French for Dummies

Being a person who has just returned from Paree after a rather grand 5 nights and 6 days, I can say I'm a bit of an authority on French, if I may say so myself.

The French language is beautiful, eloquent and poetic. There is one small problem with it though. Any poor soul who lands in France without an a French degree will be completely lost, at sea, helpless, you get the drift...

This is exactly what happened to me, I can't understand French even if my life depended on it. All I know is "Parlez vous France" means understand French or something similar to that, so I would tell any Frenchman trying to converse with me, "No parlez vous France" and he'd look at me like I ate a toad in front of him.

My long stay in the country helped me learn the ways of the French and their language and I have come to a simple, yet very effective method of learning French. It might sound very complex and difficult at first, but when you understand what I'm saying, it will be a piece of cake. The trick is as follows:

"In order to converse/write in French, one must append the fifth letter of Anglais alphabet to a word population comprising 95% or thereabouts of the Anglais language."

For those of us who grew up reading _______(fill in the blanks with any topic) for Dummies, it translates into this - add the letter 'e' to 95% of the words

in English and you have French. If you really want to become a French literary figure, you would only have to add a whole lot of letters in between each word and simply forget to pronounce them. Confidently silence critics by saying they are silent letters.

Memories of a drama by Crazy Mohan came flooding back to me when I heard the French pronounce words. In it, a superstitious Crazy Mohan's (his name in the drama is Sivaram) wife concludes that the name Sivaram is the cause of all their woes and promptly calls a Nameology expert in to change it. Names suggested ranged from Savaram to Savam to Sivaaraajxtpm. With jxtp being silent letters in the last name. At that time, it sounded extremely far fetched and funny, however, in France, no one would have batted an eyelid to a person with a name like that pronounced Sivaram. Here are a few prime examples:

• Fresnes (a place name) is pronounced Frene
• Val d'Europe (a mall) is pronounced Val d'hope
• Montevrain (another place) is pronounced Montevrey
• Calais becomes Calay
• English becomes Anglais

Sitting a quiet place and brooding on life makes you wonder how much of money must be wasted by the French. Just imagine, on the road they have huge signboards where precious space and materials are used to point you in the direction of Fresnes, when all you need is Frene. In fact, I bet a French book of 500 pages would come down to around 200 if the silent letters are eliminated. Think of the environmental impact of this! Come to think of it, do you think the French language is in its present state because of classic French writers who tried filling pages?