Trends

Debates, discussions, news articles, cultural differences stories and everyday life blah blah.

On The Road

Follow me in China, in Central and in South America, in Australia, in South-East Asia or in Europe. Enjoy the pictures and some crazy travel stories!

Immigration

How to immigrate to Canada, how to apply for Canadian citizenship, and how to tackle the challenges newcomers face.

Just Blogging

Blog contests, memes, interviews, photography hunts, random facts… Let’s connect, share some blogging fun and some little snippets of life.

The Saturday Series

The ten post Saturday series: how to immigrate to Canada, how to find a job, interviews with immigrants… and more!

Home » Canadian Life, Trends

Do You Speak English?

Written by on May 28, 2007 – 3:27 am12 Comments | 349 Read this
Newspapers Boxes

News­pa­pers Boxes

I first learned Eng­lish when I was in junior high. It’s not that I wasn’t a good stu­dent: I just didn’t give a damn. Our teacher had been to Eng­land once, prob­a­bly in the fifties. We had this stu­pid book about three friends—an Amer­i­can, an Irish and a British—and every year we would learn Christ­mas car­ols. Need­less to say I wasn’t pay­ing much atten­tion and spent most of the classes doing my Chi­nese home­work, hid­den behind the heater at the back of the room.

Eng­lish wasn’t pop­u­lar. French don’t like Eng­lish much (“they put vine­gar on chips and eat meat with mint sauce!”), and the rela­tion­ship with the USA has always been a bit rocky (“these warmongers/ burgers-eaters!”), so there were basi­cally no incen­tive to learn.

In 1999, I spent a sum­mer in Bei­jing, China. I was 16 and had naively decided I should explore the coun­try I had stud­ied for 3 years. So I packed my bags and left, leav­ing my par­ents wor­ried yet proud of their eldest daugh­ter. By the time I landed in Bei­jing, I had lost my con­fi­dence. I had entered a world I wasn’t really mas­ter­ing but I even­tu­ally made my way through it. It’s in Bei­jing I met Amer­i­cans for the first time of my life. I had trav­eled before in Eng­land and in var­i­ous parts of Europe but always with French peo­ple, so I never really had to com­mu­ni­cate in another lan­guage. And now here I was, speech­less. My Chi­nese was fine: 北京人 under­stood me most of time. The same wasn’t true for my Amer­i­can room­mates and for­eign­ers gen­er­ally speak­ing. My first room­mate was Indone­sian: we had no lan­guage in com­mon and she spoke bro­ken Chi­nese. I felt frus­trated and self-conscious: I was the lit­tle white girl whose Chi­nese was bet­ter than Eng­lish. I felt left-out. I swore I would learn English.

When I came back in France, I kept in touch with some friends I met in China. We exchanged emails in Eng­lish and I slowly improved my writ­ing. I would also lis­ten to a lot of Rock music as I always did, but I would also trans­late the lyrics. It was a bad idea to start with Pink Floyd and Nir­vana: just imag­ine me lying on my bed, a dic­tio­nary in one hand, twist­ing my hair, try­ing to make sense of these drug induced log­or­rhoea! By the time I fin­ished high school, I was top of my class in Eng­lish and was pretty con­fi­dent in my abilities.

Right after I grad­u­ated, I left for Hong Kong, where I some­how man­aged to get a job thanks to speak­ing Chi­nese. Even now, I’m not sure of what I actu­ally did in Hong Kong—this time was really con­fus­ing and the place I worked in was odd. Really odd. But sell­ing glass (!) to the world and teach­ing rich kids didn’t leave much room to French, and I ended up speak­ing Eng­lish most of time. How­ever, at the time, I hadn’t real­ized I spoke great Can­tonese Eng­lish: “more bet­ter” “long time no see”, “I tomor­row go to Shen­zhen” were the best way to communicate.

Right after Hong Kong, I went to meet Feng in Mex­ico. We hadn’t seen each other since Bei­jing in 1999 and we were ready for a long trip that would lead us to Bei­jing. I flew to Mex­ico. He met me at the air­port. It might sound like a roman­tic movie. But the romance momen­tar­ily paused when, twenty min­utes after land­ing, I declared:

Please, no Eng­lish, speak Chi­nese or Span­ish, I don’t under­stand you”.

Lis­ten­ing to Feng mak­ing con­ver­sa­tion on the way from the air­port, I had real­ized some­thing: I couldn’t under­stand a word of what he was say­ing. I was so used to botched Eng­lish that proper North Amer­i­can Eng­lish didn’t make much sense to me. Sure, I could pick up a word once in a while, out of a mush of words that I couldn’t dis­tin­guish. Any ques­tion was a strug­gle. “Do you want to take a shower now or later?” would be process in my head as “question+shower+later”, that was about it. Argu­ing, mak­ing deci­sion or express­ing feel­ings was way out of my league. I never felt that frus­trated my whole life, not to men­tion we were iso­lated in a Spanish world.

