French Learners in Hefei

If you’re a foreigner in China, especially in a relatively tourist-free city like Hefei, you’ll be asked this rather often: “你为什么学中文?” (Where are you learning Chinese?)

This is less the ‘I don’t see why you’d bother’ sort of question than it is the ‘I’m genuinely curious’ type. I’m quite sure of this because I found myself asking a Chinese student at the university a similar question today about French. But before we get to it, some background.

Being a Foreigner

In a place where seeing 外国人 (waiguoren, a foreigner) is odd all by itself, finding one that speaks Chinese is quite decidedly bizarre. Just this morning I had a bit of a celebrity moment when I talked to some students, recent graduates of the university, who looked a bit lost outside our apartment building. They were taking photos and wondering, it seemed, if anybody was home and if, perhaps, they could come in for a bit to continue the photo.

— “你们拍照片吗？你可以进来”, I told them they could come in. And in what turned out to be an odd interpretation of the offer, one of the students said something about me, and their photos. “You want me,” I asked, trying to form as coherent a sentence as my level of Chinese would allow me, “to take your photos?”

– “不”, they replied, explaining that they wanted instead to take photos with me. It didn’t matter much that I was perfectly unknown to them. Here was a 外国人 with long hair (uncommon, it turns out, for males here) who spoke Chinese, and they were going to document the chance encounter. Should their discovery ever be called into question and evidence be required.

It didn’t matter if I didn’t speak it right, or spoke with funky (generally incorrect) tones. That I spoke any bit of the language at all was surprise enough.

Finding French

And that’s exactly how I felt when, a couple of days ago playing ping-pong at the student sports building at the university, I chanced upon some Chinese students who spoke French. And one of the first things I asked them was, “Pourquoi est-ce que vous avez choisi d’apprendre le français?” Why French? Maybe what I meant was, Why not English?

I had to run to class that day, but spoke with them enough to gather that they were French concentrators, that they’d studied the language for less than a year (for which they spoke very well!), that they had a French professor who taught them and that it would be a very wise idea indeed to meet up with them when we all had some time to chat. So we exchanged numbers, I said “au revoir, à bientôt”, and ran to class. (And, you’ll be glad to know, got lost for a bit and ended up taking a perfectly long route to class).

L’échange Culturel

So today I texted Mars and Zola and set un rendevouz at the sports building. Once we got ourselves set up at a table and, throwing the ball up to make the first serve, began the conversation “Pourquoi le français alors?”

Mars told me that they picked French because, frankly, English — which they also spoke a little of — was rather common and they wanted to do something more exciting. To distinguish themselves in the job market, perhaps? I got the sense that might also be a reason. I asked them if there were many students learning French at the university, and was told that there were 43 students in their first-year class, a modest figure for a university of thousands.

— “There are fewer still,” Mars explained in French, “in the higher levels, second-year and on.”

— “So you don’t have very many people to practice the language with?” I asked, inquiring also about the French professor at the university someone had spoken to me about last year I was here.

— “No, we don’t,” Zola explained, with a half-smile that concealed a sigh. “There’s the one French professor, and she’s really busy.” No one else from France? “Apart from some of her friends who visit sometimes, she’s the only fluent French speaker.” So practicing the language is a problem.

— “We practice amongst ourselves”, Mars added, “but you can only do so much”. He seemed very enthusiastic about learning the language, and spoke in French as much as he could. The problem, it seemed.

It turns out that both Zola and Mars really like their French classes and the way that it’s taught, using songs, films and role-playing. Not unlike the way I learnt the language at Smith and, previously, at l’Alliance française du Kathmandou. But they are still more comfortable with written French than they are at the speaking bit, “which is what’s important”, Zola agreed.

It was a while before it really hit me that I was conversing in French and Chinese, with a spattering of English, with two really nice people that I’d just only gotten to know in some odd city in China. The French I was speaking was itself affected at times by Chinese, the “active second language” in my mind. Words like “mais”, “donc” and “non” got replaced with their Chinese counterparts every once in while, and I had to actively resist using Chinese “aah” and “oohs” while speaking. Mars and Zola too would slip in and out of English and Chinese too, quickly jumping back to French. Which gives you a pretty good idea of how hard it is to get yourself in a particularly French mode of thinking.

French! In a small city in Hefei where foreigners hardly come. Why, really?

The French Connection

My afternoon Chinese tutor Chen laoshi told me in one of our first few classes that she studies French too. I say studies because she insisted that although she likes the sound of French, and likens it to a flowing river, she is comfortable with the language only in the written form.

French and Russian, she told me, were the de facto foreign languages in the past in China. French because France was amongst the first countries to establish a relationship with China after its opening up in the 60s, and Russia because of ties to the Soviet Union. English, at the time, was hardly in the picture. It was, instead, seeping in from the sides like blotched ink on canvas.

— “At that time, you’d see signs in my university in Chinese and in Russian the way you do now in English“, Chen laoshi explained. “And universities had a French department and not an English one”. You’d have done better if you spoke French as a traveler back then, than if you spoke English. “Slowly, over time, as relations with America developed, interest in English rose” and French departments were replaced by English ones.

Employers now look for skills in English, the government has stipulated that kids learn the language at primary school and you can get away with an “O.K 了” even with fruit vendors who hardly speak standard Mandarin.

Quoi encore?

Zola’s parents worry about her choice of major. French, what’s one to do with that?

— “They think I might not be able to take care of myself”, she said. “I want to continue learning French at graduate school, and eventually become a professor”. That’s one possible path with French, as it is with Latin in the US.

— “I’m not into that,” Mars’ reasons were different. When I asked him if he wanted to go to France at some point, he nodded yes. “Maybe work for an international company,” he smiled, “it’ll be useful.”

French, once lingua franca of European diplomacy and the European Union, is losing learners to bigger, more “useful” languages like Spanish, Arabic and, ironically, Chinese. But as a second-language learner of French myself, it was great to meet others working on making French an important part of their lives.

Next, I’d like to meet someone learning Nepali here in China. Or in France. If I do, you’ll read about it.