Never Pass Judgment Until You’ve Walked in Their Shoes

4 Accidental Lessons of Not-Learning a Language

Note: You can also read this piece on Medium

Meeting Judy

When I first begin to spend time in Paris in 2009, a sorority sister introduces me by email to “Judy” (not her real name), her childhood friend from Great Neck.  Judy now lives in Montmartre and is married to a Frenchman; they are in the antique business. She’s been here for six years.

I like her instantly – her energy, her easy conversation, her familiarity – another sixtysomething far from home.

“How’s your French?” I ask, as Americans often do. Unlike Europeans, we are impressed when someone speaks a second language. I took French in high school – that’s past tense and very long ago.

To my surprise, Judy says, “I can’t speak much at all.”

“Really?” I say, not hiding my amazement, “…after six years?”

She is unruffled. “I get by.”

That would never be me, I think, a little ashamed of myself for secretly passing judgment on a woman I just met.

Little do I know that someday I, too, will be seen as an American woman who doesn’t speak French after being here for “so long.”

Getting a C in French Class

For the next decade after meeting Judy, I shuttle back and forth between Paris and New York – twice a year, staying anywhere from two weeks to two months each time. I live in an area populated largely by ex-pats and diplomats; most speak English.

I manage simple sentences with shopkeepers, like Où sont les œufs? (Where are the eggs?) or Portez-vous des cahiers? (Do you carry notebooks?) But I simply don’t know enough words to have a real conversation with a French person.

The exception is Françoise who speaks English perfectly with an endearing French accent. She puts my mind at ease over our first of many cafés:

Mayleenda, zhe Americans, zhay zhink zee French zhay don’t like zhem. Zees ees not true. Zee French – zhay don’t like anyone.

Françoise lived in England for extended periods during high school and college. She worked in the U. S., as she puts it, “in zhee shmata beezness,” where she developed an affinity for New York Jews.

“Just speak it,” Françoise and others tell me. Don’t worry about my accent, nor let the disdain of (some) Parisians deter me.

I sally forth, bravely…but to no avail.

By 2014, when it is clear that I’m not “picking up” the language on my own, I take a placement test at L’Institut Catholique de Paris for their month-long immersion program. I am put into an advanced-beginner section with Sylvie.

Sylvie, is attractive, animated, and funny – a great teacher, who speaks only French in the classroom and draws stick figures to help us understand.

“If I can only learn what she’s teaching,” I tell friends, “I’ll be able to speak French.”

Sylvie throws open the windows each morning to let in the brisk fresh air. It’s May; I rarely take off my down jacket. And yet, I struggle to stay awake.

The rat-a-tat barrage of foreign phrases for three solid hours, five days a week, is too much for my dyslexic brain. I force myself to concentrate, to be “present,” hoping that if I try hard enough, understanding will kick in.

When I muster the courage to approach Sylvie as we exit the classroom – saying, among other things, that it’s “hard” to remember the vocabulary, she says, “Well zhen, work harder!”

I study, do my homework every night. I’m diligent about keeping mon cahier, a black-and-white composition book that Sylvie will collect and grade at the end of our semester.

The notebook assignments encourage us to reveal ourselves in French: our style of dressing, people we admire, our favorite foods. It’s fun. I’m in 5th grade again, cutting images out of magazine to illustrate my stories.

I get a C – so much for being “a good student” most of my life. Maybe I’d have done better if I copied my class notes every night, the way Frederick did. Maybe not. Frederick, then 26, is German and already speaks several languages.  He learned English in five months.

I vow to practice “my French” when I return to the U. S. I’ll study vocabulary and conjugate verbs over morning coffee.

I don’t. And I don’t join a conversation group when I get home either. Eventually, I admit that I’m not trying very hard.  I feel guilty, but I let it go.

Cut to 2020: My Second Chance

“I am finally going to learn French,” I announce to anyone willing to listen. “This time will be different,” I predict, “because I’ll be living in Paris.  I’ll have to learn.”

Françoise has a plan. We will take walks three times a week and, for a half an hour, she will only speak French. She predicts it will all come back to me.

I’m game…until we start doing it. I have lots of stories to share with her – about Rocky, my writing, a fun anecdote about my mishaps in Paris — but it’s frustrating not to have words.

When she talks, I throw in a “C’est vrai?” (That’s true?) every so often, or a “Bien sûr!” (Of course!) – to show that I’m paying attention. However, such exchanges don’t qualify as conversation.

It’s tedious for me, and I feel guilty about making Françoise suffer. We soldier on for a few weeks like this.

“So what did you and Françoise talk about today?” my partner asks.

“I’m not sure,” I think we talked about COVID regulations, vaccines, what Macron said, how the French government is helping merchants who have been closed. “But I miss most of the details – and sometimes wonder if I’m getting the main idea!”

