Learning French

My journey to speak a second language has been long, twisty, and filled with stretches of dormancy and back-sliding.  Neither of my parents spoke a language other than English, so I did not grow up hearing other languages.  The American school system did not help much, either.  In the schools I attended, learning a second language was not on offer until 7th grade, and the structure of the school day meant that I would have had to forego an academic subject to add a class in another language.  That seemed too high a price to pay, so I waited until high school.  I first started learning German in my freshman year--chosen only because it had the reputation of being the most difficult and academic of the three languages offered--but soured quickly on it due to a poor quality (and very creepy) teacher.  I took it for four years, but do not retain much beyond pronunciation and recognizing some pretty basic vocabulary.

During my senior year in high school, I had some extra room in my schedule and decided to give French a spin.  My teacher was fantastic--immersion from day 1, lots of speaking, high expectations--but she also intertwined our vocabulary and grammar lessons with popular culture and French social structures, cultural history and its impact on etymology, and all kinds of things that kindled my interest languages, but also travel and foreign countries.

When it came time to decide which language to continue in college, I chose French over German and skipped to second year French.  Again, I had a great teacher and learned a lot in the challenging class.  By the end of the year, we were reading Camus and Colette and Simone de Beauvoir (very slowly).

There were several trips to France or Francophone countries in the decades to follow, but none long enough to result in any real improvement in my French, just perhaps a slight slowing of its decline every time I had the opportunity to talk a little bit.

That was basically it until six years ago, when we arrived in Paris for our first sabbatical.  Somehow, I thought that my French would basically take care of itself.  I would be immersed and already had a decent foundation on which to build.  Well, "immersion" would be an overstatement--everyone at the Paris School of Economics spoke English much better than I spoke French, so English was the default.  We spoke English amongst ourselves at home.  And the many people I met and befriended that year, through Kate's school and assorted other places, were either Anglophone or had better English than my French.  About two-thirds of the way through the year, I decided that I could not be passive and hired a once-a-week French tutor.  She was excellent, but it was too little, too late.

This year, I had every intention of being more proactive.  But wasn't really.  I thought I would take an immersive French class before coming.  That didn't happen.  I thought I would use some online French resource every night.  That didn't happen.  I thought I would hire a tutor immediately upon arrival in France.  That also didn't happen.  (Although, again, I was able to find an excellent French tutor about two-thirds of the way through the year.) 

But something else did happen.  Maybe it was the fact that we didn't have Kate with us to talk to the electrician and property manager.  Maybe it was that we decided to watch some French television and movies (some with subtitles, some without).  Perhaps I just got over my embarrassment and reluctance to speak and just started doing it.    

I have a theory, though.  I think that my French was very gradually, almost imperceptibly, improving over the course of the last sabbatical and then, again, when we started this one.  But still, until it reached a certain threshold, it would make sense for almost everyone I was speaking to to switch to English.  Once my French reached that threshold, a few people who would have switched to English let me proceed in French.  And my French got a little better with that practice.  Then a few more, and so on.  So once you reach that initial threshold, you just improve so much more quickly because you are actually practicing speaking in French.

I don't think any of this is ground-breakingly new:  everyone knows that immersion is best and practicing a language is indispensable for improving.  Somehow, though, I had not fully appreciated the non-linear nature of language acquisition and the importance of reaching a threshold before it became simple to practice and learning could accelerate naturally.

So, here I am, almost ready to leave, but feeling for the first time in my life like I can go into most situations and converse in French.  I would not consider myself fluent--I stumble over tenses and forget vocabulary, and I still panic when I need to make a phone call--but I'm feeling more and more comfortable with French.  It's a very good feeling.

The final test:  will I be able to walk into the SFR office and successfully cancel our cable TV and home internet before we leave?