Alright!

See, I started French when I was 11 years old, and stopped when I was 16 because my high school didn't have high enough French classes after that point. To my recollection, I never had any frustration learning French - it always was rather simple for me, a matter of memorizing a few things and remembering a few rules. Of course, the rules get more complicated and the language itself more complex, but I have no memory of ever seeing something that I just could not understand in the classroom. Nor do I remember slaving away while just trying to write a paragraph or two. All of my assignments fell perfectly within my level, and I recognized the patterns and flow of the language with respect to whatever grammar point or vocabulary we had worked on that day in class (I always had, I might point out, excellent French teachers).

By the time I got to Paris, my French was at a level where I could communicate most things with only a mild amount of trouble, but occasionally I wouldn't know a crucial adjective or noun. I believe this is because I had a strong grammatical base, a well-defined foundation upon which I began adding more and more bits of the language until I eventually spoke it rather well. At first, I would just drop topics if I didn't know how to express myself, but after a month or two I found that I could always find ways of getting around missing words. Learning French for me was therefore never an overwhelming process. To the contrary - it was extremely enjoyable and I always felt that it was a subject in which I excelled.

I started learning Spanish when I was 17 - I took an intensive beginning course just two months before I left for France. I promptly forgot all of it once I arrived in France, as my efforts to concentrate on communicating with those around me knocked out whatever Spanish I had learned the summer before (non-native languages are all stored in the same part of the brain. Hence why, when I am speaking Spanish, French occasionally pops out but English never does). I started over again a year later in college, where I had the best language professor I have ever had in my life (Hola Senor Sejas!). Sadly, that school (which was an American school in France) only had beginner's levels of all the languages except French, because the language department was inondated with foreign students wanting to learn French more so than it was with students wanting to learn German or Italian (it's a very small school).

So my Spanish love ended there. Two summers later, I picked up yet another intensive Spanish course, where I got placed in advanced beginner (second on a ladder of six courses). That class ended last July, and I just picked up my Spanish studies again last week, where I was placed in advanced intermediate (fourth on that six-part ladder) at the same school. This means I essentially skipped over that entire period (step three on the six-rung ladder) where you slowly learn and affirm your understanding of verbs and basic structures of the language.

The thing is, I know I know these things. Collectively, were I ideally able to access everything I have learned over the years, I was placed in the right level. My written test placed me there, and so I must have the information in there somewhere. But when speaking, I find I am overwhelmed with a bunch of verb tenses that I know I learned, but were never fully locked into my memory forever. I have a strong understanding of when I should use which tenses and why, but I just can't remember how to form the right verb.

And then there's Arabic, which is just a crazy, crazy language. Keep in mind, I am starting at square one. I only learned the alphabet last week, so things are obviously slow-moving. But it is amazing how frustrating the sheer foreigness of the language can be. I can look at a word in French or Spanish that I have never seen before, and can often figure out the meaning. And my pronunciation is often close, if not exactly correct. I can sometimes take an English word, add a typical French ending to it, and find a word they actually use in French. This means that for me, both French and Spanish are rather malleable: I can play with them as I like, bend them in certain ways so that what I am saying or trying to say can eventually come to make sense. But I don't ever foresee that happening in Arabic because the words feel so incredibly foreign. And that's going to be really, really weird. How can you learn a language if you can't play with it?

I remember my first day of Spanish, ever. My professor spoke entirely in Spanish, and I was appalled to realize that I understood what she was saying just by the little Spanish English-speaking Americans are just randomly familiar with. The exact same thing happened last Saturday in Arabic - my professor just started speaking in Arabic without warning, and God help me, it was Alien Speak. Just pure jibberish in my ears.

The professor obviously knows we can't understand a damn word. He told us not to listen to the language but to just hear it. Once I stopped trying to listen and just tried to hear, the experience became an awful lot more pleasant.

Right now, I'm just trying to figure out the phonetic differences between some of the letters of the alphabet (if you're curious, you can go here, and click on "alphabet" - nevermind that the page is in French. While it loads, turn on your speakers and click on some of the letters to hear what they sound like. There are a few that have the most subtle differences - very difficult sounds for an anglophone to recognize). There's a letter that sounds a little bit like "thel" (written "dhal" on the site page), and I like to laugh as the Frenchies try and make the "th" sound. There's another letter with an "r" sound, and there, too, they have a hard time. They're cute about it - the people in my class seem really laid-back and silly - so it's all in fun. But I can't imagine the frustration they must be having with just the sounds alone.

So yeah, this is all just to say that I am discovering a lot about my ability to just buckle down and do this shit. While cooking my oatmeal this morning, I was thinking to myself that maybe the very reason why I like learning languages so much is for a purely selfish reason: no matter what you do, when you leave class, you KNOW you have learned something. That whole "you learn something new every day" feels like it rings far more true for me when it comes to learning languages than it does for anything else.

Still. I am frustrated at how long my Spanish homework takes me. Languages have always come naturally and easily for me. I think I am just going to have to stare at these papers I have tacked up all over the place for a few more days before I can start whipping out the complex sentences I have the mental blueprint for in my head. If I could just get these conjugations memorized, things would fly. And learning conjugations is really just about discipline, about listing them over and over again and about testing your familiarity with them.

This is the first time I am experiencing the frustration I always saw people in my classes struggling with, but I never understood myself. It's incredilbly eye-opening, and I think it will prove to be extremely useful when I start teaching English to French students this fall.