"Where is my umbrella?"

In my literature class (20th Century Tragic Theater) this morning we were talking about the absurd (the genre, not a personal judgement!) Ionesco play we'd just read and in particular some of the comic effects of language in the play. Our professor explained that Ionesco, a Romanian, learned French as an adult by the "Assimil" method which taught, among other things, basic phrases in addition to vocabulary and grammar. For example, phrases such as "the ceiling is up and the floor is down" teach the vocabulary "ceiling" "floor" "up" and "down" based on the words' relation to other another in the sentence. The sentence is fine, and even useful, for language-learning, but when taken out of the context of the classroom, it becomes completely absurd. Imagine going up to a friend or neighbor and stating, "the ceiling is up and the floor is down." They would think something was terribly wrong. We all found this quite amusing in class and chuckled away at the series of example the play provides.

Then I realized that I'm currently in the process of learning similar phrases in my translation class at the university and the situation became less comic and more... tragic, appropriately.

For translation class we are required to learn/memorize five or six assigned chapters from a book of English-French vocabulary each semester. The chapters are organized by theme and are made up entirely of lists of words and phrases in English and their equivalent in French. Saying the lists are thorough would be an understatement. The three chapters I'm being tested on Wednesday are (brace yourselves for the thrilling nature of the topics...) The Five Senses and Speech, Industry and Travel. For the remainder of the semester I have The Armed Forces, Churches and Religion and Moral Standards to look forward to...

But I wanted to share some of the highly useful phrases I'm learning... you never know when you might need to talk about smelting ore (fondre du minerai)!

• parler avec un accent étranger : to speak with a foreign accent
• s'enrouer à force de crier : to yell oneself hoarse
• les combustibles fossiles s'épuisent : fossil fuels are running out (oh no!)
• ici on loge à pied et à cheval : accommodation for man and beast
• le chef de gare siffle : the station master blows his whistle

Clearly in certain contexts these things might come in handy and it's definitely important for translation... But when I have to look up the English definition of some of the words... How many of you know what a collier or a colliery is? How about firedamp? A flyover that doesn't involve airplanes overhead?

Still, I'm proud that I knew how to say "hovercraft" before I started studying - definitely useful!

***The title for this entry comes from a phrase that a French friend of mine said she learned as one of those silly language-learning phrases that even when one can't speak the language they know that one statement or question. For Americans, it's often "où est la bibliothèque?" I guess it's a little smarter to know how to ask for an umbrella in a foreign language than for the library... Though the other sentence my friend remembers being drilled on is "I have a yellow pencil." And she never fails to remark that in all the drilling on the sentence, the pencil never changed color!

As for the famous English-learning sentence for the French, "where is Bryan? Bryan is in the kitchen!" n'en parlons même pas!