When I speak French, I have a strong American accent. If there's a word in French that sounds like the English word, it's probably just coming out in English in the middle of my French sentence.
When I was little, my French grandparents lived next door to the mayor of their small village. In addition to being the mayor, he was a crusty old Corsican school teacher. I think he taught the equivalent of 5th grade or something (apparently being the mayor of a small Corsican village is not a full-time undertaking).
I will always remember that my grandmother thought it'd be fun to send me to school one day with him. He called me to the board to do some math problems in front of the class. I remember to this day, he wanted me to solve:
5,6
x 3,2
------
I felt like there was something here, something obvious I should be able to translate into a problem I knew how to do, but being in front of classroom of these slightly older French kids (I think I was in 4th grade) just stopped me in my tracks. I confessed I didn't know how to do it and sat back down. "I guess they don't teach that yet in America" the neighbor said. When the next kid went up and solved it out, I could tell that they were using commas where we would use periods for the decimal places and I felt stupid that I hadn't figured that out on my own. Even in the fourth grade, I could've figured out to write
17,92
To this day, there is a whole class of Corsican kids who think their math education is superior to American math...
Anyway, later that evening I was telling stories about the day in my broken French and I referred to the school teacher as le maire several times. But of course I was saying it American-style so it came out like the French word le meilleur ! Eventually my Mom laughingly corrected me "Kenny, he's not The Best, he's just the mayor" I said I knew, that I was calling him, Le Mayor!
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