Habla Frances? If Not, Perhaps New Paltz or Mazatlan Can Help You Net Those Elusive Verbs

NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — “Total immersion,” I said.

“You’re changing religions?”

“No. We’re learning a language.”

And off we drove, my husband and I, to the State University of New York at New Paltz in the Hudson River valley.

Some people go to New Paltz to climb rocks, hike trails or check out the town’s 17th-Century Huguenot settlement.

But we were going in order to talk French (beginning for my husband, intermediate for me). We’d let ourselves in for 15 class hours, plus homework, a whole weekend of French and nothing but French.

On the face of it, a language-immersion weekend seemed a splendid idea for a brief but exotic change of scene. New Paltz is an easy 90 miles from New York City. The $175 tuition (including Saturday lunch and Sunday bagel break) is cheaper than the fare to Paris.

Even better was the fact that apart from our teachers, who were getting paid for it, nobody French would be hearing us speak.

Of all languages, French is the most humiliating to talk badly . My husband and I imagined that in the “congenial and non-threatening atmosphere” promised by the brochure, we might find ourselves conversant enough to risk another trip to France.

“Leave your English and your ego at home,” advised Henry Urbanski, director of the department of foreign languages at Suny-New Paltz and founder of the immersion program 10 years ago.

So we showed up at the Friday night orientation meeting in sneakers and blue jeans. Our old college sweatshirts did nothing at all to alleviate our current freshman jitters.

Urbanski turned out to be an affable, multilingual man, whose faint but tantalizing accent carried souvenirs of a long voyage from his native Poland.

Welcoming several dozen students in the lecture hall, he tried to calm us down and cheer us up. He said grown-ups should learn a language as children do--by using it. He said we should not let our inhibitions get in the way.

Then he introduced a squad of peppy instructors, who addressed us in French, Spanish, Italian and German, rallied their students and led us off to linguistic confinement.

Hurrying after my teacher, a Madame Springer from Lille, France, I waved goodby to my husband, who was following a Madame Skarimbas from Nice. My classmates already were chatting among themselves in what sounded like fluent French.

It is such an elusive language, French. Whole syllables slip by unpronounced. Consonants are here today and gone tomorrow. Most vowels are literally unspeakable, at least by Americans, no matter how hard we try.

And grammar is not much easier. The lack of a neuter gender forces us to learn the sex of every noun in the world. Keys, houses and cars are women. Pencils, boats and hats are men.

What if I drown in this immersion? I said to myself.

Central as it seemed to my husband and me, language-learning is only a drop in the bucket-size trend of purposeful vacations.

Suny-New Paltz, happily in at the start, is busily keeping ahead with 11 campus weekends during the college year, six more at the Sheraton City Squire hotel in New York City and two-week summer programs on campus. Also offered are week-long sessions or “Tower of Babble” weekends at the nearby Mohonk Mountain House resort.

The latest in its overseas programs include a Caribbean language cruise, a language ski trip at Albertville, France, site of the ’92 Winter Olympics, and a language camp for teen-agers in Switzerland, all proliferating from the little town where the Catskill mountains meet the Walkill river.

About 16,000 people have been “immersed” so far. Though most come from the New York City area, pilgrims have appeared, surprisingly, from as far away as Texas and California.

“We must be an institution,” Urbanski said, “because we don’t advertise out there.”

The long-distance winners to date, however, are three employes of an American oil company in Saudi Arabia sent to New Paltz to study Arabic.

Gather enough “immersees” and the director will come up with a teacher of any language. Ideally, he or she will be what Urbanski calls a “native-speaker” trained in pedagogy.

The 16 languages offered in the brochure include Chinese, Swedish, Yiddish and Sign, but the shrinking world is expanding the list. Polish was added recently. Calls are coming in for Hungarian.

There is supposed to be a maximum of 10 students to a class, but it’s sometimes difficult to balance teacher supply and student demand. My husband and I were lucky. We each landed in a class of five.

People learning French are in a state of grace. Ambition, acquisition, competition, are put aside as the psyche is caught in the mysteries of language. You can listen to music, say, with closed eyes but French--with so many sound-alike words--requires open-eyed concentration. There’s no room, no time for ignoble thoughts, or any thought at all.

My classmates were graceful and alert, brave women all: an actress, a teacher of elementary school French, a businesswoman and a teacher of Russian. Whatever inhibitions came with us, we managed to squelch as the weekend progressed. Mme. Springer, a longtime teacher at New Paltz, loved us all because, as she said, were so dedicated.

I wasn’t at the top of the class but it didn’t matter. Everybody was supportive. We recited exercises. We described pictures. We reported accidents. We sang a song. We discussed office politics. We put on character masks and made up stories about who we were.

I learned more about these women than I know about some of my best friends. And all of it without a word of English. They know plenty about me, too, and they heard it in French.

Through it all, Mme. Springer never once winced.

Saturday’s buffet lunch took place at language-segregated tables, my husband’s class with mine. But after introductions, each group stayed with its own members; in my case, the French connection proving stronger than the marital bond.

My crowd could talk of many things, in the there and then as well as the here and now. My husband was confined to table utensils, the weather and body parts.

After lunch, Mme. Springer took us on a walking tour of Huguenot Street and the famous stone houses of Protestants who fled France after the revocation of the Treaty of Nantes in 1685. The Walloon church is still active, as is the old DuBois house, now functioning as a pleasant restaurant called Ft. DuBois.

We talked French all the way, of course, expanding our vocabulary along botanical and architectural lines and returning to campus braced for the second half of our dunking.

All went swimmingly. That night my husband and I slept at an inn chosen from a wide assortment of local lodgings. Unfortunately, our attic room seemed to be walled with plywood. Whispered words from next door came direct to our ears. Fortunately, we had the means to protect our privacy: We talked French.

The enchantment of Immersion continued on Sunday. Each member of my class had been assigned a 10-minute talk on any subject.

Diana, the businesswoman, was up all night writing hers. I slept (after our neighbors had fallen off) and then panicked over what I’d find to say and where I’d find the words to say it in.

But standing before my class, with four rapt faces--and Mme. Springer’s sympathetic one--drawing in my every nuance, I found myself going on and on, my French opening up and blossoming and proliferating with colloquialisms and idiomatic expressions I had never expected to fall under my control. It was fully 12 minutes before I noticed I’d gone overtime.

In the end, I hated to leave. My husband, too. We smiled all along our lovely drive home, choosing the long, cursive back roads past farms and orchards, vegetable stands and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

“Do you think we could risk Paris next spring?” my husband asked.

I shrugged.

“Pourquoi pas?” I replied. Why not?