Stories

My Journey

I first ventured onto the linguistic landscape in junior high school where I and my other seventh grade classmates had the choice of enrolling in French, Spanish or German.   Class registration tables had been set up in the school cafeteria.   Steeped in a surge of excitement and a sense of wanderlust, I contemplated and chewed over my mouth-watering choices.   All three languages were cool – after all, they were spoken in magical, enchanting countries boasting real castles! – And I was actually about to sign up to learn a language from one of those fairytale lands!   The only hurdle to getting started in my new adventure was deciding on which of the three languages to take, a choice almost as incomprehensible as ordering only one scoop of ice cream  – vanilla, chocolate or strawberry.

Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria, Germany in 2011 May. Simo Räsänen (post-processing) & Tauno Räsänen (photograph) Wikimedia Commons

No doubt all three languages endeared me to them in a sort of Disneyfied sort of way, but I finally decided on German because it was the language of my ancestors on my mother’s side.   My grandfather, a quiet man with a stern expression, hadn’t told me much about the homeland of his father, and I was longing to hear stories about Deutschland, its people and their way of life.

On the first day, filled with wonder and desire to digest it all – the language, the geography, the cultural nuances like Oktoberfest – I looked around the classroom for my girlfriend who’d promised to join the German Club and be my Deutsch conversation partner.

Frau Weber greeted us, Guten Morgen, and called out names on her attendance sheet.

Nein!!   My schoolmate’s name wasn’t there.

Ach himmel!   I’d made a terrible mistake!   Rattled, sick to my stomach, a surge of adolescent angst swooped down on me, drenching me in a cold sweat in the realization that none of my friends had signed up for German.   Alone, filled with trepidation, I was facing not only the clique of popular students seated in the front row, but also that mean girl who’d only an hour ago made fun of my baggy gym shorts in P.E.

I strategically barricaded myself behind my desk, ducking out of eye-contact range with Frau Weber who was valiantly attempting to engage us in some form of class discussion.

Frau Weber was a petite woman, who sported a pixie cut that helped accentuate her piercing eyes of dogged determination.  This diminutive-framed Powerfrau continued to push for full classroom participation with enough energy to move heaven and earth.  The fragile, self-conscious ones, like myself, the little souls in her charge teetered on the edge of apocalyptic humiliation.

Had it not been for my uber-grammar strengths, I might have dissolved into despondent tears and abandoned any hope of clinging on to some semblance of pre-adolescent poise and confidence.   It was the guts of the language that saved my syntax-loving neck.  Safe in my bedroom away from the surveillance of the in-group, I relished the solo hours of studying all the language rules that Frau Weber threw at us.  I was in my element.  I excelled at rote memorization of dialogues and mimeographed vocabulary lists.   As long as I turned in my homework, I’d figured out that I could squeak through the year without uttering much more than a Gesundheit!

And in the end, not only did I survive seventh grade, but I also managed to steer clear of humiliating myself in German – something I hadn’t accomplished in English or in my P.E. class.   And what’s more, the German I learned by heart indelibly remains. Forever-fixed deep inside the cache of my memory, I still hear echoes of my very first dialogue:   “Guten tag, Louise.  Wie geht’s?”

Following Frau Weber’s class, I continued my foreign language studies in high school.  My German teacher, Herr Brauer would from time to time deviate from our der, die, das drills to enlighten us about life in Germany.  He talked about food and holiday traditions.  He spoke of his life growing up, about good times and not so good times.

He described hardships facing postwar families.  Compared to the sprawl and suburbs where I grew up, I remember that it had been quite an eye-opener to learn about Germany’s scarcity of housing.  I found it unimaginable that parents were obliged to put their newborn’s names on waiting lists to ensure that an apartment would be available for their children to move into a quarter of a century later.

Herr Brauer spoke of loved ones who had been isolated from one another when the Berlin Wall went up.   Tears welled behind his glasses as he described the war he’d live through and the suffering of so many.  I remember looking around the classroom and reflecting on the Vietnam War looming over us.

Herr Brauer by sharing intimate stories about himself and a land that once seemed a million miles away transcended us from kids who’d had very limited knowledge of the world outside our high school to citizens of a larger community.   Herr Brauer imparted a world of wisdom and understanding and is a tribute to the life-long lessons of language learning.  With heartfelt gratitude, I remember him and the humanity he passed on.

