Language Lessons

It's the little things that trip you up when trying to speak a foreign language.

Every language has quirks of its own. For example, Spanish has two different verbs for "to be" ("ser" and "estar"), only one of which is correct at any given time, and with only imperfect logic decreeing which circumstances merit which one.

The biggest quirk of that sort in French is counting. Even though I studied French for five years in high school and college, and know how this works intellectually, it took several weeks to retrain my ears to understand the French numbering system.

It is simple, logical and just like English into the sixties. But then you count, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, sixty-ten, sixty-eleven, sixty-twelve and so on up to sixty-nineteen. Then, instead of eighty, you say the equivalent of "four twenties" or, in older English, "four score." Four score and one, four score two, four score three ... four score nine, four score ten, four score eleven, four score twelve, and so on up to four score nineteen. The next number is 100, and then you go back to a normal system, until you get to 170, when the whole thing repeats itself.

I've got that down, now, finally, but am still working on the next problem, which is that in Parisian French, at least, there are two words for "okay." "D'accord" means OK in the sense of I agree, let's do it, while "ca va" means OK in the sense of so-so, good-but-not-great, etc.

Some French teacher way back when seems to have taught me only the "ca va" part of it, so that's what comes out whenever I want to say "Okay," in either meaning. I'm still understood, but clearly it's not idiomatic, and so I end up feeling foolish.