As I got ready to come to Paris with Sweet Briar for the spring semester, I was warned time and again about the language barrier.  “Get ready to feel really stupid for a couple months,” my friends and family advised cheerfully, and “don’t worry, they’ll love your smile even if they can’t understand what you’re saying.”  And yes, I knew I wasn’t anywhere near fluent; this is the case for many Sweet Briar students.  But hey, I thought, it can’t be that bad; I get good grades in French class, I understand everything my teacher says, I’ll be fluent in a week.

I’ve been here for over a month now, and the magical insta-fluency that I imagined hasn’t kicked in yet.  Language continues to be a daily struggle in several ways.  At home, my wonderful, kind host parents suffer through my horrible grammar and repeat everything they tell me two or three times at an average dinner.  At Paris VII, I’m enrolled in a Sociology course and a Literature course, in other words a French comprehension course and a French comprehension course.  Each class is challenging, but I consider the day a success if I manage to follow the surrounding students’ whispered conversations about last weekend.  If I’m stopped on the street, it generally takes several moments of polite listening for me to discern whether I’m being asked for directions or propositioned.

So apparently learning French isn’t as simple as buying a plane ticket and enrolling in some Sorbonne classes.  Immersion in French language and culture isn’t anything like the classes I took to prepare for this experience.  The people here don’t pronounce each word with pinpoint accuracy like my professors did.  They don’t have the same idiomatic phrases.  Fluency, I realize, is about more than just practicing sentence structures and phonetics.

But despite the challenges, learning French has still been rewarding and fun.  My little notebook of new vocabulary is getting fatter each day, and my conversations with my host parents are getting more and more interesting.  I’ve started going to language exchange events (called “Franglish,” super fun), and have found that the more I talk, the more I can talk.  Though I encounter something I don’t understand just about every day, I’m also getting a larger and larger collection of things I can understand.  Successful conversations feel great, as does the ability for self-expression.  Even if it doesn’t happen right away, it’s something that’s worth the wait.

 

Ellen Parent