After a cou­ple of weeks, I could under­stand Feng bet­ter, although mak­ing a sen­tence was still tak­ing all of my energy. But I was opti­mistic: I had almost fin­ished read­ing an Eng­lish book, Feng seemed to under­stand me, and I was almost there… right? I was actu­ally pretty dis­ap­pointed. In France and in China, I had been con­sid­ered as “bilin­gual” and I had expected Feng so men­tion my flu­ent Eng­lish. Okay, on sec­ond thought, maybe not “flu­ent”. But hey, it was pretty good for a French girl!

So, one night in Can­cun, I asked Feng how long it took him to be flu­ent in Eng­lish. He paused. I was actu­ally expect­ing some­thing like “I don’t know… cou­pla years, maybe?”, some­thing reach­able, some­thing that would show I was close, very close. He looked up and declared: “prob­a­bly ten years…

That’s great”, I though. “Not only my Eng­lish sucks, but I also have to put out with the fact I’m gonna drag my lan­guage inabil­ity for the next eight years or so. May as well just give up right now!”

But my sign lan­guage abil­i­ties weren’t that good, so I didn’t give up and even­tu­ally, my Eng­lish improved. By the time we got back to Canada, I was com­fort­able enough.

Dur­ing the next three years, I expe­ri­enced Kiwi & Aus­tralian accent dur­ing our South Pacific trav­els, job hunt­ing back in Canada again, argu­ments, deal­ing with all kind of peo­ple, work­ing in a call cen­ter (where I was so uncom­fort­able with Que­bec accent that I asked to be switched to “Eng­lish only” calls), and every­day life’s prob­lems. I watched TV, read books, learned cul­tural jokes and bitched about the weather. I swore a lot and cried almost as much. Every new task required more vocab­u­lary, more cul­tural learn­ing and more slang—none of that was writ­ten in a book. I learned first­hand that lan­guage doesn’t come easy and that it takes a lot of con­fi­dence to stand up and talk in front of peo­ple. I some­times wished France had invaded the world and forced it to speak French. I dreamed of Esperanto. I loathed peo­ple who would look down upon me or those who would throw new words at me.

I feel like I’ve come a long way. My Eng­lish isn’t per­fect but I feel com­fort­able with it. I can switch back and forth between the two lan­guages when I teach. I’m not scared to talk to peo­ple. I can read all kind of medias, watch movies and TV, and—hope­fully!—write in Eng­lish. I love Eng­lish as much as I hated it before.

You know the funny thing? In my first Eng­lish class back in high school, I laughed when I learned Eng­lish didn’t really have con­ju­ga­tion per se: “wow, that’s gonna be easy!”

Related arti­cles:

  1. Bro­ken English
  2. French, Eng­lish and Montréal
  3. Do You Speak Canadian…Eh?
  4. French And Eng­lish (3÷10)
  5. Learn­ing French Or Eng­lish In Canada (6÷10)

Tagged with:

12 Comments »

  • Deadpoolite says:

    I dont speak eng­lish it is such a shame.…hey wait a minute…did I just write that…IN ENGLISH…nonetheless. It is a mir­a­cle, it is a mir­a­cle I tell you (there is some­thing super­nat­ural about this blog maybe it is the lay­out it has to be…back down evil lay­out and creepy fonts, back down…)

    I am Greek by the way and a new­bie to your blog, so a big hello to every­one!
    Orig­i­nally I started learn­ing eng­lish in my coun­try when I was about 7–8 years old. Then I was bit­ten by a radioac­tive bug and decided to go to the UK and study in their higher edu­ca­tion (of all the super­pow­ers in the world…).

    I wouldnt say eng­lish is a hard lan­guage com­pared to some other lan­guages, but I always treated it more like a learn­ing game(even the ter­mi­nol­ogy stuff for my sci­ence) so I cant really be objec­tive about the whole thing.

    In con­trast, it has been so long since I learnt french or actu­ally used them, I always feel annoyed by that.I admit I have for­got­ten a lot of the vocab­u­lary (oh well no Parisian love for me just yet I guess,lol)

    Judg­ing from you blog entry text, your writ­ten eng­lish is very good and it shows that you have put a lot of work into it. Well done!

  • Celine says:

    Your tales are interesting…haha!

Leave a comment!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

All comments are welcomed!

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get yours, head to Gravatar.