Parlez-vous franҫais?

No, you don’t speak French? Well, don’t feel bad, because I don’t either. French is an extraordinarily difficult language to learn in my opinion. And it’s even harder to pronounce even sort of correctly. Believe me, I have no delusions of grandeur about the crappy Spanish I speak, but it’s crazy to me how much more comfortable I still feel even with my C+ Spanish compared to my French (which I would currently give myself an F-).


Why the sudden musings about this beautiful and complicated language? Well, because I have spent around 100 hours of dedicated study on French—even finished level 1 (of 5) of the Rosetta Stone—and yet I still couldn’t even ask a simple question like “What time is it?” when I really needed to know the other day (I now know how to ask that question). I also couldn’t tell a French girl the simple phrase, “this table is mine” off the top of my head when she thought I was clearing my trash from the only table left at a restaurant when I was really clearing the previous occupant’s trash in order to sit there myself (I was tongue-tied, but that’s a phrase I had already learned). I have learned to use 40 verbs in the present tense, and have a whole notebook full of vocabulary. However, what I’m trying to say is that even though I have spent a lot of time studying, I still can’t really say jack; I certainly can’t communicate well or carry on a real conversation. Anytime I even try to speak to people, they automatically revert to their halting, heavily accented English just because they can tell how much I am struggling. Or my favorite is when I tell someone in French that I can’t speak French, and they just repeat the same sentence over and over or say it slower, like somehow I am going to magically and suddenly know what the bleep they are saying to me. . .

I’ve only been here a month though, and it was six months before I started to feel o.k. speaking Spanish and that was trying to speak it all day every day.

Though I respect and admire French, I really, really love Spanish and feel somewhat indebted to it. No language is easy to master, and Spanish is no exception (I still haven’t even come close). However, I originally thought my limited knowledge of Spanish was hurting rather than helping me to learn French, especially when it comes to pronunciation. But now I know for a fact, it has helped immensely in the study of French. I am so grateful to have some Spanish-language background, so I didn’t have to start learning how a foreign language works from scratch. Spanish taught me what a reflexive verb is, about masculine and feminine nouns and how to make adjectives agree with the nouns they describe in both gender and number. Spanish taught me to rearrange my noun and verb when asking a question and how to structure a command. All super helpful with the French language.

So, though I feel really frustrated a lot, and stupid even more, at least I hope to learn quickly. I’m not going to give up, and it’s just gonna take a lot more time. I feel sorry for people who have to learn English. Talk about a difficult language. And, hey, at least I can say “Où sont les toilettes?” Sometimes, with three small girls, that’s the only thing I really need to know.