Submitted by Lindsay Kaslow on the 2016 fall semester study abroad program in Paris, France…
It’s been a week here in Paris and it’s already a great time. We’ve visited several monuments, countless arrondissments (the Parisian neighborhood system), and we’ve even taken a boat cruise down the Seine River. As expected, I would say that the worst part so far is our communication. I feel like anytime I go somewhere, I end up in over my head in the conversation and have to backtrack to the most basic of sentences.
As a foreign language student, the intricacies of language are incredibly frustrating. Everyone talks about the language barrier, which undoubtedly exists – the lack of a full vocabulary, the complicated verb tenses (I’m looking at you, subjunctive), the occasional moment of panic. However, you can work around it by filling in the holes with new knowledge. What I find to be harder is the “relearning” process. We’ve spent years learning textbook French, memorizing rules and picking up pronunciation patterns. Yet, as we were sitting in French lessons this week, we were told to change gender agreement rules and to drop certain words or parts of them. Form a sentence like this, not like that. And stop using some vocabulary that you thought was essential.
It’s true that any language works this way; everyone speaks differently and has different opinions on how the language should or should not evolve. There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong, but the problem is that you begin to feel like your learning pattern is not progressive – rather, you’re going in circles. It’s difficult to change things that have been ingrained in your mind and it’s hard to produce correct answers.
But by the same token, you’re learning real, everyday French – this is how you learn to speak like a native. So at the end of the week when I sat down to dinner with my host parents, I told them what I did that day and I tried to apply what I learned in our lessons. My host parents were impressed by what I could tell them and what I could understand.
On the other hand, we have to remember it’s only our first week in Paris. It can only go up from here.