The International Engineer

April 19^th, 2023

I keep getting asked by friends, family, and acquaintances whether I can speak French now that I’m abroad. And truthfully, each time I never know quite how to respond. There’s a long-winded answer in which I would like to tell them about how my French has evolved. Am I fluent? Not exactly. Do I sound like a native speaker? Definitely not. But has my French improved leaps and bounds from when I learned it in an academic setting? Yes.

But instead of saying this I usually just say “Yeah I can get around France now.” But now on to the more long-winded and complete answer!

So for some background, I took French in high-school. More specifically, I took AP French and got a 5 (top-score) on the shortened  exam in 2020 (COVID year). However, I never felt like I knew French. It didn’t come naturally to me, and the accent was especially difficult. As someone who grew up in a multilingual household, I know what it feels like to have a “right” and “wrong” accent when speaking a language. And my French accent was very wrong.

In France, I probably knew much less vocabulary than I knew in high school. But somehow, my accent seems to become more “right” with my limited words. Just hearing people speak in French has made it easier to pick up on subtleties in the accent. In other words, after hearing customers great shopkeepers with “bonjour” and bid them goodbye “au revoir” some hundreds of times, I’ve finally managed to improve my own greeting and goodbyes (in my opinion).

Of course, it’s difficult to verify that my accent has improved, or even changed, without some unbiased third party tracking my language progression over the years. But some things I’ve noticed is the response of shopkeepers overtime to my French. Earlier I would stutter and immediately they would switch to English if they knew it. But now, I’m able to order at a café completely in French or checkout at the supermarket without relying on someone speaking English.

What I want to know is how much my current French reveals about me. Is it obvious that I’ve only been here for a few months based on my French? Or have some people I’ve interacted with thought that I was in France for longer or shorter than I’ve been here? These are some of the thoughts that run through my mind following a more intensive French interaction that I could never have pulled off in high school.

Some of my interesting language highlights are below. A few days ago, a grandmother thought that I was from Grenoble and asked me to give her directions on a Flix bus. When I told her I didn’t know and maybe someone else knew, she replied that “the others weren’t from Grenoble.” That was a big ego-boost, especially telling her that I’ve been here for three and a half months. Although I should mention that she was hard of hearing, so it’s very possible that my French mistakes were well-hidden.

And just today, I had the compelte opposite experience when trying to order a croissant coeur.  Apparently, my pronunciation of coeur was so terrible that the cashier spent around two minutes asking me repeatedly what I wanted and to pronounce it again before giving up.

Unfortunately, responses to my French have been pretty mixed and inconsistent for me to draw a meaningful conclusion just yet. So how far along am I in my French-learning journey? I don’t know. But I guess the best way to find out is to pull aside a French stranger and ask them bluntly where my French falls on a scale from 1-10. But because I’ve heard that the French are brutally honest and because I also know I still have a long way to go, I’d rather not do that yet! Maybe someday I’ll get the courage to ask a French person how good my French is.