Language Barrier

To be honest, though my Parisian life feels crowded with my daily errands and meetings and events, the vast majority of my time revolves around trying to learn this Godforsaken language. It is...challenging, to say the very least. I told someone today that "I don't think any single activity has induced as much self doubt as learning French." Which is probably true, but I'm actually not sure that it's fair to classify this immersive project as one singular activity. It kind of feels like I've taken ever aspect of my life and rotated it 90 to 180 degrees, which is a dizzying prospect to consider. So on top of spending hours a day in class and hours after class writing compositions or reading free newspapers or listing conjugations, I attempt to take advantage of every opportunity to practice my "French." I say "French" because even after 6 months of intense study and for no lack of effort on my part, I think that when I speak, even with a generous estimate, it only comes out as intelligible French about a quarter of the time. Sometimes it's franglish. Sometimes it's nonsense. But I'm trying. 25% of 1000 phrases a week is a lot more than 25% of 100.

So here I am, running full speed towards an illusive barrier. And this is still the grammar/vocab/conjugation/word order barrier. The thing that makes it so much harder (and it sounded so easy to start with, right?) Is that beyond this 5 story high steel force field is not, in fact, an open French meadow of lavender and bottomless onion soup. It is a 1.5 foot wide trap, enclosed on the other side by a bullet proof glass barrier that is so clear it appears to not even be there. This is the language barrier of which I will write today. The cultural language barrier. The wall that I fear I will not, or even more depressingly, potentially cannot be crossed.

I had a very good childhood friend visiting me this past week, and i was surprised to find that despite the fact that we could have both medaled in the sarcasm Olympics in our earlier days, nearly everything she said, nearly every joke she made, went completely over my head. Like I'm not talking I lunged and it was beyond my grasp by an inch. I'm talking I was in the nosebleeds behind home plate and she hit a homer out of left field. Like no register. No connection. How could something that once came so naturally be so completely foreign now? (And I'd like to take an opportunity to issue a formal apology to all of those whom I have upset or made uncomfortable with my sarcasm. Trust me. I get it now.)

And then, catching up with a friend on fb chat, she made an allusion which completely eluded me, which she explained only by saying that "oh, how funny, you don't get it because you're not here!" Which did not sit too well with some bubbling homesickness.

This is all just to say that as I walk down the infinitely long road towards French fluency, I walk farther and farther from the cultural component of English. It's kind of infuriating, but mostly because I know that I'm in no place to be compensating with French cultural fluency. Will I ever understand a french joke without a 5 minute explanation?

And I feel like I have enough of those anecdotes to fill a book, much less a blog post. But I'll treat you with an overarching and positive one: when I first met my now-landlady, she was a little cold (by American, not French standards). This is back when I could only say "bonjour" et "chic" et "un petit chien," all of which you can imagine are very useful in everyday Parisian life. Jokes. Anyway, fast forward three months, I can string a sentence together, however tenuously, and she gives me crème brûlée on a regular basis and we share our coffee and she talks to me about her country home and teaches me the word for wheelbarrow...in short, she likes me. She told me to tell the French bureaucrats that I am her American cousin if they gave me any trouble. 

Umm, what? We're family? We went from you not saying hello to me to being family? And while the French are notoriously moody, I think there's a bit more to this swing. I speak French, now! And despite the fact that I know that it's not very good, Liz complements and encourages me. She switches to English if she thinks I haven't understood. She teaches me phrases that I never would have learned in class. All because I can conjugate in the present tense! C'est un miracle, vraiment.

In reality, there is much more to the cultural language barrier, especially in French where the written and spoken forms are practically two languages. Slang and tone and double entendres can still elude me. But this idea, that we change, that we open up, depending on what language we are using, is fascinating, and also lasting. It's an "in," so to speak. It's a shared hobby or interest, a favorite film that you have in common. But it's also so much more, because it's not tangential or fleeting, but rather...your whole life. I don't know how else to describe it besides saying that it's the light at the end of this tunnel, and also the bane of my existence. 

Mais, c'est pas grave.