16th July 2010 - Kelsey

A third of my way through my time at Fontsoleil I was feeling perfectly settled, and thought that nothing could topple me from my zen-like balance. Enter Kelsey, my polar opposite in terms of personality. She was 22, with the features of her Chinese mother and the build of her German father and the stereotypical brashness of her native America. She hailed from California via three years in Aix-en-Provence. And my goodness did she liven things up around the farm! She was one big, garrulous bounce of go-go-go and had difficulty with sitting still and being calm, although no problem at all with sleeping, even in the battered caravan that served as her bedroom. Goedele and I had both turned it down in favour of a proper roof, leaving poor Kelsey with no choice. But, eternally optimistic, it didn’t phase her one iota. She named it –affectionately – the crappy RV. Apparently RV meant caravan in American English. You live and you learn.  

My happy, peaceful rhythm of life that I had fallen into so easily was disturbed. I felt threatened by Kelsey’s need for excitement and by her exuberance, and I automatically began to pick out things that I didn’t like about her. Natural perhaps, but unfair. As it turned out she had a lot to offer both me and the world, and the traits that I picked out weren’t problematic; they just weren’t me. She was eternally optimistic, energetic, full of laughs, and stubbornly determined to improve her French, which wasn’t as fluent as mine or Goedele’s. She was to be the source of many interesting conversations, as well as some rather enlightening jaunts. I learned a lot about myself from Kelsey. I also learned not to judge a book by its cover, even if the cover didn’t immediately appeal. Had I dismissed Kelsey immediately as not my kind of person, I would have missed out on an interesting read, and a host of strange experiences.

On the subject of reading, and also of being talkative, my French was improving in leaps and bounds. I didn’t have to think about it. And yet I wanted to think about it! WWOOFing was providing me with so many ways of learning the language. Speaking was perhaps a given; after all, I had always known that I would have to talk to get by when I was working. And yet, no. There was a difference between speaking with kids like Juan and Malo – who were less understanding of a foreigner’s difficulties with unusual words or fast and colloquial speech – and speaking with adults. Amongst adults there were further differences between conversations with those for whom French was their mother tongue and for those who were like me, learning, still making mistakes and struggling to find words. I aspired to the fluency of the French and learned a whole gamut of new words from them, as well as consolidating my grammatical forms through copying, but their very fluency  could itself be a hindrance at times, both disconcerting to my lack of confidence and flowing too fast for my mind to keep up with. When I talked to Goedele and Kelsey we could slow down for each other and help each other around unknown words, learning from the others’ knowledge, as well as from shared linguistic discoveries.

Reading was an equally obvious way of learning a language, although there was no pressing need to do it in the wilderness of the Ardèche. But what to read? I didn’t doubt that it was important on a cultural level to read Voltaire, to be acquainted with the characters of Molière and to have an appreciation of the talent of Flaubert. But it struck me that even the €2 flea market unknowns had their merits from a cultural point of view; modern life in the UK bore little resemblance to the worlds described in Dickens or Shakespeare, after all, and was much more usefully depicted in trashy airport fict  I would have argued a case, too, for modern novels translated into French from English, which were often full of conversation, containing the French equivalents of common English phrases. Magazines too I found to be useful, their short articles not too hard to concentrate on and often quite simply written, and covering any topic under the sun. 

ion.

With Goedele and Kelsey came two novel ways of improving our French. The first was doing crosswords. It was a brilliant way of learning new vocabulary that I had picked up earlier that year whilst filling in time on long train journeys across Germany with my fellow teaching assistants, and I saw no reason why I shouldn’t transfer the fun to France. During market one morning I nipped into a newsagent’s and picked up a compendium that, coupled with a dictionary, would keep us happily occupied for hours. The second was that we developed a love of playing the game Taboo, which we found gathering dust in a towering stack of board games in the spare room upstairs. It improved our vocabulary because we often didn’t know to start with the words that we were given, or the words being described to us, and it improved our fluency because we had to keep talking, and we had to use all the limited words at our disposition to get around the description of whatever word was taboo. And, of course, inevitably, it made us laugh.