own voice through her new discovery of politics and the education of her sons.

There is so much that can be said about this novel that there is just not time enough, like the scene where they install the radio, which I can only imagine from the description is a massive piece of furniture, causing so much damage during its installation in the house that they had to buy plaster to repair walls and ceiling.  Metaphorically, the damage here could represent the disruption of peace in this household with the arrival of the West in Morocco.  While having caused her stress in the beginning, she does not let it stop her.   Her education does not stop with simple objects of technology.  She takes her new empowered status on the road and tries to educate and empower other women of her country.  There is the burial of all the vestiges of her past, and looking only forward, she undertakes the complete makeover of her house, painting, furnishing with nothing but European imports.  Hers is a miraculous transformation in just a few short years.

It is an inspiring and moving story that has stuck with me for more than two decades. Reading it for the second time has only enhanced my original experience, making it even more endearing that it was the first time.  It is a story of rebirth, liberation, where she herself was a being “colonized” and was freed by the very persons to whom she gave life. They in turn, gave life back to her.  It is about the power of knowledge, having a voice, coming into being (être) and having a voice (avoir).

An enthusiastic 5 stars, if I could give it more, I would.

Writing to Improve Language Skills

Posted on by Stephanie Dodaro

Many of my students ask me how they can improve their language skills.  My usual answer to them is to write as often as they can and to read as much as they can.  The benefits of these two activities cannot be denied.  Like playing an instrument, one must practice to improve.  In that same way, practicing writing and reading often will inevitably lead to improvement in all areas of language skills, and they can be practiced anytime, anywhere.

I have, throughout my career, worked with many students at various ages and at various levels.  I was first given the idea of encouraging students to write a daily journal when I was working in Japan. It was my mentor’s idea. I was not sure how it would work, but in fact, to my surprise, it yielded incredible results.  Students, even those who had low grades, noticeably improved their grades, even across subject areas.

First, however, I must define what a journal is.  It is not necessarily a diary, which is a private book in which you record intimate details of your life.  It is simply a notebook or document where you write maybe not for the purpose of being corrected but just for the practice of writing.  Of course, you could ask for corrections, and I did correct my students’ journals if they asked me to.  We would sit together while I explained some of the changes I made to their journals and why I made them.  They learned a lot during this process, but they learned a lot simply by writing as well.

In writing daily, even something short, students started to think about how sentences (in their case English sentences) were constructed, how to say certain things that happen in everyday life.  English for them became something real, useful, relevant.  They developed vocabulary, grammar, expression. They learned how to say what they wanted to say.  They developed organizational skills and confidence in writing.

Where should you start?  Decide whether you want to do a journal digitally or keep a notebook. I personally like the idea of keeping a notebook and writing by hand.  Choose a notebook that you like, one that you will carry with you and can write when you feel inspired.  Try for a goal of writing every day for five minutes, or maybe simply writing a few sentences or a paragraph a few times a week.  As long as you are trying on a regular basis to get a few words or sentences down on the page, you will be on the path to improvement.

The subject matter is entirely up to you.  You can write anything at all.  You can write about your daily activities, having tea with a friend, going shopping, cooking dinner.  The important thing is that you are thinking about how to say all these things in your new language.  You may realize that you need a lot of new vocabulary.  The act of searching for these words and recording them will likely help you to remember them for next time.  It may even prove useful once you have a conversation with someone on a similar subject.  The other important aspect of writing about your daily activities, more than just finding the vocabulary, is the process of constructing your phrases, thinking about how things have to be said in the language.  It makes you become aware of which articles to use and when, which verb tenses, even which prepositions and all these little grammar points that we sometimes forget to think about when we are talking.

If you do not want to record personal activities, you could write about your thoughts on things on a more abstract level.  You could record your thoughts about friendship, growing older, the importance of art or literature, something that you heard about in the news.  Once you start writing, you may find that the words flow better, your thoughts come together better, and you may write more, for longer and not want to stop.  I noticed this with my students’ journals, which got longer and more complicated, and sometimes more personal.  The act of writing can really help students organize their thoughts.

One student even came up to me at the end of a session, turning in his last journals for the term, and said that originally he did not like the activity.  He could not at first see the purpose, but by the end of the term he really felt differently about it.  He said he felt his writing had really improved and flowed more easily, after only one month, and that he would likely try to continue the practice.

In conclusion, I feel that a journal is really useful for many reasons.  There is no pressure.  No one has to look at it, grade it, judge it.  It is mostly for you.  With that in mind, writing a journal can be a really beneficial activity for improving writing, especially in a second language.  My first diary was given to me at the age of 10.  I started writing, about everything, on a daily basis.  By the time I was 14 and learning French, I would occasionally write in French too.  I have no doubt in my mind that this helped me in school by improving my writing skills, my ability in French and possibly improving my grades as well.