Françoise eventually senses this, too. It’s been fun – many days we double up with laugher over another of my language gaffs – but it’s not working. More accurately, I’m not working on it.

At one point, she says, “I zhink your French ees getting worse!”

I don’t take Françoise’s assessment as an insult. She is stating a fact.

And so, we quietly change course. She speaks to me in English, and I – the reluctant student – am forced to ask myself, once again, “Do you really want to learn French?”

How I Got to No!

Lately, I think about Judy a lot – and how I quietly judged her for not learning French. Until you walk a mile in the other gal’s shoes, you can’t know what it’s like to be her.

And now I’m walking that same path, living full-time in a locked-down Paris, where all socialization is done on foot. Every morning, I trot off to the Champ de Mars to meet our dog-park friends.  I speak mostly in English.

At home, I think  and write in English. I talk on the phone and Zoom with friends – in English. Every now and then, I  log on to Duo Lingo.  It’s debatable whether I’ve learned much French that way.

This is what I have learned:

1. It’s important to identify your Achilles’ heel.

For me, it’s aural comprehension: I have trouble processing information with only my ears. I need to see words. I hated Art History 101 in college because we viewed slides in a pitch-black auditorium. I couldn’t take notes or glance down at them.

Similarly, my heart sank whenever Sylvie turned on the CD player and we had to listen to another slice of French life.  The first sentence is about Marie and Pierre going to a restaurant…got that…now the second sentence… I was still pondering the first paragraph when the passage ended.

I feel the same sense of dread today when a French speaker joins us at the dog park, or when I ask a question in French and am expected to understand the answer.

To know your weakness is not necessarily to disparage yourself or to give up.  As I tell my grandsons, “You can’t be good at everything!”

2. Quick talkers – this would include New Yorkers, as well as the French – can’t speak slowly, even if you ask them.

When I encounter a French person, I lead with, “Je suis désolé. Je ne parle pas très bien le français.” (I’m sorry. I don’t speak French very well.)

He hears my well-practiced disclaimer but protest, “Mais non, Madame, votre français est très bon!” (But no, Madam, your French is very good!).  He then rattles off what he thinks I should know – naturally, in French.

I interrupt. “Lentement s’il vous plaît!” (Slowly, please!) Even if the person slows down – and most don’t, not even the children – it’s never slow enough.

3. There IS such a thing as “not being good” at language.

“Language mentor” Lýdia Machová would disagree, but I’m sticking to my guns. I have nothing in common with a woman who currently speaks eight languages and learns a new one every other year! She is “good” at languages; I’m not.

In her TED talk, “The Secrets of Learning a New Language,” Machová shares what she and other polyglots have in common:

• Enjoyment in the process
• Effective methods
• A learning plan (“I will practice speaking every Tuesday and Thursday with a friend for 20 minutes. I will listen to a YouTube video while having breakfast.”)
• Patience

And then she adds…

Now, some of you may be thinking, “That’s all very nice to enjoy language learning, but isn’t the real secret that you polyglots are just super talented and most of us aren’t?”

That’s exactly what I think as I listen to Machová explain the four “secrets.” I come up short. Learning French feels hard; I don’t enjoy it. I’m a researcher by trade, but the only “method” I investigated is DuoLingo, and I didn’t approach that with any sort of plan or consistency. Also, I am not patient with myself.

Thus, I have to conclude that I’m among the super untalented when it comes to language. Besides not learning French, I didn’t learn Italian, despite living in Rome for four months after college. And although we’ve been together 27 years, I still haven’t learned Spanish, my partner’s native tongue.

Maybe it’s because I can’t hear the nuanced distinctions in pronunciation – in French, for example, the difference between vous avez and vous savez. Maybe it’s because my memory isn’t what it used to be (then again, I was 21 when I didn’t learn Italian). And maybe I would rather be doing something else.

4. Tell yourself the truth.

I love writing about this strategy for getting yourself “unstuck.”  I learned it decades ago from transformation coach Barbara Biziou, who then taught a class in self-actualization.  Whether you’re in a repetitive negative cycle in a relationship or a situation or you somehow find yourself going around in circles, STOP! Look around you. Tell yourself the truth. And then move on. Do something different.

Looking around – in this case, at my aborted and half-hearted attempts to learn French – I see someone who is reluctant to commit and would rather be elsewhere!

I think of my dear friend Zelda. We met in her early 90s; she played tennis until 99 and walked three miles a day until she died, just shy of 105. When you reach that age, you know what’s important.

Honey, all we have is time. We have to spend it wisely.

My truth is that I’d rather “spend” my minutes and hours writing, walking the streets of Paris, talking to old friends, making new ones, not studying.

It’s taken me months to tell myself this truth, to admit that (at least for now) learning French is not how I want to use my time. I thought this would change when I moved here in December. I thought that necessity would spark invention – and enthusiasm. I thought that being here full-time would make all the difference.

It hasn’t. But, like Judy, I get by.