As long as we’re on the subject of academics, I feel I should clarify something, once and for all, and then I will probably be permanently done speaking of it:

I have been asked over and over since coming here (by people I left back in the US) if "I am fluent yet." I think perhaps when I arrived I thought that by this time I would be– everybody tells you immersion is the only way to learn a language, and I LIVE WITH a French person after all, right? So shouldn’t I just be soaking it up like a sponge?

But fluency, like beauty, is in the eye, or rather the ear, of the listener. If you’ve never lived outside of an English-speaking country, then fluency is the ability to ask how much something is, to pay a bill, to get/give directions– all of which I can do without batting an eye.

If you have lived in a foreign-language environment, the definition of fluency changes to being able to understand idioms, to catch on to pickup lines, to comprehend what people are saying to you at a club with loud music blaring, to figure out the lyrics to popular songs– all of which I CAN do, though not perfectly.

And, if you are a former English major at a university with a pretty wickedly amazing liberal arts department, the definition of fluency turns into being able to understand the difference between words like "smell" and "fragrance." Or the nuances that exist when someone says "is there any way you could please go..." instead of just "go." How to say words like "fizz" and "snap" and the sound a sneeze makes and the translation of a phrase like "you rock my world."
These are the ones that still stump me, the grit of learning a new language... I’ve learned to say "tu déchires!" when I would usually throw in a "you rock," but I still find myself using the limited vocabulary I have– though, to be honest, it must be less limited than I think it is, because my American friends, my Swedish friend, and a few French people have commented on the randomness of the words that I know. I may not know the verb to use for "taking notes," but I know the word for faucet. (In France, by way of explanation, you don’t turn off the water– you "close the faucet.")

And when I think about the amount of times I’ve been completely stumped lately, it has to signal progress that it hasn’t happened since I can remember, right? Last semester things would happen all the time that would have the person I was talking to rolling their eyes and switching to English, or looking at me confusedly as I shut my eyes and tried to think through whatever it was I needed to say after I had come out with something as tactful as "Do you want me?" which I blurted, quite accidentally, to a PROFESSOR of all things, when staying after class to try to figure out when the final exam was. But now– I may occasionally have to repeat something when my accent has obscured the slight difference between "fois" (time) and "froid" (cold) and "foie" (liver paté), but now I understand how to handle the miscommunication, I know when to give up, how to rephrase whatever it is I need to say, and how to console myself out of an experience with a rude clerk or boulanger who couldn’t understand.

And I think of it now, and how I feel like that is such progress, and it is, even for me, but the truth is that even though there were things I often made a fool of myself doing, when I first got here, I was so completely at my wits’ end, so totally at rock-bottom, that the fact that I was speaking an unintelligible form of Franglais never really occurred to me as something to be embarrassed by. Because let’s think back nine months, shall we?

I remember not writing about it, because I didn’t want everyone to think I was miserable, but when I got here... pretty much everything that could have fallen apart, did. Well, maybe that is dramatizing it a little bit, but that’s how it felt anyway. I arrived without any possessions except for my MP3 player, a bag of sunflower seeds, my passport, 20 DOLLARS in cash (useless upon arrival, remember), and a book of sudoku puzzles. And that was it. Oh, and the clothes on my back.

I didn’t even have a toothbrush, and since it was Sunday, there was no place open to buy one. Because my luggage chose to go on a world tour without me. And since I didn’t have any address to give the airport, I spent everyday calling my program office to try to see if they had any news for me.

And the morning after I arrived, I woke up feeling as though I had been run over. I will never forget that morning– I felt so awful I couldn’t eat the "authentic French" breakfast our program had provided us. I sweated through my clothes before I made it to the Metro station– the clothes that weren’t even mine, but my roommate’s, who was sweet enough to let me use EVERYTHING of hers for days until my belongings arrived. And then I got to the room where we were supposed to sit through a three-hour meeting, and I remember sitting there as the words in French washed over and around me, comprehending nothing and hoping that my roommate would be able to explain to me whatever they had said later– I remember sitting there, soaked in sweat as everyone else was dry and comfortable in the early fall Paris weather, and praying and praying that I wouldn’t pass out. I felt my vision going fuzzy just as my roommate handed me her water bottle that she had filled up with orange juice that morning. I think I drank the whole thing down without blinking. I made it through without passing out, but even when I acquired a fever of 39 or 40 or something, I kept telling myself I had a cold and that the doctor here would be too much to deal with, so I should just bear up. I dragged myself to the airport one day because someone in the US told someone who told me that it would help if I went in person. I sat waiting and waiting and waiting in the customer service office of Continental Airlines, behind a monk in full-on monk robes, wondering what he could possibly have had in his checked baggage other than more burlap robes. I eventually was "helped" by a condescending French woman, who spoke to me so rudely in perfectly clipped English, and I felt too bad to try to stand up for myself. I remember how I walked out of that room, sat down on the first chair I saw, in front of the conveyor belt of luggage coming in from Dubai, and cried.

If you know me, you know that this should have been the only sign I needed that I was terribly, awfully sick. Because I don’t cry, ever, not in front of people, not alone, and most CERTAINLY not in public. I sat there in my roommate’s clothes, alone, and cried for probably not more than five minutes, at which point I got up, put my sunglasses on, and tried to figure out how to get back home. It was the first time I had gone anywhere alone in Paris. I fell asleep in the middle of my grammar class’s game of charades one day– I stopped eating and quit drinking almost completely because it hurt too badly to swallow anything. I went to bed, head propped to try to keep my nose from being too stuffed up, but I awoke at 430am, my fever raging, my nose stuffed, my throat so sore it felt like it was full of hot tar.
I went to my open windows, stood there pressing my burning face against the glass to try to cool down, and cried for real. I remember saying to myself, or possibly aloud, "this is not how it’s supposed to be! This is not the place I was supposed to have come to!" But even then one question kept popping into my head: "Where would you rather be?" And I just kept thinking that there was nowhere else I wanted to be; I knew the coming adventure would be worth it; I just kept thinking that there had to have been a better way to GET TO that adventure than the route I had, quite inadvertently, chosen.

I didn’t know then that my luggage would arrive three days later, unfolded and mashed, but otherwise none the worse for wear.

I didn’t know then that I had mono, and would spend many many afternoons napping in that warm bed in which I had awoken bawling my eyes out that morning.

I didn’t know then that I would love that city, that neighborhood, enough that I would decide to stay for twice as long as I had originally intended.

And I didn't know then that, nine months later, I'd be getting ready to leave and dreading the fact that I will "lose" my French when I get back to the US.

And now here I am, conversing, spending one of my last days in Paris taking three exams of 2.5 hours each, writing until my hand almost falls off, all of it in French and all of it without batting an eye. Maybe this fluency thing really is all it's cracked up to be...

I am made,
B