Grimace: How to speak French without saying a word.

As you may already know, I have made many embarrassing errors while learning French since my arrival in Paris. One of those errors was a very basic misunderstanding of the scope and nature of the language itself. I thought that learning French was a matter of words that I needed to be able to speak and write-vocabulary to learn, verbs to conjugate and the grammar to put it all together.

What I didn't realize was that the French language is far more than words; it also includes a great variety of other sounds, facial expressions and physical gestures. This is the only language I have ever been exposed to where so much can be said without saying anything at all.

My favorite non-verbal French sound used for communication purposes is a peculiar technique that French people, especially women, have for saying "oui" without actually pronouncing the word. It is a short, quick inhalation of air-a brief gasp that sounds like a split-second, mono-syllabic "ee" sound-and is often accompanied by head-nodding. At first I didn't recognize this as speech, but have since seen it in use hundreds of times. Since it requires no movement of the mouth or lips, it is easy to not even notice that the person making the noise even did anything. It looks like some unseen third person in the room must have done it, as if this person were speaking to you through an invisible spirit occupying the same space. It sends a chill down my spine every time.

As for facial expressions, a typically articulate French person is so skilled in the subtle communicative use of eyebrows that they could be used to conduct an orchestra. On most human faces, eyebrows can move in two directions-up and down-but your average pair of French eyebrows have the agility and dexterity of an Olympic gymnast-vaulting high into the air to express surprise, violently plummeting to express disdain or, most impressive of all, gyrating, spinning, jerking and dancing like a gold medalist on a pommel horse to express all of the other thousands of emotions wrapped up in any given sentence. Little Mary Lou Retton would be impressed.

On the third category, physical gestures, I could write volumes. Let it suffice to say that the French have elevated the shoulder shrug to an art form. The French shrug includes innumerable variations, which are used to indicate vastly different emotions-everything from pure ambivalence to anger-in a variety of degree. I have seen everything from a non-committal, virtually motionless twitch of a shrug meaning "you there, you fly deranging my existence, be gone" to a full-body, full-contact Metro-passenger shrug meaning "should I throw you on the tracks now or later?"

Put it all together-the "ee" gasp, the gyrating eyebrows and the full-body shrug-and you have a complete thought that avoids the time-consuming work of remembering vocabulary, struggling through verb conjugation and tripping over grammar. So what if such physical antics would get you committed to a mental institution outside of France. Here, use body language properly and you have no further need to learn French.