My French is Broken.

My French is broken. I have lived in a French speaking country for nearly a decade and my French is broken. I can read Balzac and Zola and I can ask for a novel by Jules Verne in the bookstore, but I cannot understand my plumber, the satellite guy, the post person, most shop keepers, and even the daily newsreader on the TV.  My French is broken or rather my French ear is broken. For ten years, I have heard nothing but one continuous noise emanating from any Belgian French speaker within five feet of me. Each and everyone sounds like the "adults" in an old Charlie Brown animated film, "Wawa wa wa wawa wa wa.." I cannot find the beginning or end of a single spoken word and I know the problem is mine, or rather my ears'.

I have tried to remedy the situation, with endless radio and TV. I've attended endless expensive lessons, purchased workbooks and CD's, and downloaded mp3 files to play while sleeping. My last French professor recommended hypnosis and I think he was being kind while truly thinking I needed more in depth therapy to release some deeply held psychosis against the Belgian culture. This may also be true, as at least a dozen Belgians attempted to murder me by car during the first four weeks in the country, but that story is for another time or perhaps never.

The problem is my ear and I have to be patient and so starts September and another round of lessons. As per my teacher's recommendations, I tune in the French satellite again. There are five stations. If I'm lucky, once a week there will be something interesting between the endless talking heads, game shows and singing contests. Tonight, I hit the jackpot, a movie. The title is in French, "Celui qu'on attendait" and it translates roughly to "The one we were waiting for". This sounds vaguely promising. I'm expecting some old villager sitting at a rough table in a dark room expounding about the lost good old days punctuated by scenes of rustic village life, food, wine, broken trucks, shoddy electricity, shady government officials and the like. This is roughly what I get, except that the old man in this film is constantly screaming "Je voudrais aller a l'aeroport!" Well, I get that one sentence. It's been repeated at least five times. I must be making progress right?

Yeah, I'm making progress alright. It took 45 minutes and half the film to figure out this story is about an old French actor who some how gets lost in Armenia and an impoverished village takes full advantage of his situation in scenes of rustic village life, food, wine, broken trucks, flaky electricity and shady government officials. And the vast majority of dialog, in the movie directed by Serge Avedikian and fillmed in Armenian, you guessed it ... it's Armenian. Well, I now know six slightly different ways to say "I want to go to the airport.", maybe the universe is telling me something.