Judith's Jottings: Origins of love of all things French a mystery

Renaud Barret's film, System K, explores the urban jungle of Kinshasa where, amid social and political chaos, an eclectic and bubbling street art scene is emerging. It screens in Palmerston North this weekend.

Comment

I was a Francophile from early on. I have no idea where this love of most things French came from but I would create menus in French that I mostly never cooked. There were to be no potatoes for me - pommes de terre pour moi - though apple from the earth doesn't sound particularly sexy.

A prized possession was a poster of chateaux of the Loire, which I still have albeit in the spare wardrobe and not on the wall. My favourite was Chenonceau - it looked like a fairy tale on champagne. I got to visit the chateau on my second trip to France but only just. Such is the choice of chateaux in the Loire Valley our tour didn't include a visit, just a lunch stop in the nearby village. I walked as fast as I could to the chateau and managed to take in some of the atmosphere before speeding back to the bus as fast as my croissant-powered legs would let me.

Then came French classes at secondary school. Oh la la, it was hard. While the alphabet was more or less the same, words didn't go in the same order as English, letters sounded different and you had to do things with verbs that surely were what a prim Anglican school girl shouldn't know how to do. And aren't masculine and feminine toilets?

In fifth form French there were just four of us left. The other three were naturals but I would rather stare dreamily at the posters of Paris landmarks our teacher had put up around the classroom. Oral dictation was the worst and I still remember the day when Mrs H read some sentences in French and we were meant to write them down - in French. Quelle? I got zero out of 20. Oh the shame.

For my final report that year I got a C+ and Mrs H commented "a lack of confidence causes Judith to produce some erratic results". Confidence and I have never been natural bedfellows.

But after teaching English to adults for three years I realised confidence when learning a new language is key. The students who made the most progress orally were not afraid to open their mouths and see what English tumbled out. It didn't matter if the syntax, pronunciation and grammar were not perfect, as long as they were communicating in English I was happy. English speakers seldom get the language 100 per cent right all the time.

Confidence comes from encouragement, support and trust. Encouragement to try, support to scaffold your sentence forming and trust you won't be ridiculed. Vital components in any learning, don't you think.

This weekend's Francophonie Film Festival is yet another example of how lucky we are in Palmy. Have a look-see. What's piqued my interest is they aren't just French films, there are also films from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Tunisia and Algeria. All the films have English subtitles and remember, one of the easiest words to say in French is merci.