Becoming "fluent"

Antibes, France. 

I had a lot of goals for our adventure, and most of them have materialized.

• The Boys are learning French. Their teachers report that they understand what is happening in the classroom and participate regularly. They are "serious," which is high praise from a French teacher, and try hard. Boy1 is leading his class in math. At home, they are curious about new words and Google Translate is my go-to source for answers. The pronunciation feature is especially helpful.
• They are developing delightful, authentic accents. In fact, Boy2 absolutely loves to say words with that back-of-the-throat R sound that I simply cannot replicate. Boy1 is learning how to do it, too. They both correct my pronunciation. I try not to be offended.
• They are getting to know their grandmother as a real person and not just a woman who visits for two weeks each year. They know her routines and her habits, her favorite foods and her favorite grocery store. 
• We are trying to be as helpful to Belle Mere as we can. When leg pain prevents her from driving, Hubby runs errands. In the evenings, he walks over to light a fire in her fireplace. We have emptied 40 years of papers and baby clothing and housewares from her cabanon (shed). She has sold what she could, donated some, and we discarded the rest.
• We are all learning more about the culture of France. For example, France celebrates Carnaval, which is their version of Mardi Gras. They have gateau de roi (king cake) in which a little token is hidden. The person who finds the token buys a bottle of champagne for the group, which is a tradition I can totally support. The kids wear costumes to school on Carnaval and the parents attend a little event with singing. I had no idea any of this was a thing.

Dressed for the Carnaval 2016 celebration at the village school.
(c) 2016 by jenveltsos

But my last goal is more elusive and difficult to quantify. I wanted to become more fluent in French. I mean, it would be totally embarrassing to live here for a year and return home with just my choppy tourist French, right? And certainly living in the country, surrounded by French speakers, would help me learn by osmosis. Isn't that how it works? But I didn't account for my hermetic tendencies. I work from home, so I'm tucked away in a sunny corner most days, reading or writing or designing my courses for next year. I used to run errands pretty frequently, but now Hubby goes to the gym most mornings and it's really easy to just give him a shopping list. And I missed the last two Parent's Association meetings. Those meetings are great practice at following multiple speakers using colloquial language.

I know more words than when I arrived, so that's got to mean something, right? I try to speak French to Hubby and Belle Mere. They are really supportive and encouraging, but they also interrupt and finish my sentences when I'm struggling for a word. When I ask them to repeat a sentence so that I can make sure I understood correctly or catch a word that I missed, they tend to completely rephrase the sentence, and that defeats the purpose.

I'm still struggling with verb tenses, and everyone I talk to, even the French, agree that is a common problem. When I speak to others, it seems like I live in the present and the past in France because I usually cannot remember the future or conditional tenses. One exception is Je voudrais (I would like) because that's an essential part of ordering food in restaurants. When shopping, I speak French to the clerks even if they switch to English saying "Je dois pratiquer le Francais, mais je comprend si vous parlez tres lentement." (I must practice French, but I understand if you speak very slowly.)

A few months ago, I read Flirting with French by William Alexander, a lovely memoir that chronicled his efforts to become fluent in French. (I embedded a link at the bottom of the page.) The idea that resonated the most was that I must stop translating in my head. To become fluent, I must look at that red fruit and think une pomme, not "That's an apple. The French word for apple is la pomme. The indefinite article for feminine words is une. So that is une pomme." While that's probably the most concrete advice and fluency yardstick I have found, I'm not there yet. 

So here at month 8, I am wondering, am I becoming fluent in French? DuoLingo says I am about 10% fluent, but that's based upon the number of lessons I have completed. (I'll get back to you soon, little owl professor, I promise!) What does it even mean to "be fluent" in a language? Some people say it means to know a target language as well as your native one, but most of us understand that is unrealistic. Some of the other definitions I have found are:

