Parlez Vous Anglais ?

Yes, these were the exact three words that all I learnt before coming over to France: Parlez vous Anglais ? which means Do you speak English ? I was told these very three words would prove to be a saviour during the initial days in France. Later I joined a French language school where I was given one month time to master the most sophisticated language in the world. Although my mother knew that I could make it somehow it was my dad who was suspicious and less supportive. It was too much for him to digest the thought that I could learn French in a month and that I could take my engineering lessons entirely in French.

Having spent more than five years in this beautiful country, now when I look back I realise that the engineering lessons never really helped me learning French. In the language school, all I could learn within a month was the present tense. I was a fresher and had no worries about the future. I closed my past chapter the moment I took the flight from India to France. So I never bothered learning these two tenses.

A couple of months passed by smoothly. And then when I thought I would never have to bother about the other tenses in French, I fell in love with an amazing girl. Little did I know that my belief would disappear like a fart in the wind. Like every other girlfriend, she started asking about our future and Bamn ! I couldn't say anything. (Well, it was partly because I saw none.) It was at that moment it occurred to me that I would have to learn little more than the present tense. So I learnt the future tense and then everything went right back on the track. A few months sailed away and we reached a point where a girlfriend starts expecting things from you. Her French became alien to me once again. Later I discovered she was using the subjunctive mood to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred. In order to understand her emotions and wishes (although one can never really understand these things in a woman) I learnt subjunctive.

It was towards the end of our relationship she started using a lot of conditional moods to refer to a hypothetical state of affairs, or an uncertain event like If I loved her, I would do this/that. In order to counter her arguments, once again for no interest of my own, I learnt the conditional moods in French. At last we broke up and I thought it was the end to the quest of learning French. But once again I was wrong. My friends asked me all sort of questions and details about what went wrong between we two. I couldn't express myself at all because I knew no past tense. Finally, I learnt the past tense.

I still remember the first day in my language class the professor told everyone that we would learn French very little from the classes and mostly from the life experiences. I couldn't agree more.