I’m on a trip to Melbourne from France. Living abroad comes with constant learning in almost all you say and think. Visiting home is a return to autopilot. In the supermarket, I don’t read the packaging – I reach for products without thinking. But if the checkout assistant wants to chat, I can’t say, “Je ne parle français.” Even if I don’t want to, I have to talk.
I also have to answer a question, on repeat, from friends. They also asked it in the weeks before I moved.
“How’s your French?”
A year ago, I felt nervous replying, not wanting to admit my incompetence. I’d promise to get better.
Don’t worry! said my monolingual peers. You’ll be fluent in no time! Once you’re immersed!
If language acquisition comes from exposure, I should be fluent by now. I began learning French seven years ago in a depressive episode when I failed to land a post-grad role. Perhaps I’d redeem my future, which had ground to a halt, through linguistic diversity.
My teacher, Sylvie, taught French in English and said she’d never eat a ham and cheese croissant. She passed all of us each term, no matter what.
The following year, during my Masters, I paid a French exchange student to teach me in the hallway between classes. I retained nothing from Sylvie nor him. I stopped replying to his messages to meet up.
Four years on, in a bout of lockdown self-determination, I enrolled in a series of online classes that always got cancelled due to low enrollment numbers. When my manager asked why I was learning, I told her, “Just because.”
Friends, seeing post-its in my house labelling la fenêtre, le frigo, la douche, asked, point blank, “Are you moving to France?”
“Yes.”
On my first day in France, a man stopped me on my walk to the supermarket and asked, “Vous-avez un stylo?”
I couldn’t believe it – I understood! I pulled out a pen from my bag.
Onwards, from this serendipitous textbook moment, all former classes proved moot. No one asked what my dad did for work. If they asked for votre nom, it was amongst a bureaucratic spiel, and I missed it. On my canape, I’d practise for hours, talking to my bunny, writing lists of words to use in the big wide world. Though, once there – a waitress, postie, supermarket clerk staring at me – nothing came to mind. French constantly drained from my brain.
“It matters not that yesterday I knew the central modal verbs and demonstrative adjectives: today they are nowhere to be found,” Rachel Cusk wrote in The Last Supper on learning Italian for a three-month stint in the country. She goes on to speak of the security of acquiring simple vocabulary, “like fat gold coins; I can store them up and exchange them for goods. I ask for formaggio and I get it…”
For me, once committed to memory, each “C’était délicieux” at a cafe held some weight of gratitude that “It was delicious” in Melbourne never could.
“A sentence under the influence of otherness says more than it says,” writes Mandy-Suzanne Wong for LitHub, “You feel more of a sentence than it says, much to your delight or discomfort. You feel, in its morphing and contorting, language being what it is: Vida and Komporaly are right that “language is in fact an enormous living being” with all of life’s vulnerability and inadequacy.”
Vulnerability and inadequacy in language learning overshadow wins. On a volunteering trip in the South of France, my South African host asked about my French. Sitting in the back of her car, with her crusty dog on my lap, I said I was doing my best.
“And you?”
“Really good. I am amazing at languages.” The dog itched his skin, shedding white fur onto my black dress. “But Australians don’t even know English, haha! What can anyone expect from you?”
At my first language school in France, the teacher also despaired, “You’re Australian! How am I meant to teach you? You probably don’t know grammar!”
She’d stand close to my desk and ask, in a slow voice, “Do you know what a NOUN is?” Of course I do (je suis écrivaine!). But everything still slipped out as soon as it went in.
After class, I’d walk home like I was returning from a funeral. The post-class cries stopped when I stole a sprig from a vine at the back of the classroom. I propagated it and sold the plant – my first profit from French.
(Like finding the right partner or psychologist, I shopped around until I found a teacher who tolerated my flaws and with whom I’ve found value rather than pain in. She used to teach in Melbourne and knows when to tell me to stop swallowing my vowels.)
In France, immersion is non-negotiable; despite proximity to the UK, the country is anything by Anglophone. The French, true to stereotype, are obsessed with baguettes, long lunch breaks and protests. For the latter two, I always expect everything to be closed (no post office runs at midday) but know that the boulangerie is always open.
Through exposure to the French world, I relearned how to live, not how to speak. Fluency by osmosis was a myth.
But I had zealous intentions. My terrible French didn’t reflect a lack of desire to learn. If not apathy, maybe it was an inability? Despite doing my dues, I grappled with failure rather than reward.
I Googled why it didn’t stick, how long it takes to learn, what methods work. The path was endless, empty, complex, no matter how I marched on. Expat friends offered unsolicited advice: podcasts, French films with subtitles. Of course, I knew these tips, but they assumed I didn’t. Otherwise, I’d know French, like them.
“You should learn it,” one told me, “You’ll have a better grasp on the culture!” I smiled and said I’m trying my best.
