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URLhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/magazine/learn-french.html
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Meta TitleI Kept Failing to Learn French. This Is What Finally Worked. - The New York Times
Meta DescriptionDoing exercises in a book was très terrible. A friend suggested something more radical.
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Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Letter of Recommendation Doing exercises in a book was très terrible. A friend suggested something more radical. Credit... Illustration by Vartika Sharma Aug. 21, 2024 There’s a scene I love in the movie “Husbands,” when John Cassavetes, performing in his own film, is attempting to smooth-talk a beautiful blonde in a London casino. “What languages do you speak?” he asks her. None, she answers. “I’m going to give you a little bit of French,” he says, before launching, with seductive gravitas, into a language that sounds like French. But the words are nonsense. It’s fake French. “You like Italian?” he asks, and then he does his fake version. The woman laughs and says, “It’s not real.” “It’s real to me ,” he replies. I saw that film at a cinema in the Latin Quarter with my husband two decades back, when we were first dating and he was showing me “his Paris,” a place where he had lived for a time. My husband is American but reads in French and also translates it. French history and culture, its writers, philosophers, filmmakers, were a big part of his life, and eventually mine, too, except that the only French I spoke was the pretend version Cassavetes uses to hit on a woman in a bar. I had studied Italian in college and kept it up, on and off. I enrolled in intensive Spanish when I first moved to Los Angeles, long ago, but as I progressed I noticed that I was losing my Italian, as if, to make room for the Spanish, it was being trundled to some remote storage facility, perhaps never to be seen again. I quit the Spanish and focused on preserving my Italian. Some people are fundamentally monolingual, I decided somewhere along the way, and I might be among them. This liberated me from the idea that it’s “virtuous” to be a polyglot. Every true polyglot I’ve known either had foreign languages at home or went to fancy schools or otherwise had access to learn them from a young age. They weren’t morally superior, just luckier. After we had our son, we enrolled him in a French school: He could be among the lucky. We visited France every summer, but I considered it impossible that I would learn French deep into adulthood. A big part of it was the accent: I felt condemned, a priori, for my failed “r.” Even people who had merely taken high school French could do that “r.” I could not, and I wasn’t willing to broadcast my coarseness by attempting to try. Three years ago, when I learned that a friend of mine had taken it upon herself to learn French well enough to write and deliver an artist’s statement at a museum, my certainty that it was “too late” was undermined. This friend is uniquely driven and brilliant, but the essence of her achievement was something simple: willingness. Why couldn’t I, too, be willing? I found a teacher who came highly recommended but was hesitant; she did not often teach beginners. I wanted to show her I wasn’t a lost cause. We made progress, which was satisfying for both of us. My family was less impressed. Stop talking so loudly, they would say, and don’t make it sound so fraught . Focus on intonation, they advised, not the accent. French words, my son informed me, just didn’t fit well in my mouth. My husband described a fluent American he knew who rolled around Paris with a flat “r” and was perfectly understood. Just do that, he suggested. But it was too late for me to preserve a flat “r”; I was already deep into my botched accent and unable to turn back. Two years into this pursuit, I was at a film festival in Lisbon surrounded by Europeans who kept switching into French. I confessed to a Portuguese filmmaker, Marta Mateus, that I was trying to learn it, and she, and then others, took up a concerted project of always addressing me in French, an act of generous optimism that I would eventually catch on. I was a judge at this festival, and after long days at movies, I forced myself to interact in French at midnight dinners and then returned to my room, depleted and without hope. I could not really converse. I didn’t have a mind for languages. Doing dumb exercises in a book, it turned out, was a different world from trying to have an intelligent conversation with Jean-Luc Godard’s longtime collaborator, Fabrice Aragno. Marta, who had the most faith in me, had a radical suggestion: Go to Paris, she said, and get a teacher to talk to you for several hours every day. This was what she had done, and now she spoke French with ease. That’s because you’re European , I whined. But she was unconvinced that I should take shelter in low expectations. I was, in fact, planning a trip to Paris, to write for a month. I skipped the plan to write and instead enrolled in intensive daily language instruction. By the end of that stay, I turned a corner. I can now hold a conversation; I can speak in French for an entire meal, although with close friends, I do that for only so long before veering into English and a higher level of communication than I’m capable of in French. My pronunciation is less labored now, and though I still have a long way to go, the more I learn, the better I understand what I’m up to. I don’t exactly need French for practical reasons. But I’m attracted to it: It’s a realm where I am unmoored, stripped of what comes easily to me. The writer, the artist, uses rhetoric and imagination, intuition and irony, to conquer reality. They take in cues, and form reactions, always with their secret mental notes about everything. French, meanwhile, is an authoritative structure. To follow it, I can’t just “hear” as I do in my native tongue. I must stand at attention and go beyond what’s real for me , as Cassavetes puts it, to what’s real for others: an expanded world I have no need to “conquer” and, instead, to which I can only ever modestly hope to submit . A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 25, 2024 , Page 16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Learning a Language . