Learning French as a Grown-Ass Woman
Because Your Midlife Crisis Wasn't Stressful Enough
It’s 5:30 pm on July 4. I’m in a full flop sweat, sitting on a hard chair in an unairconditioned hallway in the language department at the University of Perpignan. I should be on the beach, or sitting at a café reading a book and sipping a glass of rosé. Instead, I’m in the throes of a slo-mo meltdown, further enhanced by a urinary tract infection.
What am I doing here?
Taking an exam.
The DELF (Diplôme d'Etudes en Langue Française) is an official diploma awarded by the French Ministry of Education to certify that non-French speakers have achieved a certain level of French. The Man of the House and I need to pass the intermediate test to qualify for French citizenship. None of our friends understand our desire to become French. It’s a huge bureaucratic slog that can take many years, culminating in a long, nerve-wracking interview about French history and culture that would cause a Ph.D. candidate to stoke out. But I’m stubborn. We live in France and pay taxes in France and have French friends and have embraced the cheese course and the resting bitch face. Plus, we want to vote.
MotH and I are the only Americans testing today. A herd of college-aged girls with long shiny hair and very short denim shorts converse in Spanish. There’s also some German and Russian going on. A trio of young African women speak a language I don’t recognize.
It’s 5:45 pm. I was scheduled to take the oral portion of the exam at 3:50 pm. The examiners had arrived 45 minutes late. He’s a dapper gent in a blue linen shirt sporting an impressive Snidely Whiplash mustache. She’s a surly young woman with blond princess tresses dressed in flowing pants and crop top. They appeared to have been summoned from another department (or maybe the bar down the street?) because it took them another twenty minutes to sort out what they were supposed to test us on.
That morning, we’d macheted our way through the written portion. This examiner was the picture of French apathy. She shuffled in, yawned and gestured at us to put our stuff, including our phones, on a table at the front of the room. The written part is a series of six timed sections. In preparation, I’d been doing precisely-timed practice tests on YouTube since Christmas.
But there was no clock in this classroom. Someone young enough to be my grandson asked how we were supposed to know how much time we had left without a clock. The examiner scratched her bed head, said ‘ehhhh’, looked around hoping to conjure up a wall clock, then passed out the exam booklets without further comment. After the first three listening sections, which required her to play recordings, we were left to free-style the rest of the test while she futzed around on her laptop.
I completed each section as if a tsunami was barreling down on me. I was so freaked out that I wouldn’t have time to complete the exam, I finished twenty minutes early. As I waited outside for MotH, a voice inside my head shrieked I am so fucked! alternating with a second voice, but you only have to get 50% to pass!
Yes, you only have to get 50% on the DELF exam to pass, because every test in France is fucking hard, and grade inflation hasn’t yet reached these shores. Difficulty-wise, French tests are on par with college organic chemistry, where the class genius scores 38. One hundred percent is mathematically possible on a French test, but culturally impossible.
It’s 6:15 pm. My linen shirt is soaked with sweat. In between strategizing how to work the subjunctive into my upcoming orals, I’m stressing over whether I should drink more water, and thus risk having to run to the bathroom and losing my spot in line.
A young French friend once advised me that the biggest hurdle I faced living in France was the daily discipline of setting aside American expectations. In this case, I’d expected that since this was a fancy schmancy exam administered and sanctioned by the French Ministry of Education, sitting for it would not make you feel as if you were on a reality show where the goal is not just to pass the test, but to pass it under extreme duress.
It's 6:30 pm. Surly pokes her head out the door and she mumbles my name.
The first part of the orals involve introducing yourself, saying where you’re from, where you live, and what are your hobbies. (Hobbies, ha!) I say that I’m writer. I say that I’ve written fourteen books, several novels, and a quartet of biographies on great women in history, including one on Coco Chanel. Snidely and Surly are also perspiring, and probably also slowly dying as they endure one sweaty foreigner after another butchering their language. I expect them to find this at least mildly intriguing, but they just stare at me like I’m a fantasist who’s wandered in off the street. They have no questions.
I think, “fuck fuck fuck, I should have made up some hobbies!”
Then, I’m asked to deliver a three-minute monologue on sleep deprivation in France, and why French people aren’t getting enough sleep. I thank the patron saint of test taking that I didn’t wind up having to talk about, say, the pros and cons of carpooling (an actual topic). I’m given ten minutes to conjure up some thoughts that will allow me to jam in every verb tense I can manage.
My default setting in life is One Woman Show. If I were going down on a cruise ship, taken hostage by kidnappers, stuck in an elevator with my tax auditor, the evidence of my mental collapse would be One Woman Show, and that’s what I resort to now.
I fold my hands on the desk and smile, knowing full well the French find American smiles to be deranged and slightly scary. I explain why the French are suffering from sleep deprivation (screens, doom scrolling, politics, did I turn off the oven?, etc). I tell about how I was hospitalized for sleep deprivation when I was in college (a complete fabrication), and how I think we can solve the problem by using our imagination. I suggest a national campaign called Pas Après 10h00! (Not after 10:00). After ten o’clock, people will be encouraged to turn off their phones, stop watching the news, stop talking about the news, stop thinking about anything other than petting their dogs, having sex, reading a gentle novel, or knitting. I suggest enlisting the French rock group Indochine to write a Pas Après 10h00 anthem. I end by saying how we must do something, because not sleeping sucks! (Ne pas dormir, c'est nulle.)
Snidely asks, “what was that last phrase?”
“Uh, c’est nulle?” I make a big production of apologizing because I do know that c’est nulle is too vulgar for a DELF examination, but I couldn’t help myself because I am so passionate about this subject.
I thank them for their time and attention, and afterwards I go straight to the ladies’ room to pee, which of course I don’t, because UTI. I think I might throw-up, but instead I add “Ne pas dormir, c’est nulle!” to the rest of the graffito on the back of the stall door.
We’re told it will take up to two months to receive the results, but after a little over two weeks an email arrives telling us we can come pick up our grades. We passed! I will not reveal our scores, because the only thing that matters in France is passing. That said, I bless the hearts of Snidely and Surly, who gave me my highest score.
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Exactement!
Toutes mes félicitations! J'en ris encore!