My first foreign language was French. The choice was simple, really. My high school offered one foreign language. I wanted to take a foreign language. So I took French.

At the timne, one taught French using dialogs. To this day, if someone were to ask me “Ou est Sylvie?” I would automatically answer “A la piscine” without giving it a second thought, because everyone knows that Sylvie is at the swimming pool.

I had really wanted to take German, and was disappointed that my high school didn’t offer it. As a consolation, it did teach English in a manner that required us to diagram our sentences. I thought, “Great! I’ll be all set to do this in German!” because some of the German textbooks I saw at a college library near me had people doing the same thing.

There were two other tie-ins to French that my high school had, which seemed to work to its advantage. The Canadian Consul General visited my high school when I was in the ninth grade to present several books about Canada and by Canadians. Almost half of them were in French. As a consequence, I could actually try reading some French that wasn’t a dialog. I could expand my horizons beyond whether Robert had two brothers or a sister. Life was looking up.

The second tie-in was our having to read A Separate Peace by John Knowles during which Gene writes “Je ne give a damn pas about le français” during a study session. So, French was a natural offering.

When I went to college, I had a chance to continue French. Fortunately, we were reading monologues and essays initially, expanding into literature and current events. I also had access to French language periodicals, so I could read l’Express and Paris Match. We also had a language lab where we listened to radio plays and could listen to ourselves doing oral exercises.

My first practical use of French was a visit to Montréal. (I actually got to go to Toronto during high school, but all I could really use French for there was to read product labels and Canadian banknotes.) In Montréal, I got to meet real, living Francophones. Announcements on the Métro were made in French, and I got to explain to my grandmother that “Merci” was not the French word for trash any more than “Thanks,” “Push,” “Pitch In!” or “Keep America Beautiful” were English words for trash, and that “Sortie” is not a station stop on the Métro but is the word for “Exit.”

My second practical use was in St Louis. There were several people making the same connection I was, and our originating flight was delayed leaving Boston — so much so that we were to miss our second flight and would have to spend the night in St Louis. As I was chatting with a seatmate, I realized there were a bunch of us that would be spending the night together in St Louis. Somehow, the fact that I knew some French came up, and he lit up like a Christmas tree. A woman from Paris was making the same connection, and she didn’t speak a word of English. While we were all standing in line at Hotel Voucher Central, people on the flight kept asking me to ask the woman various questions, and she would give me answers that I translated back to English. I was getting so good at this that, on the way to baggage claim, one of us had to make a call and was waiting for a call back at a pay phone when a guy starts to sit down at it to make a call himself. One of the women for whom I had been translating asked me to ask the guy to please leave the phone clear for an incoming call, so I walk up to him and ask him, very politely and in French, if he would mind using a different phone. I got a very strange look.

In college, I also had the opportunity to start my study of German. They had stopped teaching sentence diagramming, much to my consternation, since that was my primary motivation for putting up with studying it in English. I won’t say much about German here, since Mark Twain has written extensively about the German language. At this point, let me just say that, if you’re shopping for a German dictionary, look for the declension tables. If you don’t know what those are, you don’t need a German dictionary. If you do know what they are, and there are fewer than 30, keep looking. Remember, you have three genders and four cases to work with.

My first language in a post Me Talk Pretty One Day world is Portuguese. And if someone asks me “Onde està o cachorro?” I am ready.