It is a sad truth of language acquisition – or at least language acquisition as I have been experiencing it for the past three months – that instead of mastering a new language while maintaining mastery of your mother tongue, you find yourself unable to speak any language coherently and live instead a life of perpetual lacunae. Rather than finding myself easily and consistently able to communicate in French and English, I am frequently stuck in a land between two languages. For example, the first time I thought about that sentence it started: “Instead of trouving myself easily and toujourly able to speaker en French and English”…
I run into my biggest language-mix problems when I am thinking in one language and attempting to speak in another. If I spend the day with Anglophones or enjoy a reflective stroll by myself, I tend to think in English. You know, because it’s the only language I actually speak. If I am suddenly confronted with a French-speaker – they’re everywhere, it’s madness! – it takes me a minute to switch gears, and I often ask them to repeat themselves.
This is invariably greeted with a smug smile and a thickly accented “Oh, I understand. You are American. I speak English.” Which doesn’t seem so bad – in fact it seems pretty helpful, at first – except that in almost every case, even my deeply flawed French is superior to these well-intentioned (mildly condescending) attempts at English. Worse yet, many French people, upon realizing that they are talking to an English-speaker, will continue to speak in English, even if their English is nearly incomprehensible and even if I speak to them in French. This of course leads to many of my conversations in France proceeding like a sketch out of a bad comedy, in which two people converse in the absolute least practical way possible for several minutes, before parting ways without any idea of what has just happened to them.
Similarly, when I have had occasion to speak French all day, I find myself thinking in French. Which is not to say that I am France’s next great thinker. Usually, the thoughts I have in French are along the lines of “I am walking down the street. Now I am crossing the street. When I get home, I will eat a baguette.” Unfortunately, the fact that my French is childish does not stop it from confusing my English. I have recently found myself starting sentences in English and having to stop halfway through, having forgotten not only the English word that I was planning on using, but also its definition, French translations, and all synonyms. When this first started happening, I was unwilling to give up the fight and would stare off into space for a while, searching for a word I was no longer even totally sure existed. After several weeks of disheartening regression in my English skills, I have finally accepted that my poor confused brain has given up on interpreting the sounds that most people recognize as words, and has instead thrown up the white flag of surrender to the Language Gods, leaving me in the lurch.
