The Bearded Woman

I am still plugging away at French, but often it feels like I am in one of those resistance swimming machines -- I keep trying and trying, but never actually get anywhere. I study my flashcards and feel somewhat confident, but then I go to class and realize just how much I don't know when I open my mouth to say something. My biggest challenge is that I am just a wordy person. Something that would take a normal person five words to explain will take me 20 words. This is an awful trait to have when you only know about 40 words of a language. To top it all off, all words in French are assigned masculine and feminine gender. Although it is really hard to reason if a table would be masculine or feminine, you would think that a least a few words would be obvious. However, you would be wrong -- the word beard is feminine, while the word vagina is maculine, and to top it all off, the word masculinity is feminine!


For awhile I didn't even attempt to learn the genders, I just figured I would mumble and slur my way around that part of the sentence. However, the other day I was with three other American women when a British woman speaking to us pronounced the word collage as CO-llage (instead of the way I am used to hearing it as co-LLAGE). None of us knew what she was talking about. She repeated the word and we all still looked blankely at her. When she finally explained what she was talking about we all understood. But it was a good reminder to me that if a word doesn't come out sounding like it is supposed to, you can't assume that people will know what you are saying.

I am really glad I waited until my third year here to take French because at least now I already know my way through the grocery store, the metro, how to do cooking conversions, how to drive here etc. The learning curve of adjusting to life here was so great, I just blocked out the French language and tried to cope with everything else that was thrown at me. It was a good decision because I don't think my self-confidence could have handled feeling stupid in every single aspect of my life.