Being Bilingual feat. Flight of the Conchords

So, today I gave my first oral presentation in Frace in front of a room filled to capacity with native speakers. Needless to say, it was nerve-wracking. However, I knew the material well and the professor (who's super nice) told me that I had done an excellent job! When I told my host mother, she beamed with pride and only corrected my speach once in the insuing conversations. This is an example of a linguistically good day.

Wednesday, I went to my 9h45 am course on Montaigne that's going to eat my soul. I have been doing a written analysis of every chapter like he asks us to, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only one in the class that's done it every single time. I get props for that, but there's a problem when the prof hands you back your paper and is all like, "Yeah, there are a lot of errors here. Why don't you just give me 10 perfect sentences next time?" Gah! I understand the material, but written expression wasn't being good to me. This is an examle of a linguistically mediocre day.

From here, it can go two ways: you can buck up, make a note to do better next time, and continue being French, continuing the mediocre day-- possibly making it into a good day; or you can completely succumb to your failure and have a small breakdown, constantly doubting yourself in French for the rest of the day, inevitably leading to more errors, which turns this into a linguisically bad day.

Some days, you may wake up and your brain refuses to switch to French. You spend the entirity of a 3 hour class doodling and pondering your existence because your feble mind refuses to function in foreign. This only gets worse throughout the day. By dinnertime, all communication with your host family is pointless because you can't even remember the word for something as simple as "spoon", let alone construct coherent sentences. When some unwitting person even attempts a conversation in French, a deer in the headlights look is all you can manage, and perhaps an accompanying shake of the head. At this point, hand gestures are all you have. This is a linguisically terrible day.

My first days here can be categorized as linguistically terrible. The rest have been a melange of bad, good, and mediochre. How can you prepare yourself mentally? You can't. It just happens. However, carrying around a phrasebook and pocket dictionary may aid in confidence-boosting and provide a resource when you need it.

Linguistically bad and terrible days go something like the Flight of the Conchords video posted separately. It makes absolutely no sense, and all you can really remember are random vocab that may not even be correct. I highly recommend watching it, as it only takes up 2.5 minutes of your time.

To sum up: being immersed in a second language is not easy, but being prepared for the linguistically bad days definitely helps

This post is dedicated to Tina Manco