“There was no difference in work ethic between us,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his Atlantic piece on learning French as an adult, surrounded by more well-educated peers. “If I spent more time studying than my classmates, that fact should not be taken as an accolade but as a marker of my inefficiency. They had something over me, and that something was a culture, which is to say a suite of practices so ingrained as to be ritualistic.”
Coates argues that on the basis of class, some people have access to certain environments that make high achieving more possible over one’s lifetime. For every migrant with French who gave me a silly tip, I’d learn of their fancy private school education. My school’s biggest focus (and failure) was preventing teen pregnancy. At best, we got “bonjour” and “un deux trois”; higher education, moving abroad, second languages – pipedreams.
“I have always known that in failing to become a scholastic achiever, I forfeited knowledge of certain things… But what I did not understand was that I had also forfeited a culture, which is to say a tool kit, a set of pins and tumblers that might have unlocked the language which I so presently adore,” says Coates.
Even if my friends acquired French in adulthood, they had tools I’ve never been given that powered their success. Or, at least, that’s what I like to tell myself. I took a decade to remember road rules and get my licence. I dropped pole dancing classes when I stagnated at the same level for years. Now, French follows suit in this penchant to plateau.
I think of French like a board game. When the rules are explained, I can’t follow, then I zone out against my will. Then, the game starts. Somehow, everyone remembers what to do. I fumble through. I know that I’m not gonna win. Or, I think of language acquisition like weightlifting, manifesting an awareness of the functions of mind and body, even if I’m not as strong as I’d like to be. It’s progressive overload, even if slow.
Or, as David Sedaris writes for Esquire, “Learning French is a lot like joining a gang in that it involves a long and intensive period of hazing.”
The French, against stereotype, though, have been kind to me. They also suck at second languages and empathise. Still, living without French in France demands daily struggle; like, trying to buy the pain de jour at the boulangerie. When I request Tuesday’s special, the boulanger will correct my pronunciation of maïs (may-eez not mayz).
I still get my cornbread. The risks, outside ego, are low. I’m more likely to experience inconvenience than discrimination. I’m willing to be hazed.
For most of my childhood, I was homeschooled and had a stutter. At netball, I observed the chatter of my teammates, the somewhat enigmatic “school girls”. I never joined in or wanted to. One day, they approached me, giggling over each other.
“What’s your favourite colour?”
I froze, composed myself, and spoke quietly.
“Green.”
“Told you! She knows how to talk!” they squealed, running away.
The pleasure of observing beats the humiliation of being perceived with faulty speech. By not talking, and living with a language barrier instead of overcoming it, other senses come. At cafes, I fall into a deep focus on my Macbook in the white noise of chattering friends without picking up the details. I see wrinkled foreheads when they bof, and wrinkled lips when they puff skinny cigarettes.
When I work from home, I hear it all; French windows are large, the streets chatty. I hear coo coo from friends meeting up. I listen to couples take their arguments outside, screaming putain. I observe it all without expressing it back.
I talk to friends online once I formulate something to say. I never speak off the cuff. No one talks over me, I always finish what I’d like to say. My thoughts are strung cohesively from hours and days of thinking without French or English interruption. But why romanticise sitting out on a more verbose daily life like this?
“There was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal, was in some ways an appealing prospect,” Cusk wrote in Outline on living in a language not yet grasped. “The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew.”
Back in Melbourne, when friends ask How’s your French? I say that I sit down to my French class each week, and I can get through my chores. I can check for my allergens on packaging. I can read menus at a bistro and signs on the metro. At the beach, I understand children speaking to their parents about poisson in la mer. I understood the drunk man on a bike telling me about the bon chien across the road. Though, I can’t converse back or listen to much, I tell them. Everything’s scrambled together at speed, and I can’t untangle it.
Or, I say, I’m fluent and laugh.
They look unimpressed at the former and confused at the latter. Why is she laughing? Shouldn’t she have picked it up by now?
“French is a humbling pursuit, one that forces its learners to rethink their approach to language itself,” Colin Marshall wrote for LA Review of Books, “Or at least it does under ideal circumstances… to take it on its own uncompromising terms.” He also agrees with Coates, who emphasises the grey areas of learning and the importance of “continuing to put one foot in front of the other” instead of stressing over perfecting the methods of learning.
Before I left France, I spent a Saturday in Marseille to buy shoes for a wedding in Australia. I began my search at midday. At six, I’d given up when I passed a shop with sparkly pink heels to match my sparkly pink dress. “Je vais prend trente huit,” I told the shop assistant, and he tapped a box with my size, “Tak tak.” They were a perfect fit. “Voila!” I told him, “J’ai trouvé pour six heures.”
He said my French was very good, and asked if I was from Melbourne. He had family there.
“Oui.”
Writing this now, I realise I should have said, “cherché,” not “trouvé.” That is, “I looked for six hours,” not “I found for six hours.” I wish it mattered to me more – these mistakes, this lack of verbal sharpness. But my desire to do better doesn’t mean I will.
So, why the shame? The barrier is a comfortably beautiful space, anyway.
Photos by the author