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe Related Content Letter of Recommendation Celebrating the overlooked and underappreciated. Illustration by Jose Flores Illustration by Nadiia Zhelieznova Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times More in Magazine Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times Illustration by Celyn Brazier Illustration by Tomi Um Illustration by Denise Nestor Editors’ Picks Boston Globe Allyson Riggs/Apple TV Trending in The Times Eduardo Munoz/Reuters Hannah Cousins Cj Rivera/Invision, via Associated Press, Eduardo Munoz/Reuters, Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Andrew Purcell for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Carrie Purcell. Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times Jack Smith/Associated Press @Travelees via YouTube, via Reuters Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Markdown
[Skip to content](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/magazine/learn-french.html#site-content)[Skip to site index](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/magazine/learn-french.html#site-index) Search & Section Navigation Section Navigation Search [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fsubscription%2Fonboarding-offer%3FcampaignId%3D7JFJX%26EXIT_URI%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.nytimes.com%252F2024%252F08%252F21%252Fmagazine%252Flearn-french.html&asset=masthead) Thursday, April 16, 2026 [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) [Magazine](https://www.nytimes.com/section/magazine)\|I Kept Failing to Learn French. This Is What Finally Worked. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/magazine/learn-french.html - Share full article Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/magazine/learn-french.html#after-top) Supported by [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/magazine/learn-french.html#after-sponsor) Letter of Recommendation # I Kept Failing to Learn French. This Is What Finally Worked. Doing exercises in a book was très terrible. A friend suggested something more radical. - Share full article ![An illustration of two people speaking to one another. There is a squiggly line going from one face to the other where shapes and colors jumble together.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/08/28/magazine/28mag-LOR-01/28mag-LOR-01-articleLarge.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Credit...Illustration by Vartika Sharma By Rachel Kushner Aug. 21, 2024 [See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?cs=0&hl=en&q=nytimes.com) There’s a scene I love in the movie “Husbands,” when John Cassavetes, performing in his own film, is attempting to smooth-talk a beautiful blonde in a London casino. “What languages do you speak?” he asks her. None, she answers. “I’m going to give you a little bit of French,” he says, before launching, with seductive gravitas, into a language that *sounds* like French. But the words are nonsense. It’s fake French. “You like Italian?” he asks, and then he does his fake version. The woman laughs and says, “It’s not real.” “It’s real *to me*,” he replies. I saw that film at a cinema in the Latin Quarter with my husband two decades back, when we were first dating and he was showing me “his Paris,” a place where he had lived for a time. My husband is American but reads in French and also translates it. French history and culture, its writers, philosophers, filmmakers, were a big part of his life, and eventually mine, too, except that the only French I spoke was the pretend version Cassavetes uses to hit on a woman in a bar. I had studied Italian in college and kept it up, on and off. I enrolled in intensive Spanish when I first moved to Los Angeles, long ago, but as I progressed I noticed that I was losing my Italian, as if, to make room for the Spanish, it was being trundled to some remote storage facility, perhaps never to be seen again. I quit the Spanish and focused on preserving my Italian. Some people are fundamentally monolingual, I decided somewhere along the way, and I might be among them. This liberated me from the idea that it’s “virtuous” to be a polyglot. Every true polyglot I’ve known either had foreign languages at home or went to fancy schools or otherwise had access to learn them from a young age. They weren’t morally superior, just luckier. After we had our son, we enrolled him in a French school: He could be among the lucky. We visited France every summer, but I considered it impossible that I would learn French deep into adulthood. A big part of it was the accent: I felt condemned, a priori, for my failed “r.” Even people who had merely taken high school French could do that “r.” I could not, and I wasn’t willing to broadcast my coarseness by attempting to try. Three years ago, when I learned that a friend of mine had taken it upon herself to learn French well enough to write and deliver