ainnew.com) as the first-class honours student who, on moving to France to study, was shocked to discover that, unlike other French universities, the one she'd been accepted at didn't give a goddamn fuck about her results. He ended the book by comparing the French and German educational systems, and concluded that at best, the French system produced graduates who were "good little _bourgeois_ little bitches," at worst, "bitchy little _bourgeois_ bitches." So he returned to the UK and found himself working as a language teacher, a job he found depressing: he was one of only a few of the staff who didn't go to bed at a reasonable hour, and on weekends, he was left alone with a class of twenty-six-year-olds he found, quite simply, intolerable. The only thing he really liked about his job was having been born a student of French, so that he had an endless supply of anecdotes at his fingertips. When my friend told me the French school story, he said it was typical of Dave, who always had a story to tell, and he didn't actually say that they were all about France—but I wouldn't have believed it, either, if you'd said they were all about France. By the time he reached the end of his book, in fact, my friend had actually _become_ a bit like Dave, and not just by virtue of having read a whole book about _Paris et les Français_ —he'd started to make allusions to the Parisian scene whenever he saw an excuse. So now when a Frenchman walks down the street, he's no longer content to just watch; now he looks more closely at his surroundings. Or the traffic lights that he crosses while waiting for the green light. The buildings in the distance that he thinks are tall. How they have a unique architecture, though most of the rest of the world—the rest of the world, not yet the entire western world—has been influenced by them. The first time I really noticed this was at a supermarket, when, in the store's parking lot, a woman who worked for one of the supermarket's subcontractors was putting up a large wooden sign that said " _Dépanneurs_ " and " _Dépanneur_ ," only she kept getting them mixed up. It wasn't that she couldn't understand the difference between the word " _dépanneurs_ " and the word " _dépanneur_ ," because one's French and the other isn't, but she didn't feel like putting in the effort to distinguish between the two. It wasn't that she couldn't distinguish between them, but she didn't think there was any need to. When it came to words, French and English are equally hard—that was one of the things I'd concluded when I went to study abroad, or rather, it wasn't a conclusion, it was an observation. I mean, people can't be expected to see any difference between " _vins_ " and " _vignerons_ " any more than they can be expected to see the difference between two words like "wine" and "wine-shop." The point is that everyone is affected by language at a very basic level. She was probably the laziest Frenchwoman I've ever seen; her sign was so big, but her method of putting it up was so sluggish, as if she were putting up a set of shelves in a shop. And I can say that because I've done that a few times myself—in fact, I'm not the laziest Frenchman; there are some who are much lazier, and some who aren't lazy at all—you know the kind of guy I mean, the guy who thinks about football instead of getting his shelves done? And we all know the shop assistant in a sports shop, who's always sluggish and doesn't understand that a footballer's not a _bleu de travail_. Of course, the woman was from Eastern Europe—and not just Eastern Europe, but Romania or something. The laziest Frenchmen are from Romania, but most of the _dépanneurs_ are not; you see a lot of them in town, with their crates of wine. The only two types of people who ever have trouble making up their mind about which of the two, the red wine or the white, they want—which gives me an idea for a series of ads, actually, on Sunday afternoons on T.V.: There were at least ten more people in the supermarket, all either French or Romanian or German, and at any one time there were probably a dozen or so such people walking the street in the village. The Romanian guy who'd just driven his van through the shop's wall was one of them; he didn't want to be here, as if to say, " _Tout le monde fait ça_ ," but there wasn't really much point in saying anything—and in fact, his being Romanian was probably a point in his favor. The laziest _dépanneur_ can see that he has a good deal going for him: the Frenchman has spent time abroad, so he knows about them, but the Romanian guy isn't all that old, and he looks kind of like a student. We're told a million times that in France you have to learn two languages: English and French. No one learns Romanian. In all likelihood, the man was Romanian, but what the hell could the woman know about Romanian, except that it's the language of her childhood? She doesn't live in Romania; she hasn't even been there, and she probably never will. Maybe she went there a few years ago with some guy she met in a pub; she had to go back, so they went there together. A Frenchman would have taken her there with him as a wife, and at the end of a year, the two of them would have moved into a tiny Romanian-style house somewhere near a town square. What are you going to do with your English when you're in Romania, by the way? That was the least interesting point about Romanian that I was taught during my first year of French studies. She didn't really understand Romanian, that's why she didn't understand " _dépanneur_ " and " _dépanneurs_." I've never really understood the fuss about learning English. It doesn't really exist; it's a dialect. There are no books in English in my local library—I checked. Why should we try and learn a language that nobody speaks anymore? I think you should just learn French. Or maybe you should learn German and English and Romanian—whatever you like. And we should learn English to talk to people who speak nothing but English; and if you're a _dépanneur_ or _dépanneuse_ in France, then you should learn French, even though people don't understand it all that well; and we should learn Spanish if we can, because Spanish is a beautiful language. On top of which, there's the question of what you do when you've got a car accident and you don't understand anything anybody says to you. Of course, you won't really have time for that in France, because you'll all be too busy working your butts off to get through your two-year master's program, and making sure you've got enough money to pay for the school and the next school. In my opinion, the people who should be teaching French aren't always the ones who teach French. And by that, I don't just mean private lessons, either. I'm talking about the teachers in French classes; not the French teachers who go to Canada, the ones who teach in high school, but the ones who've just finished their degree and they still think they're going to get teaching jobs. They think that they need to have at least three years' experience in teaching to be taken seriously, whereas it's probably better if you don't have any teaching experience. It's like a doctor who wants a job at a school without having been a doctor first; you know how they look down on him? I mean, what can they possibly teach him? You know those teachers who come back from school and start giving jobs to their friends? What would they do with a teacher who had no experience? All that would happen would be that you'd get teachers who know how to follow orders, and do as they're told, like obedient soldiers. I've seen some terrible things happen when French teachers come back from teaching in secondary schools.