My second pilgrimage in a foreign language landscape was nearly three decades later, at an age that some might consider too old to learn a language…I wasn’t actually approaching advanced age, but I wasn’t exactly young either.

Joining the love of my life in Quebec, Canada, I took on the challenge of learning French, starting from scratch in an immersion course for absolute beginners.   With soaring expectations and starry-eyed excitement, I imagined myself by the end of the first semester speaking French in the most beautiful Catherine Deneuve accent.

In the first week though, my fantasy of overnight fluency was struck down by a jolt of reality.  It was going to take me much, much longer than twelve weeks to come close to speaking an intelligible let alone beautiful French.

What I discovered though was that many of my classmates had shared the same fantasy and we’d all been struck by the same jolt of reality.  We shared a whole lot of fun together in that debutant class and came out with a real sense of accomplishment.

I could speak a little halting French and conjugate a grand total of twenty verbs.  I’d picked up a little vocabulary and a few expressions.  The word le trottoir, for example, was in my repertoire because it was fun to pronounce.  Pamplemousse tickled my funny bone whenever I went grocery shopping.   I could randomly retrieve from memory un robinet, a faucet, and I knew the word le chauffage, because the heating system in our building didn’t work very well.   I learned that un préservatif was not a preservative.

My comprehension was good if we were talking about food, plumbing, i.e. faucet, heat in the building or something other than a food preservative.  Outside these contexts, however, I found myself way outside my comfort zone, mostly living in a hyper-alert state.  Navigating around my new French neighborhood with very limited vocabulary, I frequently felt a sense of panic that I was going to miss something important, which in fact did happen on a somewhat regular basis.  Not being able to comprehend what someone was communicating would leave me feeling totally defeated and ashamed of my incompetency to grasp the meaning.

I desperately wanted to fit in and have a sense of belonging in my Francophone community, but because I was teaching English as a Second Language and speaking English with my husband who shared the same mother tongue, I hadn’t taken the plunge to be fully immersed in français and the Quebec culture. Overall, my progress proved to be painfully slow.

Gradually, over the following few years, I did eventually make some headway from where I’d started.  I reached out and found a French conversation partner who not only became a good friend but also helped me get over my angst of living in French.  My day-to-day sense of dread relented a bit as I discovered that my mishaps, misunderstandings and miscommunications were opportunities to learn and move on.  I’d found my way by taking on what I encountered a little more in stride, and best of all I developed a stronger sense of humor about my misadventures en français.

C’est la vie!

For the most part it’s true that if you spend enough time practicing, working on a skill, keeping at it, you will be good at it.  Take keyboarding, for example, with enough time and practice, it’s possible for you to become really good at it.  You don’t have to be born to type.  There are a lot of fast keyboarders out there with no natural aptitude for it.

On the other hand, no matter how much time you spend on something or how much you love it, there’s also the chance that you’re never going to be great or even good at it.

Singing, in my opinion, falls into this category.  It’s an innate talent, a gift.  I believe if you weren’t blessed with vocal chords to trill the sweetest music, you’re never going to be very good at it except for those amazing shower moments.   If I were a naturally gifted singer and had inherited my mother’s sweet voice, for example, I could strive for Karaoke greatness at the very least, but I inherited my father’s voice and although we both love singing, neither one of us can seriously carry the simplest ditty.

In my opinion, speaking French and singing are closely related.    The language itself is very musical, very pleasant to listen to and of course seductive.  How I desire to speak the lovely titillating notes I hear.  But replicating the musical intonation is hopeless.   No matter how much I long to reproduce its beauty, I know that I’m never going to master its loveliness.  The language and its elegance are as elusive as a silky smooth Ella Fitzgerald song.

Voila!  Having said that, I’m not going to abandon my love of French.  Even though my accent will always be a jarring reminder that I can’t sing a lick and will probably never be able to get my tongue around French, I’m continuing my journey, learning the language I adore, the language I find totally enchanting.

Besides,  my French rolls off my tongue so beautifully in those perfect shower moments, l’amour …ahhh….ahhh…les trottoirs.