During the year that I worked as an assistante d’anglaise near Lyon, France, I overcame a number of challenges (managing to rent an apartment without French papers in a sea of “déjà loué” responses, miraculously locating some approximation of Neosporin on a Sunday when all of France shuts down, semi-successfully sharing my English skills with students ranging in age from 12 to 25)  and learned at least as many lessons (that pate should not be eaten with sparkling wine, that it is acceptable to ask which Bordeaux is more Cabernet than Merlot-based even if one is buying the cheapest bottle, that all other European rail systems pale in comparison to France’s TGV).

Some things, though, I struggled with up until the very end of my stay.  For example, correctly pronouncing the name of the small town where I was teaching. The name of the town was Tarare. The way that I pronounced it caused, first confusion, and then hysterical laughter. My pronunciation of the word “gingembre” had a similar effect. Pronouncing the word in a form that was at all comprehensible to the owners of any patisserie or chocolaterie that I ever visited, seemed far beyond my capabilities. Here are two examples of the pains that these two particular words caused me:

1. At the police station where my boyfriend and I were filing a statement about a minor case of assault we’d experienced on the metro, the investigator who was taking my statement asked me where I worked. I had been speaking to him in English so, without thinking, I said “forty minutes away, in Tarare.” He tilted his head, showing confusion, then sudden comprehension, then unrestrained laughter. Wiping his eyes, he called a colleague into the room. “Say it again! Say it again!” he urged. I did. Both of them bowled over. When I tried to say the town’s name correctly, with those phlegmy French R’s, my tongue twisted and the letters came out squashed and jumbled. Tears streamed down their faces. It was all they could do to remain standing.

2. One Saturday, after the farmer’s market, I was queued up for chocolate at a store near my apartment. As I approached the front of the line, I was asked for my order so that one of the workers could begin packaging it up. I bravely navigated through the majority of my list, the shop attendant nodding patiently, and then, bracing myself, added that I wanted three of the “gingembre” variety as well. The attendant stared blankly. Pardon? “Gingembre, gingembre, gingembre,” I tried to explain, stressing various syllables and attempting to point. A nice, vaguely annoyed older woman behind me cut in. “Gingembre!” she said, obviously. The shop attendant smiled. “Ah! gingembre!” Without further hesitation, she packaged up the rest of my chocolates. I had detected no difference between my pronunciation and theirs.

One day in class, a student was mocking my American pronunciation of words that he had only heard his teachers pronounce in perfect, crisp, British English. Hilariously for me, what he thought were mocking, over-the-top enunciations of the letters “R” and “H,” were actually more closely approximate to correct American pronunciations than anything he had previously mustered. In this I saw a revelation. In order to correctly pronounce the foreign consonants of a new language, one must resort to what sounds, to the novice, like mockery. I applied this to my French, and in the last few months of my stay, succeeded at saying “Tarare” to nary a snicker or smile. I still never bested gingembre. Chocolates and pastries infused with that particular, peppery root, remained off-limits to me, but for the help of kind, impatient strangers.

By Anastasia Kolobrodova