Around the World...and then some

Midterms à la française and other ramblings

This week officially marked the end of a long drag of midterms. With three before break, and two in the past few days, it's been a fun couple of weeks. It also reminded me how hard this whole taking college classes in another language thing is.

I was studying for my Lexicology exam Monday night and I was re-reading (ok, fine. reading for the first time. you all know me too well.) one of the articles my teacher had passed out. I got through a paragraph and suddenly realized that while I had basically understood every word I had just read, I had no idea what the point of the paragraph actually was. It's as though I'm a fourth grader trying to make my way through a college textbook. Actually, that's exactly what it is. My French is at the fourth grade level at best, and here I am taking a course that I easily could take back at Midd, in my native language. Of course there are words that I don't understand, but I can always look them up in a dictionary or online if I'm really stuck, and I can usually get the gist of it. However, when it comes to really wrapping my brain around these ideas, I just can't do it in a foreign language.

Sometimes, when I have to write a French paper, I will write an outline in English first. I need to get my ideas down and realize what it is I'm thinking at all before I can then put it into French. They tell you that you are truly fluent in a language when you can think in it. But what they don't tell you is that before you get to that point where you feel fluent, you may be "fluent" at a level that just isn't up to your standards. Sometimes, on a lucky day, I can think in French. And generally my words come out without much need to plan them out in my head beforehand. But there's another level there - the level of ideas and concepts - that I still can't get in French mode. I first need to understand the words, and then the sentences, and only then, once I'm back in English in my head, can I truly understand the concepts. It's this level of language that I've never really thought about before. It's no longer for communication purposes, but rather it becomes an expression, because sometimes the hardest part is actually putting them into words. And the concepts are so large that even when we can't get the words out, and we no longer realize that we're using language to express them, we just can't grasp them without the ease of our native tongue.

And this post just suddenly became nothing like it started out as. The bottom line? Languages are hard. Especially when you thought you knew all the words (or even thought you knew a few...) and suddenly the words are no longer the only thing that matters.

posted by Becky @ 3:03 PM