an artist’s statement at a museum, my certainty that it was “too late” was undermined. This friend is uniquely driven and brilliant, but the essence of her achievement was something simple: willingness. Why couldn’t I, too, be willing? I found a teacher who came highly recommended but was hesitant; she did not often teach beginners. I wanted to show her I wasn’t a lost cause. We made progress, which was satisfying for both of us. My family was less impressed. Stop talking so loudly, they would say, and don’t make it sound so *fraught*. Focus on intonation, they advised, not the accent. French words, my son informed me, just didn’t fit well in my mouth. My husband described a fluent American he knew who rolled around Paris with a flat “r” and was perfectly understood. Just do that, he suggested. But it was too late for me to preserve a flat “r”; I was already deep into my botched accent and unable to turn back. Two years into this pursuit, I was at a film festival in Lisbon surrounded by Europeans who kept switching into French. I confessed to a Portuguese filmmaker, Marta Mateus, that I was trying to learn it, and she, and then others, took up a concerted project of always addressing me in French, an act of generous optimism that I would eventually catch on. I was a judge at this festival, and after long days at movies, I forced myself to interact in French at midnight dinners and then returned to my room, depleted and without hope. I could not really converse. I didn’t have a mind for languages. Doing dumb exercises in a book, it turned out, was a different world from trying to have an intelligent conversation with Jean-Luc Godard’s longtime collaborator, Fabrice Aragno. Marta, who had the most faith in me, had a radical suggestion: Go to Paris, she said, and get a teacher to talk to you for several hours every day. This was what she had done, and now she spoke French with ease. *That’s because you’re European*, I whined. But she was unconvinced that I should take shelter in low expectations. I was, in fact, planning a trip to Paris, to write for a month. I skipped the plan to write and instead enrolled in intensive daily language instruction. By the end of that stay, I turned a corner. I can now hold a conversation; I can speak in French for an entire meal, although with close friends, I do that for only so long before veering into English and a higher level of communication than I’m capable of in French. My pronunciation is less labored now, and though I still have a long way to go, the more I learn, the better I understand what I’m up to. I don’t exactly *need* French for practical reasons. But I’m attracted to it: It’s a realm where I am unmoored, stripped of what comes easily to me. The writer, the artist, uses rhetoric and imagination, intuition and irony, to conquer reality. They take in cues, and form reactions, always with their secret mental notes about everything. French, meanwhile, is an authoritative structure. To follow it, I can’t just “hear” as I do in my native tongue. I must stand at attention and go beyond what’s real *for me*, as Cassavetes puts it, to what’s real for others: an expanded world I have no need to “conquer” and, instead, to which I can only ever modestly hope to *submit*. ## Editors’ Picks [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/03/26/well/WELL-UPLIFTING-BOOKS-image/WELL-UPLIFTING-BOOKS-image-thumbLarge.jpg)5 Books to Lift You Up During Life’s Hardest Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/well/uplifting-books.html) [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/26/books/review/26TBR-Prose-FBHoriz/26TBR-Prose-FBHoriz-thumbLarge.jpg)Bob Dylan and the Beatles: When the Fab Four Became the Fab Five](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/books/review/where-the-music-had-to-go-jim-windolf.html) [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/12/multimedia/00biz-corneroffice-peloton-vgzp/00biz-corneroffice-peloton-vgzp-thumbLarge.jpg)Peloton’s Latest Leader Thinks He Can Coach It Back to Health](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/business/peloton-peter-stern.html) Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/magazine/learn-french.html#after-pp_edpick) A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 25, 2024, Page 16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Learning a Language. [Order Reprints](https://nytimes.wrightsmedia.com/) \| [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) \| [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY) See more on: [John Cassavetes](https://www.nytimes.com/topic/john-cassavetes) - Share full article *** ## Explore The New York Times Magazine *** - **I Feel So Sorry for My A.I. Sunglasses:** Plenty of people hate Mark Zuckerberg’s superintelligent, supercharged spectacles. [Our writer was ready to hate them, too](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/magazine/ai-sunglasses-meta-zuckerberg.html). - **The Rise and Fall and Rise of Michael Jackson:** A new biopic is the latest move in the Jackson estate’s [posthumous — and lucrative — rehabilitation campaign](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/magazine/michael-jackson-biopic-estate.html). - **Not Knowing How A.I. 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Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/magazine/learn-french.html#after-top) Letter of Recommendation Doing exercises in a book was très terrible. A friend suggested something more radical. ![An illustration of two people speaking to one another. There is a squiggly line going from one face to the other where shapes and colors jumble together.