I am David Miller, an American lover of French language and culture. I live in the US, in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, a state I’ve inhabited for almost all of my 51 years of life. I work as a software engineer at Google in Cambridge and I have three increasingly independent and adult children. I have no French ancestry that I’m aware of.
I have never taken a formal exam as an adult, but have been taking formal classes and lessons since 2012. On my better days I have a DELF C2 command of French (on my worse days more like B2/C1). My other hobbies include teaching, cooking, mathematics, politics, history, singing, piano, guitar, and occasionally banjo.
My French Journey
I started studying French at my public middle school at the age of 11, taking an ordinary group class for 42 minutes each day. I had studied Hebrew for several years at our synagogue’s after-school program, learning enough that it took me 18 months of French class before my command of Hebrew was eclipsed by my command of French. I still remember the 7th grade vocabulary quiz where I couldn’t remember the French word for tomorrow, and so wrote down מָחָר instead of demain. My French teacher failed to notice and graded my paper 100% correct, which gives you some sense of how rigorous the teaching was at this school.
I followed the standard French curriculum our school had to offer for 6 years, culminating in AP French my senior year of high school. I also studied German for a couple years in high school to avoid taking history classes. I read a few French novels more than the curriculum required and studied for the College Board exam, but didn’t otherwise go out of my way to study the language. At college I gazed desirously at the French offerings in the course catalog, but never went as far as registering for one.
My family took a short vacation to Quebec somewhere in there, which I mostly remember for its excellent bowls of hot chocolate in the morning. I traveled to France for the first time just after graduating from college. My friend and I did a two-week ramble from Paris, down the Tarn river valley, through Lyon, Montpellier, Avignon, and Annecy, and then into Italy.
I worked for a US division of Aventis, a French pharmaceutical company, for a couple years starting in 2001, but beyond exchanging small-talk with the odd visiting French colleague I never had occasion to use my French. I did get invited to one corporate event in Paris, which I was very excited about. Alas, by “Paris”, they meant EuroDisney, where we were housed in the New York Hotel. I managed to salvage some benefit of being there by skipping the conference events one afternoon, heading to the nearest mall, and stumbling upon a FNAC for the first time in my life. I bought for my kids a healthy selection of French books, CDs, and toys, introducing me to the world of comptines and chansons that was new to me.
My adult French journey really took off in 2011 when my previous manager at Google mentioned to me that he was looking for engineers to move from the US to Google Paris in order to expand a remote team he ran there. Family considerations made that a non-starter, but I joked with him that if he ever needed someone for two-week consulting gig in France, I’d be happy to go and tack on a vacation at the end. That, too, was a non-starter, and so we left it at that. But we kept in touch, and the situation evolved such that by fall of 2012 we had agreed I would spend all of summer 2013 working in the Paris office with his team.
Summer in Paris! An opportunity not to be missed. I discovered that Boston has an outstanding French Cultural Center, which I promptly joined and began visiting twice a week for classes. I also enrolled the children in classes there and began reading French books again. When we landed a CDG airport 9 months later, I felt my French skills were likely back to what they had been at the end of high school.
We spent a wonderful time in Paris that summer and got to know the city fairly well. We rarely ventured out of le Péripherique, and my French office colleagues spoke mostly in English for work, but it was wonderful nonetheless. I fell in love with the French theater, which I found I could understand if the style was not too colloquial. The kids were enrolled in French summer schools for part of the time, and toured the city with my wife some other weeks. I took a couple vacation weeks with them at the end so we could experience Paris as a family. When la rentrée arrived, we were ready to go home, but also aware what a gift we’d just enjoyed.
With summer in the rear view mirror, no more need to take French classes. Returning to my previous US work group took a lot of my attention, as did parenting adolescents. But after a few months it occurred to me that I didn’t need a specific reason to take French lessons, I could just do so as a hobby. So I resumed taking classes and then private lessons. I arranged two-week stints telecommuting from the Google Paris office. I discovered French Today’s adult immersion programs and spent weeks in Amiens and Toulouse studying. I read French novels and saw French plays and listened to French podcasts and watched French TV and sang French songs. I still do.
Frankly (Francly?), I’ve gone a bit overboard. My family has long since gotten tired of me talking about my latest French morceau, and my friends are not far behind. So, I started this blog. Now I can get all giddy about my francophilia in writing and send it off into the ether. Only interested parties need read about it.