How the language of love can change life

Madame Linda Kunz follows the way of the language of romance.

A French professor at UB for nearly 20 years, Kunz is part of the team bringing National French Week events and activities to campus. With budget cuts at local schools in the Western New York area, language programs are feeling the effects, and Kunz hopes the week's events will help keep the community aware of the importance of learning about other cultures and languages.

"I was just taken with it, the whole culture, everything about it," Kunz said of her French-speaking background. "There is so much of the world that is French speaking. It's good to have another language."

In the wake of French Week, Kunz hopes that the UB community can come to appreciate the French culture.

"They've influenced western thought," she said. "We have a great debt to the country, culturally speaking."

Originally from the Buffalo area, Kunz began learning French in high school and later earned her bachelor's degree in French education. She also studied psychology and German.

In her junior year, Kunz studied abroad in a one-year program in France at the Universit?(c) de Grenoble. She opted to stay with a French family instead of dorming, an experience that proved instrumental in helping her become fluent with the language.

"They just taught me so much," she said. "After a few weeks you get used to the accent and fill in the words."

For students who have taken classes in a language and know the basic background, Kunz said a six-month study abroad program where the language is spoken could greatly help in becoming fluent.

After graduation, Kunz moved to Geneva, Switzerland where she married her sweetheart from her year in Grenoble, a Swiss-German named Benard, also a French education major. Kunz was married in her husband's hometown in a ceremony spoken entirely in the Swiss-German dialect.

The couple spent the first nine years of their marriage residing in Geneva, where the citizens are French-speaking. There, she worked as a tutor and translator and her two sons, Jeremy and Andrew, were born.

Kunz said living and studying abroad, and being exposed to both French and Swiss-German, gave her new perspective on people and culture.

"I was just very much in my own world. Meeting different people made me much more interested in what was going on in the world," she said. "Every person I met thought their country was the best in the world."

"I just started realizing that everybody loves what they know, and if everybody only knows one thing, they will never realize there are so many other things they could love," she continued.

After a life of old architecture and cobble stone roads in Switzerland, Kunz and her husband moved back to the United States to study, where they ended up settling permanently. Kunz went on for her masters in teaching, and eventually her doctorate in French poetry, both earned at UB.

She currently teaches FR 151 and 152 as an adjunct lecturer. Her husband teaches French at Hutchinson Technical High School in Buffalo. They travel to Switzerland to visit family regularly, and the close proximity to Montreal in Canada keeps their French fresh.

For Kunz, learning another language has changed her views of the world.

"It expands your way of relating to the world," she said. "It let's you see things in different ways."

Kunz said that there has even been research that learning another language activates certain brain cells that could prevent the on-set of Alzheimer's disease.

"Your brain becomes very active thinking in another language," she said.

The poet Arthur Rimbaud is a particular favorite of hers, with the mantra, "Changer la Vie." In English, it means change life, or change the world.

"I've had an interesting life, and I think it's from studying foreign language," Kunz said. "It's still very vital in the world."