On my first day of intensive French class I am certain I want to quit.
I’m in the Mediterranean-adjacent, mid-sized town of Montpellier, in the south of France, and I’ve committed myself to two months of classes.
The lessons, held every afternoon for a total of 20 hours a week, are conducted entirely in French. English is forbidden. Every class culminates in a group exercise, or production oral, where we provide our opinions on a topical subject, somehow connected to the lesson for the day.
After completing an online test, I am placed in the elementary class, which places me slightly above complete beginners. Notwithstanding this apparent distinction, I spend the entire first week feeling very much like a complete beginner. Our professor’s instructions wash over me. As my classmates expertly construct sentences around me, I fantasise about walking out of the room and never coming back.
Later, I am comforted to learn that most of my eight classmates feel like quitting too. They also can’t understand most of our professors’ instructions. Their encouragement, combined with the fact I have already paid a hefty sum in advance, gives me the motivation to persist.
In the following weeks, I cover every object in my Airbnb with sticky notes labelling them in French (pink for feminine words and blue for masculine). I switch my Netflix language to French and start writing down every new word I learn in a small green notebook. Slowly, the dread I feel before going to class, and in every group exercise, fades.
My efforts begin to bring me some success within the confines of our classroom. I start to express more opinions, although these takes are often less a reflection of my actual views and more a function of whatever I am able to get across in my limited French. My language school friends and I have a running joke that in French, we are all void of personality. When asked how we are, our universal response is that we are fine.
As someone who has so much to say in my native language of English, it is a challenge feeling so incapable. My ineptitude greets me at every corner: when I inadvertently buy the wrong item at the supermarket, mangle a basic conjugation or leave a sentence hanging because I can’t find the right word to complete it.
The feeling of incapacity that comes with learning a language invariably leads one to think about the nature of language itself. It’s not lost on me that language is a function of power. It is why the acquisition of certain languages is privileged above others. This in turn privileges certain histories and world views.
It may be the reason why despite Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic being the most spoken languages in the world – aside from English – French remains the second most taught language in Australian schools.
As the child of immigrants, I already have an uncomfortable relationship with English. It makes me feel uneasy that acquiring French is about more than conjugations and croissants; in choosing this as my fourth language, I am privileging yet another coloniser’s tongue.
My limited abilities and constant errors in French make me so self-conscious that I constantly reach for the familiarity and comfort of English. It is only when my then-boyfriend – a native French speaker – expresses frustration at speaking mostly English with me that I realise that, rather than resisting, I need to embrace my status as a beginner.
In the same way that learning a language privileges certain histories and world views on a wider level, on an intimate one it can be a step towards another person, their history and perspective.
Knowing the value of being a beginner is easier in the abstract than when you’re bumbling at the boulangerie. Learning a language is a non-linear journey littered with constant mistakes. But these mistakes make the moments of success, which would be unremarkable in English, even more worthwhile.
An elderly gentleman at the next table in a restaurant gives me a thumbs up when he overhears me struggling to speak French for an entire lunch. I express my actual views in class and, in time, graduate to the intermediate level. I understand parts of my boyfriend’s conversation when he is unaware I am listening. He speaks at his regular pace in French, and I get an insight into a different part of his personality.
In each of these moments I move further from the safety of English towards the possibilities of French.
At the end of my two months, I’ve learned more than French. I come home knowing that stepping away from comfort, and towards a great unknown, is probably a necessary element in any worthwhile endeavour.
Fatima Malik is a lawyer and writer from Sydney
