There are moments where I discover exactly how much French I know, where I feel on top of the world and I am understanding everything, and can sort of converse in the language. There are other moments where I discover exactly how much French I do not know, I do not understand anything, and my conversation is reduced to gesticulation and rudimentary usage of the same words over and over in no particular grammatical pattern. In the case of meeting local French men, the latter is what happens when I am not en écrivant on my iPod or Facebook or some other means of chatting and am actually faced with the situation of dining and associating with someone who speaks, at best, broken English.
How terrifying.
So I decided that life was too short to reduce all of my going out and interacting with people to Americans and other people who speak English and broken French the way that I do, because I remembered how I don't actually like being insular when I'm abroad. Life is too short not to be awkward, and so it was that I decided to grab some food and hang out with a French guy who lives not too far from Geneva. Everyone here seems to drive, and it is definitely more of a necessity than in bigger cities, but that's not really a problem. The idea was to get some food and figure out what else to do afterward, probably hanging out at the lake or something if the weather was nice. It wasn't, so it ended up being in the air.
This is the point that I discovered that I am absolutely terrified of talking on the telephone in French. In Russian I can sort of get by and I have done such things as ordering taxis with no particular difficulty. The way that the French murmur and slur their language, as though the whole country is drunk absolutely constantly, I can not bear to attempt to talk on the phone in it. Not going to happen. So we exchanged confusing text messages and finally figured out where we were and ended up eating in an "Italian" chain that is remarkably similar to any that you could think of and name in the United States. It seems that pizza and pasta are done pretty much exactly the same way the world over. I bet you could probably find such chains even in Italy, except that they would probably call it "American". They would have good reason for that.
The combination of the extremely loud restaurant, mumbling flamboyant Frenchman, and natural shyness upon first meeting anyone created the perfect storm for my French to absolutely shit itself fall apart, and I was rendered pretty much unable to say anything confidently or particularly coherently. All of my written fluency flew right out the window, and there I found myself, eating my not particularly kosher pizza, wondering exactly how long this meal was going to last. Given the nature of any and all service sectors in France not caring particularly much to work together, that turned into an hour or so longer than it needed to, with the kitchen staff forgetting our dessert order, his dessert arriving cold, and then the bill taking longer than necessary to get paid. It was painful.
Yet, reflecting on it afterward, I feel like this is how people really do end up learning how to communicate properly in a language. If you want to speak fluidly (if not fluently), you kind of just have to do it. Eventually the words will come, and you'll be able to remember the right things to express the more nuanced subjects that you think of in your native language. Or I have it all wrong, and there's a LOLcats for that. I just have to actually do that more. If I were staying in France for longer than six weeks I would push myself a little bit harder, especially given the element of needing to make more lasting social contacts, but I am still thrust into situations like this, and I think it's good.
The evening ended up going better, and we walked around the old town and pedestrian zones for quite a while, seeing some things I hadn't before and in general scaling the entire city. It was good, and I got more comfortable, but I don't mark it as so much of a linguistic success at it could have been. Perhaps next time.
The iPhone got flash, horrible photo quality commenced the world over.
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