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I remember visiting France as a youngish child - maybe 8 or so - and proudly asking a boulanger for "une baguette, s'il vous plat"; the bread tasted even sweeter knowing that I'd made myself understood. At the time, I couldn't conceive of how the French could read their funny language, or understand each other; I surmised they had some kind of instant translation circuits in their brain that turned everything into English.

I couldn't wait to learn French at school - I was far and away the ablest Francophone in my class, mainly because I had a superb memory and could take in vocabulary quicker than anyone else. So I guess the first reason I liked French was that I was annoyingly good at it.

My reasons have become a little more complicated since. I lived for a year in Avignon, studying and developing a horrible Provenal accent, voraciously reading French literature. My favourite was Dumas' Three Musketeers - written in old-fashioned French I could barely understand, but with enough action to keep my interest for 700-odd pages. It was only once I started reading Daudet's Letters from my Windmill aloud that I realised that languages have different strengths. The rhythms and flow of the French were things I couldn't begin to translate to English.

I should confess that having fluent (if accented) French is also impressive to employers and sophisticated members of the opposite (or same) sex you wish to sleep with. That kind of thing is almost as important, for a language, as the possibility of good poetry.

Learn more about this author, Colin Beveridge.
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