On Fluency
One of the questions I get the most from people back home since moving to France is, “Are you fluent?” Before I left, I got this question a lot too. It’s a normal question to ask someone before moving to another country, despite the fact that I’ve met a fair amount of Americans here who knew no French before moving here. Before I left, I probably would have said something like, “I’m pretty close.” I did major in it, write a 60-page honors thesis in it, and had lived here twice before for short periods of time. After spending a month in France, though, I quickly realized I was far from fluent.
Fluency is an interesting idea because it’s seen as this ultimate goal or box to check off of LinkedIn. But the truth it, fluency is so much harder to achieve. It probably takes years of living in another country, and even then you might not even be able to fully consider yourself fluent when you take into account body language and cultural norms. There are so many things I’ve learned since moving to France that have helped me get closer to being fluent, but I also acknowledge that 7 months here is not enough time to really be fully fluent in French.
One of the things I’ve learned in my time here is the importance of filler words in appearing like a native speaker. Yes, my demeanor will always scream American (or rather, not French for that matter. Today I was asked if I was Scottish). But navigating how French people hold conversations casually is a skill I never learned in my many college French courses. While studying literature from the 18th century has its positives and is definitely fascinating, a course where you just watch French TV shows and learn how they speak would be massively helpful to (and for what it’s worth, my French teacher in high school did this and I found it helped immensely). For starters, there’s the French equivalent of um, which is ben (pronounced bah kind of). This is a word I learned the first time I lived in France when I was 15, but still struggle to work into my everyday vocabulary. Uh, on the other hand, has the equivalent of euh, which is pronounced roughly the same.
But in addition to these words that help fill sentences, there are also other words that contain so many different meanings depending on the context they are used in. For example, du coup is a really common one, but can mean anything from so to just finishing a sentence. I can’t even think of a direct English equivalent, but it is much in the same way we end sentences with so, yeah, or something like that. The French at one point used genre in the same way we used like, but now it’s more common to use a phrase like “c’est comme.” A lot of these filler/transition words are things I would have never picked up in a French class in the US. Not just because they’re not in books and poems, but also because you only really hear them in common conversation, not in a lecture hall. As much as I love studying the French language itself through literature, there is something so cool about understanding its nuances in everyday conversation.
I could write a whole book on French slang, even though that’s been done many a time. I haven’t really learned a ton, which I think is partly due to the fact that I spend a lot of time with Anglophones speaking English and partly due to the fact that the French people I do talk to are elementary school teachers who try to speak as correctly as possible so that their students don’t pick up any bad habits. I do pick up phrases when eating lunch with them, though. One that took me a while to figure out was “entre-guillemets” which means “quote-on-quote.” It wasn’t until the principal at one of my schools did literal air quotes as she was saying it did I get it. A lot of times expressions mean the opposite of conventional wisdom - tu m’étonnes, for example, literally means “you stun me.” But in common parlance it’s like, “no kidding.”
A whole other aspect of fluency in French is the grammar. I stopped learning actual French grammar when I was 17. We learn the basics in high school and definitely go a bit deeper than that, but there are things we either don’t touch or things we forget. One of the hardest examples in French is the subjunctive. I constantly see posts in the TAPIF Facebook group of people asking for advice with how to use the subjunctive. Often times, if I hear it used in a less common way (aka other than il faut que…) I ask whoever said it why they used it there. Naturally, with any native speaker of a language, it’s hard to explain why something is the way that it is. I never really get a fulsome answer, and this is just another reminder that I am miles away from being truly fluent.
I think I feel the least fluent in French when I’m working with the students I teach. While I recognize that I would probably struggle understanding the mumblings of American schoolchildren as well, it’s a whole other level when it’s happening in a different language. I rarely ask them to repeat themselves because I know I’ll never arrive at what they mean. Most of the time I say “ah ouais,” (oh yes) and walk away before they tell me I didn’t answer their question or didn’t understand what they mean. If a teacher is nearby I just direct the child to the teacher. But this is definitely an example of me being put in my place when I realize how far from fluent I am.
Now, when people ask me if I’m fluent in French, I say I’m far from it. While I definitely think my French has improved a lot since I’ve arrived, I know I still have a long way to go (and I also recognize I’ll lose a lot of what I’ve learned by virtue of returning to America). I feel more comfortable understanding people when they are speaking quickly, and I feel much more at ease trying to join into conversations in French where I’m the only non-native speaker. I also notice that in hearing so much French, I’ve started to lose some of my facility with English. That’s not to say I’ve forgotten it, but often I’ll be speaking to someone in English and fully forget what word I’m looking for or forget that a specific word exists. Especially in the last few weeks, I’ve found myself switching between the two a lot in my head. A lot of people say you’ve reached a high level when you start dreaming in another language, but I’m not sure how much of that is your own skill vs. your environment. On Monday I watched a bunch of episodes of a French TV show and read in French, and of course I had a dream in French. But on the other hand, I can spend all day speaking French and still dream fully in English. I’m not really sure how the brain works with respect to that.
All this to say - I’m definitely better at French than when I arrived, but also know I have miles to go. I also have learned that there are ways to keep up French when I’m back home. I’m going to watch more French TV shows, read in French (contemporary novels are just as important as the classics), and make an effort to talk to the Anglophone friends I’ve made here in French once I’m back home. There’s always more to learn when it comes to languages, which I think is why I like them so much.