I remember talking with one of my professors before I came to France.
He gave me this advice, "When you go to France, convince yourself that you are bad at French."
Well, I thought that wouldn't be too hard. I had some vague idea that speaking a foreign language in a foreign country would be a little difficult.
He continued, "When you are speaking in France, be patient with yourself. Don't worry about if you make mistakes, just make sure that people understand what you are saying."
Unfortunately for me, I underestimated just how easy it would be to convince myself that I was bad at French. My first conversation, or rather attempted conversation, in French was with an SNCF, the nationalized French train service, worker at the airport. I approached his desk and politely asked for a train ticket to Dijon in French. He understood me just fine, but I wasn't prepared for was his response. Rolling out of his mouth came a barrage of completely unintelligible French phrases. So unintelligible, in fact, that I was stunned speechless. Noticing this, he asked me in English the same question he was trying to convey in French, quite simply, "Have you ever traveled with SNCF before?"
Over a month into the program now, and I feel like this is still happening too often. A French speaker will say something in French that I should recognize but can't, and I have to ask them to repeat what they said a second, third, or fourth time. What's even more frustrating is the fact that they will often switch to English when they see that I'm having trouble.
As frustrating as immersion is, what's even more irksome is the difficulty I'm having in getting immersed. Everyone speaks English, and this is the common language of most of the students in the International Residence, many of whom have never taken a French class before this semester. Even those who have taken French classes before are often more comfortable speaking in English; some of them will even become annoyed when you try to speak French with them.
I'm not trying to give you a bad impression of the other students. For every student that insists on speaking in English, there is one who will gladly speak French with you, yet I can't help but feel that I'd be making more progress if I was totally immersed all the time. Of course, I imagine that if I was totally immersed, my experience here would be much more exhausting and lonely.
I'm continuing to seek out new opportunities to get immersed. I've joined two martial arts clubs here, both of which are conducted entirely in French. I've started reading a novel in French, and I try to listen to French radio programs at night before I go to bed. Even with these improvements though, the anglophone speakers are always around the corner, and I realize now that I was as unprepared for them as I was for the francophone speakers.
I think I should just copy this entry and put it on my own blog. I feel exactly the same way.
ReplyDeleteI think its sort of like this in every non-mainly-English country, but with interesting little quirks. My boyfriend is studying in Holland, where at first they only speak Dutch to you if they're trying to irritate you on purpose, then they speak only English to you in order to show their superiority. Once you can carry on a conversation with a Dutch person and they don't switch back to English, you've got the language down. I've been there twice so far and I find it pretty easy to understand, I can even order food (but not figure out how much money they're asking me for--haven't figured out the numbers yet because unfortunately "two" in Dutch sounds like "three" in German, and good luck remembering that "twenty" is pronounced "tvin-tock") but for some reason it's a lot harder to speak than read or understand, I think because of a lot of really strange vowel sounds. I've only taken a little French, but at least to me, French is the other way around, it's fairly easy to put together a simple but coherent and well-enunciated sentence, but it's virtually impossible for me to understand any real French just by hearing it.
ReplyDeleteI'm finding that I can speak and understand standardized French pretty well, though there are of course the occasional vocabulary gaps. The issue is when it drifts into idiom and habitual speech. Accents are also a problem. There are a lot of different French accents, and Dijon is a pretty cosmopolitan area, as it's one of the central hubs for the train system. A Swiss Francophone speaker is much easier understand than someone from North Africa. I can communicate with the other students international students at the university, but that's only because they're operating on standardized French. When I get out into the real France, things are much more frustrating. In fact, I'm noticing that when a French person realizes that I'm foreign, their speech will change. They'll enunciate more, and refrain from using idiomatic phrases. It'll be quite a while I think before I can truly communicate without having others cater to my language level.
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