I am not good at languages.
I’ve always been rather ashamed of this. In the multinational, multilingual world in which I live, I am painfully conscious of my conformity to the stereotype: what do you call someone who speaks three languages? (Trilingual). What do you call someone who speaks two languages? (Bilingual). What do you call someone who speaks one language? English.
This conformity constrains me personally and it constrains me professionally, and I feel a deep discomfort with the arrogance that for me, it belies. I’ve got away with it so far because ‘everyone speaks English.’ But actually, four out of five people in the world do not speak English. The world in which I have operated may be full of people who speak English, but I want access to a new world, a wider world.
Finally this summer I decided to do something about this. I missed out on a job I really wanted because of my lack of French. I was feeling fidgety due to lack of learning, I had some time to fill, and I was feeling stubborn (if other people can do this, I can do this). Je peux le faire.
First stop the Institut Francais, South Kensington. An initial assessment conversation: I explained that j'ai appris le français à l'école, but that was ten years ago (no, wait… 18 years ago).
I commuted in for five hours of class every morning for two weeks. I did homework every afternoon, and I jolted awake at four a.m. with verb tables and conjugations dancing on auto-repeat around my slumbering brain. There was a lot that I didn’t understand, and I didn’t understand half of the explanations that were given for the things that I didn’t understand, and we wound down a spiral of attempts to explain the explanations until I wanted to beg: just give us the English translation! But I also began to enjoy the process of disaggregating language, these clever systems and structures that we have built, and I began to see that learning another language is not just learning different words for the same things; it’s also learning another way to understand and to think about things. And I was better than the others in my class: the retired policeman and the American exchange student and the builder from Essex with the Swiss girlfriend. So my confidence began to grow.
Next came the Eurostar to Paris and a super-intensive week of morning classes, afternoon ‘language labs’ and an hour of private tuition to top off each day. I began to feel like a one-way system, a funnel: I was pouring so much French into the depths of myself, but none of it seemed willing to come back out. I wondered where it was all going.
Yet when ordering my morning coffee, or paying my dinner bill, more than once I was aware of a small smug feeling when an Australian tourist would launch into the same in strident English. I liked to believe that my simple attempts were understood as I mean them to be: as signs of respect. And that speaking to people in their own language creates connections that can't be reached any other way. As Mandela once said, “if you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
On the Thursday of that week I had a very strange experience. I realised that I could make myself understood. I did it in a very roundabout way, and I took my time, and I didn’t know how I was doing it, exactly, but somehow it was happening and I was communicating. And not just about how many siblings I have or what I did on the weekend. I didn’t know what I’d done to tap into that well inside of me, and when I thought about this it immediately sealed up. The next day I couldn’t find the words to ask for a coffee but I knew that it had happened, that one evening. I'd been speaking French.
Then I moved to South Sudan and, who would have thought it, there’s an Institut Francais here, on the campus of Juba University.
I’ve always been rather ashamed of this. In the multinational, multilingual world in which I live, I am painfully conscious of my conformity to the stereotype: what do you call someone who speaks three languages? (Trilingual). What do you call someone who speaks two languages? (Bilingual). What do you call someone who speaks one language? English.
This conformity constrains me personally and it constrains me professionally, and I feel a deep discomfort with the arrogance that for me, it belies. I’ve got away with it so far because ‘everyone speaks English.’ But actually, four out of five people in the world do not speak English. The world in which I have operated may be full of people who speak English, but I want access to a new world, a wider world.
Finally this summer I decided to do something about this. I missed out on a job I really wanted because of my lack of French. I was feeling fidgety due to lack of learning, I had some time to fill, and I was feeling stubborn (if other people can do this, I can do this). Je peux le faire.
First stop the Institut Francais, South Kensington. An initial assessment conversation: I explained that j'ai appris le français à l'école, but that was ten years ago (no, wait… 18 years ago).
I commuted in for five hours of class every morning for two weeks. I did homework every afternoon, and I jolted awake at four a.m. with verb tables and conjugations dancing on auto-repeat around my slumbering brain. There was a lot that I didn’t understand, and I didn’t understand half of the explanations that were given for the things that I didn’t understand, and we wound down a spiral of attempts to explain the explanations until I wanted to beg: just give us the English translation! But I also began to enjoy the process of disaggregating language, these clever systems and structures that we have built, and I began to see that learning another language is not just learning different words for the same things; it’s also learning another way to understand and to think about things. And I was better than the others in my class: the retired policeman and the American exchange student and the builder from Essex with the Swiss girlfriend. So my confidence began to grow.
Next came the Eurostar to Paris and a super-intensive week of morning classes, afternoon ‘language labs’ and an hour of private tuition to top off each day. I began to feel like a one-way system, a funnel: I was pouring so much French into the depths of myself, but none of it seemed willing to come back out. I wondered where it was all going.
Yet when ordering my morning coffee, or paying my dinner bill, more than once I was aware of a small smug feeling when an Australian tourist would launch into the same in strident English. I liked to believe that my simple attempts were understood as I mean them to be: as signs of respect. And that speaking to people in their own language creates connections that can't be reached any other way. As Mandela once said, “if you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
On the Thursday of that week I had a very strange experience. I realised that I could make myself understood. I did it in a very roundabout way, and I took my time, and I didn’t know how I was doing it, exactly, but somehow it was happening and I was communicating. And not just about how many siblings I have or what I did on the weekend. I didn’t know what I’d done to tap into that well inside of me, and when I thought about this it immediately sealed up. The next day I couldn’t find the words to ask for a coffee but I knew that it had happened, that one evening. I'd been speaking French.
Then I moved to South Sudan and, who would have thought it, there’s an Institut Francais here, on the campus of Juba University.
I take classes here after work every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The first group I joined was taught by a portly Congolese gentleman with sweat beading his brow. He wrote single words on the blackboard and then read them to us. We wrote them down. I, the owner of the only white face in the vicinity, was fascinated by this insight into a different understanding of what it is to teach, and to learn.
But that’s not why I choose to spend my precious pre-curfew hours here three times a week. I want to learn French. So I moved up a class, and into the remit of a highly animated professeur from whom I hope I really can learn. Because I have a lot still to learn.
Souhaiter-moi bonne chance!
But that’s not why I choose to spend my precious pre-curfew hours here three times a week. I want to learn French. So I moved up a class, and into the remit of a highly animated professeur from whom I hope I really can learn. Because I have a lot still to learn.
Souhaiter-moi bonne chance!