• Ability to speak and write quickly in a language
• Depending upon the topic, I can speak quickly or not. I do not need to write in French very often. I could start journaling in French, but I know that I'm not the kind of person to do that consistently. I can read current events-type materials pretty easily, but not French literature. Then again, I don't often read "English literature" either.
• Ability to converse fluidly and easily, as opposed to slow, halting, and searching for words
• I do speak slowly and search for words. 
• Knowledge of at least 3,000 words in the target language
• How does one quantify that? Am I really expected to list every word I know? Yet somehow I'm pretty sure I am a little beyond the 3K threshold.
• Thinking in the target language
• With common words and topics, I do find myself thinking of the French words immediately. This tends to happen most often right before I go to sleep. On a recent drive, I read a road sign in French (ah, deux cent metres encore) and only later realized I had not translated it to English except to convert meters to miles. In spite of these promising signs, I'm still translating from English to French in my head a lot, though. 
• Dreaming in the target language
• Nope

Then, as if by magic (but really by computer algorithm), Facebook inserted this Babble.com ad in my wall a couple of weeks ago:

Myth #1: Fluency is purely linguistic or grammatical (vocabulary, sentence structures, verb tenses).

This myth ignores the cultural, physical, and contextual elements of language. Eight months ago, I would not have really understood what this means, but I'm starting to understand. The Gallic shrug is the most obvious example, and one that I haven't used very often because I feel like a poser. Ah bon doesn't really mean oh, good but rather serves as the French version of uh-huh to keep a conversation going or oh, really? when something is surprising or dubious.

Much of my knowledge of non-standard words and phrases comes from a non-standard educational activity: Netflix. Most evenings, I watch old television shows with the French subtitles on. By focusing on shows I have already seen, I can watch the subtitles and match them to the dialogue without worrying that I am missing visual cues. Most of the new things are words and phrases that are easy to ignore, so I did for a long time. Or the flip side: Because I did not know what they meant, I would get stuck on trying to figure them out and miss the important parts of conversations. But now I know that in effet means indeed but also in effect, in reality, basically, as a matter of fact, of course. Tant mieux means good but also even better, good for her/him, better him/her than me. And I am working them both into sentences.

Myth #2: It's a zero sum game, or a finishing line: You are either have fluency or you don't.

There's actually a lot of room on this continuum, but this is the myth I struggle with the most. Academics suffer from impostor syndrome: we are certain that at any moment someone will catch on that we're not brilliant, just persistent students. I usually feel like I know quite enough about a subject because I know there is always more to learn. This makes me a pretty good teacher but a terrible language learner. Everyone tells me to go ahead and just talk, that people will understand the gist of what I'm saying. (Even Boy1 tells me this. "That's what I do at school with French, Mom. I pay attention to the words I know and watch what the others are doing.")

And I get complimented on my French pretty often, even by strangers. For example, when I apologized to the delivery driver for handing the phone to Hubby when he called: Je suis desolee, mais il est difficile pour moi a ecouter sur le telephone. Il y a beaucoup de bruit. (I'm sorry, but it is difficult for me to hear on the telephone. There is too much noise.) Nonsense, he replied, your French is fine.

Myth #3: Learning a language is a linear process. 

If you pass enough tests of increasing difficulty, you will become fluent. Isn't that the way we were taught in school? But I can feel my own grasp of the language morphing. It surges when I have coffee with Hubby and one of his high school friends or when I watch a French movie (with subtitles, of course) and it ebbs when I skip a few nights of my Netflix language lessons or when we miss a day or two of visiting with Belle Mere.

If I shift my own definition of fluency to accommodate theses myths, I do feel like I am becoming fluent. I can go to the salon and describe how I want my hair cut and understand the coiffeur's jokes while he works. I can translate on the fly as I read emails, websites, and the weather forecast aloud to Hubby. I know I should use hand signals to suggest above or below because the two words sound ridiculously similar and I just can't hear (or say) the difference. And I can go to a hobby shop and ask the saleswoman for yarn by asking saying, "Bonjour Madame. Je cherche pour quelque chose, main je ne sais quoi le me. Je cherche le fil pour faire crochet. (As it turns out, fil means both wire and yarn, so I was right on the money, but that's just dumb luck. I was actually trying to say "I'm looking for the wire that is used to crochet.") I don't know everything about French, I cannot conjugate the future tense, but I can make myself understood.

In short, I can live in France. Just don't ask me to talk to the utility companies.