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/08/28/magazine/28mag-LOR-01/28mag-LOR-01-articleLarge.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Credit...Illustration by Vartika Sharma Aug. 21, 2024 There’s a scene I love in the movie “Husbands,” when John Cassavetes, performing in his own film, is attempting to smooth-talk a beautiful blonde in a London casino. “What languages do you speak?” he asks her. None, she answers. “I’m going to give you a little bit of French,” he says, before launching, with seductive gravitas, into a language that *sounds* like French. But the words are nonsense. It’s fake French. “You like Italian?” he asks, and then he does his fake version. The woman laughs and says, “It’s not real.” “It’s real *to me*,” he replies. I saw that film at a cinema in the Latin Quarter with my husband two decades back, when we were first dating and he was showing me “his Paris,” a place where he had lived for a time. My husband is American but reads in French and also translates it. French history and culture, its writers, philosophers, filmmakers, were a big part of his life, and eventually mine, too, except that the only French I spoke was the pretend version Cassavetes uses to hit on a woman in a bar. I had studied Italian in college and kept it up, on and off. I enrolled in intensive Spanish when I first moved to Los Angeles, long ago, but as I progressed I noticed that I was losing my Italian, as if, to make room for the Spanish, it was being trundled to some remote storage facility, perhaps never to be seen again. I quit the Spanish and focused on preserving my Italian. Some people are fundamentally monolingual, I decided somewhere along the way, and I might be among them. This liberated me from the idea that it’s “virtuous” to be a polyglot. Every true polyglot I’ve known either had foreign languages at home or went to fancy schools or otherwise had access to learn them from a young age. They weren’t morally superior, just luckier. After we had our son, we enrolled him in a French school: He could be among the lucky. We visited France every summer, but I considered it impossible that I would learn French deep into adulthood. A big part of it was the accent: I felt condemned, a priori, for my failed “r.” Even people who had merely taken high school French could do that “r.” I could not, and I wasn’t willing to broadcast my coarseness by attempting to try. Three years ago, when I learned that a friend of mine had taken it upon herself to learn French well enough to write and deliver an artist’s statement at a museum, my certainty that it was “too late” was undermined. This friend is uniquely driven and brilliant, but the essence of her achievement was something simple: willingness. Why couldn’t I, too, be willing? I found a teacher who came highly recommended but was hesitant; she did not often teach beginners. I wanted to show her I wasn’t a lost cause. We made progress, which was satisfying for both of us. My family was less impressed. Stop talking so loudly, they would say, and don’t make it sound so *fraught*. Focus on intonation, they advised, not the accent. French words, my son informed me, just didn’t fit well in my mouth. My husband described a fluent American he knew who rolled around Paris with a flat “r” and was perfectly understood. Just do that, he suggested. But it was too late for me to preserve a flat “r”; I was already deep into my botched accent and unable to turn back. Two years into this pursuit, I was at a film festival in Lisbon surrounded by Europeans who kept switching into French. I confessed to a Portuguese filmmaker, Marta Mateus, that I was trying to learn it, and she, and then others, took up a concerted project of always addressing me in French, an act of generous optimism that I would eventually catch on. I was a judge at this festival, and after long days at movies, I forced myself to interact in French at midnight dinners and then returned to my room, depleted and without hope. I could not really converse. I didn’t have a mind for languages. Doing dumb exercises in a book, it turned out, was a different world from trying to have an intelligent conversation with Jean-Luc Godard’s longtime collaborator, Fabrice Aragno. Marta, who had the most faith in me, had a radical suggestion: Go to Paris, she said, and get a teacher to talk to you for several hours every day. This was what she had done, and now she spoke French with ease. *That’s because you’re European*, I whined. But she was unconvinced that I should take shelter in low expectations. I was, in fact, planning a trip to Paris, to write for a month. I skipped the plan to write and instead enrolled in intensive daily language instruction. By the end of that stay, I turned a corner. I can now hold a conversation; I can speak in French for an entire meal, although with close friends, I do that for only so long before veering into English and a higher level of communication than I’m capable of in French. My pronunciation is less labored now, and though I still have a long way to go, the more I learn, the better I understand what I’m up to. I don’t exactly *need* French for practical reasons. But I’m attracted to it: It’s a realm where I am unmoored, stripped of what comes easily to me. The writer, the artist, uses rhetoric and imagination, intuition and irony, to conquer reality. They take in cues, and form reactions, always with their secret mental notes about everything. French, meanwhile, is an authoritative structure. To follow it, I can’t just “hear” as I do in my native tongue. I must stand at attention and go beyond what’s real *for me*, as Cassavetes puts it, to what’s real