On Language, the third installment
Hello, dearest people of the RyanBlog, and welcome to my semi-regular State of the Language Learning address.
As you’ve all heard me explain approximately 133,459,769 times by now, a big part of the reason I came to Senegal was because I wanted to finally attain some mastery of French. I’d been stumbling along for about a year and a half in beginner language classes at Duke and I knew that if I was ever going to learn the language, I mean really learn it and not just memorize grammar and vocabulary from a textbook (to understand the difference, please review the entry in which the french phrase i thought meant ‘to take a walk’ turned out to mean ‘zip around dakar giving away live chickens to homeless men’), I would have to go to a country where French was spoken.
Alright, so I realize there’s a very simple solution to this quandary. I won’t tell you what it is, but here’s a clue. It begins with “go” and ends with “to France.”
But if you’ve met me or even have a passing familiarity with my personality, you’ll know by now that I’m really weird. And something about studying abroad in France just felt heart-stoppingly, soul-crushingly, mind-bendingly normal to me. And I was plainly having none of that.
So instead of spending a semester in France, the frenchiest of all frenchy countries, I signed up to go to Senegal. This, I decided, was the perfect mix of the opportunity I sought to learn French and the totally off-the-wall bizarre semester abroad that I really wanted.
Alright, so fast-forward to now, three months into my time in this former French colony in West Africa. Here’s where we stand—I’m still astoundingly far from being fluent, conversational, or even functionally competent in French. My pronunciation remains a mangled, fiery heap of wreckage and, while my vocabulary has increased ten-fold in the time I’ve been here, I still sometimes forget basic, everyday conversation words at the moment I need them.
I’ve spent untold hours feeling frustrated about all of this. To put it simply, it’s really hard to live in a place where you can’t communicate effectively or efficiently. And quite lonely. And it certainly doesn’t help when you have a host mother who periodically comments on a) how terrible your language skills are, b) how little you are improving, and c) how much better her English is than your French.
Ouch.
But don’t worry. This entry is not going to just be me wading through an endless puddle of self-pity. Because what I’m trying to get at here is how, despite all of what I just mentioned, being in Senegal has been a really cool language-learning experience for me, in ways I could not have begun to think up before I came here.
For one thing, I’ve learned what language immersion is. Or rather, I’ve learned what language immersion is not. And it is not going to a country where many people speak the language you are trying to learn.
If that was the case, people wouldn’t just go to the U.S. or England to learn English. They’d also go to China or Germany or Egypt or Indonesia. Because there are tons of people in all those countries who can speak English. So why not study it there?
It’s because, when we look to immerse ourselves in a language, we want more than just the ability to converse with people in that language. We want to really and truly be inside the language, to have it constantly pushing up against us from all sides. This means hearing the language constantly spoken—on the streets, in stores, by the people next to you on the bus or at the table beside you in a restaurant. It means listening to it on the radio and TV and seeing it on signs on the street, so that the language buzzes all around you, even when you’re not consciously participating in it, like a constant and inescapable hum.
I’ve known for a while that this is not the case in Senegal, although the first time it truly clicked was only this week. I was at a movie theatre in Dakar watching a film made about a group of Senegalese young people in the 1980s. As the movie went on, something about it felt stilted and awkward to me. Then it dawned on me what it was—all of the characters were speaking to each other in French.
I realized that in all the time I’ve been in Senegal, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard Senegalese people speak to each other in French in front of me when it was not directly for my benefit. Everyone with an education knows French, since it’s the language in which all schooling is conducted, but no one carries on their day-to-day conversations in French. It’s not the language you use with your friends or to yell at your kids or for casual dinnertime conversation.
For instance, my host mom speaks to me in French, but I am the only person I’ve ever seen her use that language with. With our maid, with her friends, on the phone, etc, it’s always Wolof.
This used to make me ridiculously frustrated. I hated that she, and most other Senegalese people I met, would even carry on long conversations with other people while I was there in Wolof, knowing full well that I couldn’t understand a word they were saying (okay, maybe I could understand a word, but when that word is “I” or “and” it’s not particularly helpful to following the conversation), and also knowing that we all had a language in common that they were merely choosing not to use.
