To "tu-toi "or not to "tu-toi"? (and other would-be cultural mishaps)

No matter how many times people try to explain it, there will always be confusion in figuring out which form of "you" to use in certain situations. The general (read: textbook) rule is that "tu" is informal, used with equals and family, and "vous" is formal and/or plural, used always when talking to more than one person, or if that one person is more important or older than you are. There are some obvious cases, yes (Queen of England = "vous," small child = "tu.") But what about all those "fine-line" situations? This inevitably leads to awkwardness, like "vous"-ing your host family au pair out of politeness until it makes you feel so uncomfortable because she seems more like an older sister that you start "tu-toi"-ing her. And hope no one notices.

Which leads me to the point of this entry: You learn a lot about the subtleties of language when you find yourself suddenly speaking and hearing a different one all the time. I still wake up and have to consciously switch my brain to French before attempting host family interaction (my "je parle français, je parle français, je suis à Paris et je parle français!" pep talk usually does the trick), but I have gotten to the point where it takes a minute to discern whether someone is speaking French or English because the comprehension levels are more or less equalling out. Hyper-cool. Anyways, regardless of all this, I have found that there are an incredible amount of creative ways you can mix up a phrase or mispronounce a word in French that leads to cultural misunderstandings by way of giggles/blank stares/some combination of the two depending on context.

With this in mind, I present to you my Top 5 French Language Mishaps. Consider yourselves warned. People were kind enough to explain the distinctions in advance on some occasions. On others, I learned the hard, albeit amusing way:

1) "Je suis excité" does NOT mean "I am excited" unless you are a small child. At least not in the traditional sense of the term. Think about it. Now never think those words in that order again, unless you're in a relevant situation in which case I don't really want to hear about it. (Thankfully I knew this ahead in time enough to avoid an unintentional awkward personal proclamation. We had suscipsions about this phrase from the get-go, and a waiter at The American Dream bar confirmed the rumors.)

2) A mere mispronunciation of the last sound in the commonly used phrase "merci beaucoup" - saying "khew" instead of "coo" - subtly changes the phrase from "thanks a lot" to "thanks, nice ass." Thanks to the Steve-from-Sex-and-the-City-lookalike bartender at a café for warning us about this one, demonstration included.

3) "Casse-noissettes" does not mean, as literal translation would have it, "break nuts." It took me a little while of listening to my seven-year-old host sister telling me a story and asking myself why on earth she was talking about breaking nuts until I realized she was in fact recounting the story of the Nutcracker. Pretty efficient term if you ask me. Don't think it would really fly in the U.S.

4) "Saucisse" is not the same thing as "saucissons." I thought I was ordering a salami sandwich and was somewhat put off when the entire boulangerie clientele laughed under their their breath (some less discretely than others) only to find out moments later that the owner thought I had asked for a whole uncooked sausage. At this point I had to put on my best sheepish "I'm a stupid American" smile and laugh along.

5) Putting "mon" (my) instead of "un" (a) in front of the word "ami(e)" turns a friend into a boyfriend. Our lovely director had the foresight to warn us about this a good four days after arriving in Paris, thus a good four days too late. It is now not unlikely that my host family is under the wrong impression that I have a) a boyfriend, b) a girlfriend, or c) several. Of each.

This is what they should really put in all those French textbooks. Knowing how to conjugate "avoir" in the subjunctive won't get you anywhere if all the Frenchies are already laughing because you just unwittingly issued a proclamation about your level of arousal.