for others: an expanded world I have no need to “conquer” and, instead, to which I can only ever modestly hope to *submit*. A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 25, 2024, Page 16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Learning a Language. [Order Reprints](https://nytimes.wrightsmedia.com/) \| [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) \| [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY) ## Related Content [Letter of Recommendation](https://www.nytimes.com/column/letter-of-recommendation) Celebrating the overlooked and underappreciated. - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/03/29/magazine/29mag-lor-1/29mag-lor-1-thumbLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Illustration by Jose Flores - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/03/22/magazine/22mag-lor-2/22mag-lor-2-thumbLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Illustration by Nadiia Zhelieznova - Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times [More in Magazine](https://www.nytimes.com/section/magazine) - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/19/magazine/19mag-interview-dunham-02/19mag-interview-dunham-02-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/12/magazine/12mag-hodgman/12mag-hodgman-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Illustration by Celyn Brazier - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/19/magazine/19mag-ethicist-onlineonly/19mag-ethicist-onlineonly-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Illustration by Tomi Um - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/03/20/magazine/mag-12vegetative-illo-h/mag-12vegetative-illo-h-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Illustration by Denise Nestor Editors’ Picks - ![Emily Sweeney, who has worked at The Boston Globe since 2001, has been relaying the latest headlines from behind a desk or on roller blades.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/15/multimedia/15ST-EMILY-BOSTONIAN-stills-01-hgmt/15ST-EMILY-BOSTONIAN-stills-01-hgmt-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Boston Globe - ![Michelle Pfeiffer and Elle Fanning play mother and daughter in “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” premiering Wednesday on Apple TV.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/15/multimedia/15margo-hcfv/15margo-hcfv-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Allyson Riggs/Apple TV Trending in The Times - ![Damon Jones played for several teams during his N.B.A. career, including the Cleveland Cavaliers.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/16/multimedia/16met-bball-gambling-wpqz/16met-bball-gambling-wpqz-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Eduardo Munoz/Reuters - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/15/t-magazine/tmag-anaotmy-bedcore/tmag-anaotmy-bedcore-square640-v3.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Hannah Cousins - ![Ruben Santiago-Hudson and Kara Young, left and center, will star in a new Dominique Morisseau play, while Bill Irwin, right, will star in a revival of “The Imaginary Invalid.”](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/16/arts/16cul-moliere-monty-combo/16cul-moliere-monty-combo-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Cj Rivera/Invision, via Associated Press, Eduardo Munoz/Reuters, Sara Krulwich/The New York Times - ![Jerrelle Guy’s strawberry spoon cake.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/02/21/dining/17Spoonbread-a-copy/17Spoonbread-a-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Andrew Purcell for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Carrie Purcell. - ![Faiz Shakir, the executive director of More Perfect Union and a senior adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, has cast the organization as a progressive response along class lines to an elite world of universities still captured by great wealth.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/14/us/politics/pol-campus-dems/pol-campus-dems-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg - ![A technician drilling into a piece of a skull to obtain powder from which DNA could be extracted in David Reich’s lab at Harvard University.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/15/multimedia/15HS-SELECTION-01-phvz/15HS-SELECTION-01-phvz-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times - ![The TAG Heuer Monaco Evergraph.The brand’s heritage director, Nicholas Biebuyck, said the watch would “change people’s perceptions of TAG Heuer.”](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/14/multimedia/14sp-watches-new-short-inyt-vjtz/14sp-watches-new-short-inyt-vjtz-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) - ![With the help of a giant crane, Keiko is transported into the pool at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/11/16/podcasts/16newsletter-the-good-whale-03/16newsletter-the-good-whale-03-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Jack Smith/Associated Press - @Travelees via YouTube, via Reuters - ![Four people and a dog in Lagoon Valley Park.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/04/15/multimedia/15re-living-in-Vacaville-fzkm/15re-living-in-Vacaville-fzkm-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/magazine/learn-french.html#after-bottom)
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Content Metadata
Languageen
Authornull
Publish Time2024-08-21 09:02:33 (1 year ago)
Original Publish Time2024-08-21 09:02:33 (1 year ago)
RepublishedNo
Word Count (Total)1,902
Word Count (Content)1,187
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