But the more time I’ve spent studying French, the more I understand this inclination. How much easier and more rewarding is it for me to speak to my own friends in English than in French? Beyond simply the fact that I speak much, MUCH better English than French, I also simply am more at home in that language. It is the language I first learned to express myself in, the language I have spent years poking at and tweaking and learning to navigate. English is a part of my personality and my personal history in a way that a second language can never be, for as long or as much as I study it.
I think that it’s the same thing for the Senegalese. Even those who speak flawless, idiomatic French—and many Senegalese do—have their roots in Wolof (or Pulaar or Serer or any other of the native languages of this region of the world). These are the languages of their families and their cultures. And for as much French as they know, it will never quite equal the ease with which their first language expresses who they are.
That may sound silly, and it probably would have to me before I came here, but being in Senegal for me has been a constant experience of learning how language reflects and expresses the things we value and the world as we see it. This week, for instance, we spent two hours in my Wolof class going over the words for family. Many of them were things that seemed normal to me—mother, father, parents, grandparents—but others were startlingly and fascinatingly different. For instance, one’s siblings are categorized not by their gender (brother and sister), but by their age (there is a word for “younger sibling” and a word for “older sibling,” onto which you add “who is a male” or “who is a female”). There are also an astounding number of different ways to describe extended family. In Wolof there is a different word for your aunts on your mother’s side and your aunts on your father’s, for the children of your father’s brother and the children of his sister. Wolof, coming as it does from a polygamous society, has one word for “the child of my father by one of his wives that is not my mother” but no way to describe step-siblings or step-parents.
Suddenly, knowing all this, I understood why I get so confused when Senegalese people describe their relationships to me, telling me that someone is their “cousin” or “brother” or “uncle” when I know plainly that they are not. The problem is not that they are being imprecise, it is rather that my language(s) do not have adequate words to convey familial relationships in the way that they are used to. This is a small and random example, of course, but I think it’s telling.
So, as I’ve said, all of this has been ridiculously eye-opening for me to observe in Senegalese society. On a more personal note, it’s also given me a new and more optimistic lens through which to view my own language learning. Given that I am not actually immersed in French, and also given that my actual French language class is inane and almost completely worthless (more on that another time), I have realized that I have to be realistic about my progress here. I’m not going to become great or even good at French in the four months I’m in Senegal. I’m going to walk away still constantly struggling to keep my head above water in daily conversations or to read most anything without the help of a dictionary.
But I am also, for the first time ever, on a real and serious path to learning a language. When French was merely just a class I took in school, I did just enough work in it to get by and no more. French was verb conjugation charts and lists of vocabulary words and grammar rules to be memorized. It wasn’t something vibrant, and since I frankly have no knack for foreign languages, it had no life beyond the classroom where I struggled through studying it.
That’s obviously a silly way to look at a language, and I recognize that, but for me there was also no way to convince my brain that this was real and important, that language was a living, breathing thing, until I lived and breathed it. Until I had to tell someone in French that the door was locked or ask how much bread cost or bargain for a taxi ride, I didn’t care that much how you did any of those things in French. And I knew that about myself before I came here. And I’ve seen the change in myself since then.
I’m going to go back to Duke still pretty incompetent in French, but now I know why I’m studying this language and how much I can get out of learning it. I’ve seen the glimmers of what’s to come—those moments when I make a joke in French and someone laughs, or I explain something about the U.S. to my host mother and I can see I’m teaching her something cool. Now I want to know French in a real and serious way, and I think that momentum will propel me to actually achieving the level of French I originally thought I could get from this semester.
So that’s a very longwinded way of saying, this semester has been a phenomenally useful one for me in terms of language learning, if not really in the ways I expected. Of course, as with all my opinions of my experiences in Senegal, this one is liable to change in my final month here as well. We’ll see how it goes…
(P.S. if you want to see my earlier ramblings about language learning in Senegal, they can be found here and here.)
