*Jane in Paris*
According to the Fulbright Commission, I officially passed the halfway point of my 9 month grant yesterday. The date also served as a deadline for my midyear report, which concerned the progress of my research and integration into French culture. As I answered the questions I realized that I am certainly not wasting the time given to me.
My contact with real French people increased from almost nothing when I decided to join a French Protestant church one month ago. Since then I have attended four worship services given entirely in French, eaten a meal with several other church goers three times, and last week I attempted the scariest thing for the first time: attending the college student group. This was stressful because as tends to be the case in the US, younger people speak very fast, and like in English one can take a lot of short cuts and use a lot of slang in modern French. But I want to learn how to speak real French, with real French people, so I had to go.
The youth pastor of the church is British, but he speaks French fluently and just as fast as the students. The group consisted of about 10 of us, who filtered in slowly as we gathered at the beginning to eat dinner. During dinner I spoke a little bit about myself and tried to hang on to stories the other students told at a blistering pace. After the meal we sang some Christian songs, and some of them were funny to me because they were American songs that I knew quite well that had been translated ("Lord I Lift Your Name on High" was one of them). Then we undertook a fairly complicated conversation that combined the Lord of the Rings, the Bible, and how the modern Christian fits into history. As it seems conversations with young Christians often go these days, we ended up in a heated argument about the afterlife. I say "we" because by this point I could understand most of the conversation well, and I had things to say in my head, but the pace of the discussion was much too fast for me to interject. Alex, the leader, had to call for us to stop talking several times before it finally happened.
So on the one hand I feel like my ability to comprehend spoken French has really gotten better, but my speaking ability is still frustratingly inconsistent. I find that because rhythm and exact pronunciation are so integral to speaking French I need to warm up. Today, for instance, I had to go pick up a package in a small town outside of France, and when the man at the reception desk began speaking to me with a heavy non-French accent I couldn't understand him at all. "Oh, you are not French," he said after awhile. It's still difficult for me to speak with someone suddenly like this. The longer I speak with someone the better I tend to pronounce things and to use more complex grammatical constructions. Because I speak the language so inconsistently I have gotten everything from "she is injuring the French language" (an exchange between two people at a US university fair that I understood perfectly well) to "you speak French very well." I think that sometimes people say the latter to mean that I pronounce the language well, which is no small feat in itself.
It's fun to take note of the strange changes taking place in the brain when I am learning a new language. When I spent two months in Germany as an undergraduate I experienced a period of about a week towards the beginning of my stay when I forgot scores of English words (one of them was "surprise," for instance). I could actually tell that my brain was rearranging the structures that deal with language to make room for German. Then when I began to learn French a year later German always seemed to get in the way, especially when it came to numbers. Now that I am living in France but spending considerable time in Austria as well it isn't too difficult for me to switch between the two languages. The French, however, is now impinging upon the German in my head because my German pronunciation has become to my ear quite tainted by French sounds. Nick is in the process of learning to speak German with real Germanophones at the same time, and so there are often funny moments during our Skype conversations where neither of us are getting our English out very well.
I would be interested to hear about other people's experiences with foreign language. It has been so difficult to learn these languages over the last ten years, but persevering until I actually got them "in my head" has been an ample reward.
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I wish I could speak the person who said you were injuring the French language. I would like to ask her some questions. Like, "would you rather she not even try to learn your language?" "If she did that, and only spoke English while in your country, would you then criticize her for expecting people in France to speak English, and criticize her for not even trying to learn your langauge?" "Why are you a bitch?"
ReplyDeleteYou know, questions like that.
I find language fascinating. I've never learned a language well enough to speak it fluently, so I can't speak to that experience. I can speak to the experience of different dialects. During my senior year in high school, I started working at a agriculture research station. I worked with a PhD from Tanzania, and a MS from China. They had a hard time understanding my very thick Southern accent. I started paying attention to how I pronounced words. I started to purposely change the way I spoke the English language in order to better communicate with them. I stopped elongating my i's, and changed them from monophthongs to diphthongs. I noticed that in my dialect, we put the accent on different syllables in some words than most other English dialects. So I started adjusting accordingly. It became quite natural after sometime. I could switch back to my "normal" way of speaking quite easily. But it got to the point I paid close attention to my speech when meeting new people, especially when I went to University and was around lots of academia people. For some reason, I thought this was a "better" way to speak. Now, I have some regrets about that. I more or less speak the "new" way, but as you well know, I sometimes slip back into my old ways when I'm speaking passionately about something. Of course, parts my original dialect are always there, but I have "lost" my old way of speaking in a way. It's not natural anymore. I have to consciously and purposely go back to it when I want to. Sorry for babbling on about this. Would love to talk more about it when you're back.