I’m not here to try and make excuses.
OK……..maybe just a leeedle bit.
Honestly, I’m embarrassed. I’ve been living in France for almost exactly a year, and my French skills are still generally really embarrassing. And anything that helps even slightly to make it feel like it’s not entirely my fault is a glass from which I will readily sip.
Like, the whole thing is getting more embarrassing by the day, because there might be some people out there that would be expecting I’d get better with every day that passes.
No, I get better by about 0.6% every month.
I think, despite stereotypes, the average French person I encounter has been pretty good and nice about my pointing and shrugging and mumbling and red cheeks.
And a hell of a lot of them speak English, actually really well.
They’re always so apologetic, so self-conscious and ‘I’m so bad!’ about it, but they’re actually so good.
We’re there talking, in their home country, and they’re bending over backwards to communicate with this dumb, lazy foreigner that is living in their country, using their facilities and eating their baguettes.
If anyone should be apologising, it’s most definitely me.
Immersion, they said. The best possible way to learn a new language is by living in that country, being surrounded by the language and being forced to communicate with locals daily.
And I know plenty of people that it has worked for.
Just not me.
Why?
1. It’s really hard to be ok sounding like kid.
I’m a big fan of English, and I’ve spent a lot of time working on the way I use it conversationally so as to appear more intelligent than I actually am. I get to France, and suddenly I’m an idiot. I literally cannot open my mouth without sounding like a complete dick.
I mumble something in horrible French – sentences you might find in a five year-old’s school workbook, mixing up my masculines and feminines and speaking of yesterday as if it is yet to happen.
Basically, I hate feeling like a babbling kid. So I just don’t. I am a grown adult, dammit, and I like to sound like one. I want to use my big person words!
2. Every time someone doesn’t understand you, it kills your confidence.
I pick up new words regularly – spotting them on billboards or catching them in conversations, squirrelling them away to analyse on my Google Translate app. When I feel like I understand the word properly, how to use it, and also, how to say it, I’ll give it a crack in real-life.
Being met with a blank stare, I can tell you, is not the response you’d be hoping for.
It kinda kills any shred of confidence you might have had, especially if you’re speaking to a stranger who is in no hurry to help correct you.
Is it too much to ask for confetti cannons with every successful verb usage?
3. Finding English-speaking friends easily stunts your progress.
Being quickly surrounded by English-speaking friends in France has been a gift and curse. Obviously, I’m not horrendously lonely, so that’s a plus – but it hasn’t exactly helped my progress with the ol’ Français.
Even my French friends don’t attempt to speak French to me anymore. English is what we communicate best with, and it would put a serious downer on girly gossiping if I started stumbling along in toddler French.
Should I have tried harder to speak with them in their own language (which only seems fair) when I first met them? Yeah. Yes I should have.
5. I’m getting away with the easy stuff.
When you’re in the situation I currently find myself, you could barely call it immersion. At best, I dip a toe in once or twice a day.
I’m not going out to a job every day, and when I interact with people, it’s usually short and sharp, like at the supermarket or the boulangerie down the road.
I’m not really forced to communicate. I’m not challenged.
I’m getting away with the simple stuff day to day, so there’s really no urgency to be better.
Seems lazy and unmotivated, and well, it is. Why would I bust a gut learning when I don’t need to, right? (that sounds scarily like something I might have said in my high school geography class)
7. I’m stuck in my comfort zone.
I use oui and merci like they’re the only two words in existence. They’re comfortable, I’m confident with them, and they’re surprisingly versatile.
I wait for someone to say something, then I select oui, merci, or both, and if they say nothing, then I stare at them until they give me something I can work with.
The other day I realised I was saying bonne journée after people said bonne journée to me, which basically amounted to replying ‘have a good day’ to ‘have a good day’.
No.
I decided I better start saying ‘et vous’ (and you) instead, because that is a far more reasonable thing to say.
So I get a ‘bonne journée’ at the market, and ready to use my new, better words, I replied ‘urgh waahhs’ as my brain simultaneously exploded and froze. Cough, red face, turn away, speed walk to vehicle.
And this is why I don’t say things.
8. Over-thinking it
Generally, I’m just over-thinking the whole thing. I’m focusing on the conjugations I don’t know, instead of working on my basic conversational skills. I’m so concerned about getting it right that I’m frozen in don’t-even-try zone.
I’m forgetting that no one expects me to know everything. I’m forgetting that everyone has to start somewhere, and everyone that’s ever learnt another language has had to go through the process of messing up and sounding like an idiot, before they started making sense.
If I could go back and tell myself one thing, and even if I could just tell myself something right now that I’d actually listen to – it would be don’t give so much of a shit.
Don’t worry about people judging you, don’t worry about fucking up – just have a crack, learn through your mistakes and you’ll get better.
Now. About that.
