A Fish Out of Water
It was July of 2013 and I had just discovered a message that had been sent to me on Facebook, in November of 2012, from Cathy Gérard-Fisse, someone who I was not familiar with. The message was hidden in a little-known place on Facebook, where messages to you from people unknown to you, meaning they weren’t friends or friends of friends of yours on Facebook, were put. The thing is that Facebook didn’t notify you that you had a message there, which is why I didn’t see it until 8 months later. The outcome of this message was the discovery that I had a half-brother, named Franz, living in France. Someone I did not know existed. His wife was trying to find me and my family to connect with us, which we, in fact, did. You can find the whole story here: https://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=320.
The impact of finding this French family, none of whom could speak English, was that someone in our family had to either know how to speak French or learn how to. The solution came from my sister Leslie’s husband, who was born in Switzerland and was fluent in French. He became our interpreter and still is as we continue to interact with Cathy. In my case, I had taken French in Junior and Senior High school and had no memory of the language, so I started taking out language books and audio CDs to learn how to speak French. Starting in September of 2013, knowing that we were actually going to meet Franz and Cathy in November, I started some online language programs, Duolingo being the primary one. To this day, I continue to practice and learn French.
No matter how long I practice and how many different lessons from different sources I use to learn French I’m a fish out of water when it comes to speaking with someone in French.
I can read French much better now than when I started. I’m even okay with saying some basic stuff in French. But you put me in a situation with someone who speaks French fluently, I’m like a deer in headlights. As my mind figures out one of the words that are being said, the speaker is already on the next sentence or idea.
As a fluent reader of English, you don’t see each letter that is forming a word, you either see a word or a phrase at a time. You can actually decode the meaning of what you are reading without saying the words in your head. With the exception, for me, of when I’m reading a really good fiction novel and I’m actually reading the story aloud in my mind, voices and all. This is probably why I’m a slow reader. I’ve heard you don’t have to do that. But when it comes to reading French I am still reading mostly word by word. I have expanded to getting some sentences in their entirety without seeing each individual word. But have not advanced much further.
Listening to and speaking a language is different from reading. Think of watching a streaming video when you have a poor network connection. As someone speaks to you, you may hear a word or two as the scene freezes and when the connection resolves itself, the speaker is already further along in the sentence or thought and you missed what was said during the network freeze. Kind of like what happens on Zoom meetings sometimes.
I hear a word being spoken and while my brain, on tape delay, is processing meaning, I’m missing the next part of the conversation, and thus get totally confused.
When I try speaking, I know the English sentence I want to say, but may not know all of the words or sentence structure in French. My mind goes into buffering mode as I try to construct my sentence before saying it. And by the time I have it, the conversation usually has moved on.
I find it a little easier to understand French if I am cognizant of the topic being discussed. But if I come in during the middle of a conversation that I was not part of, this little fish is looking for water.
There’s a story about a family of mice that are being chased by a cat. The mother mouse comes out and lets out a very loud, “BARK”! The cat hearing it quickly turns and runs away. The mother mouse then turns to her children and says, “Now do you see the advantages of learning a second language.”
I agree there is a great advantage to learning a second language, especially when you’re young. It would have helped me a lot with communicating with my brother and sister-in-law. But learning it as an adult, trust me, it ain’t easy. And for you fishes out there, make sure there is plenty of water available to you if you try and you deer, stay out of the headlights.
