Saturday, November 8, 2014

Beau Dommage, Speaking Quebecois with Richard and Bullshitting in French

I am listening to one of my favorite groups from the 70s, Beau Dommage. They were from Montreal. A graduate student introduced their music to a French conversation group I was part of when I was living in an international student dorm.  I had a good friend from Quebec who did not like their music. He said that their accents were "too country."This is rather funny, because his accent too was very "country." Their accents were very similar. I could not find their music in the U.S. for a long time, and a friend of mine went to a jazz festival in Montreal. I asked her to see if she could find some music by them, and she found a cd of their music which she brought back for me. If I had not spent time speaking Quebecois with my friend from Quebec I would probably have a hard time understanding them. To me their music is a lot of fun.
From spending time conversing in Quebecois with Richard (I have mentioned him before. He was the friend I mentioned before when I wrote about us finishing each other's sentences, etc.) I became able to speak two forms of French, Quebecois and French as it is spoken in France. The French that Richard and I spoke was far from polite at times. I took a year off from school to make money to finish my last year. During that time Richard was the only one with whom I spoke French, and when I went back to school my French was much less formal. Sometimes I would speak in class in language that I thought was a little too informal for that situation, but the professors did not mind too much. I would like to go back to France and to go to Quebec so that I could practice both.
One of my favorite words in French is ouaouaron which means bullfrog. Ouaouaron fits better. It reminds me of the sound that those frogs make.
I took a class in French Canadian literature. Each week we read a novel and we also had supplemental reading. I did not do all of the supplemental reading. We had the final exam at the professor's house. It was an oral exam. We were each required to answer two questions. We could pass on one question. I answered one question and passed on the next. The third question was on an article that I had not read, it was part of the supplemental reading. I could tell basically what the article was about because of the title. Basically I bullshitted my way through the question in French. Amazingly the professor did not realize that I had not read it. During the exam we had a meat pie that his wife made for us and drank hard cider. That was the only time I ever got buzzed at a final exam.

No comments:

Post a Comment