Street Charades

Hi all!

Although I am from New England and I have braved some insane winter storms on the Hill, I can say this this past week has been COLD in Dijon. I didn’t have to trek through a foot of snow to get to classes (which is normal in Worcester) but the early onset of rain and colder temperatures made for a unpleasant surprise and a sad burial of my shorts in the back of my closet. RIP.

This week I want to talk about a phenomenon that I’m sure other students studying abroad in foreign language speaking countries have experienced. It is the strange way in which years of vocabulary and grammar can suddenly slip away from you, leaving you looking down at the ground, darting your eyes back and forth as your hand grasps your head, as if searching for the word you know that you’ve learned (and leaving the poor person who asked for directions standing in front of you uncomfortably). This search is usually fruitless and you’re often left stitching together words and motions that might convey the correct meaning, creating a sad game of charades between you and your poor questionner. Once meaning is conveyed or one of the people caves (accepting that there is no acceptable hand motion to denote the town hall) and you separate, the word you were searching for comes clearly into your mind, along with several sophisticated ways to vary your sentences.

Though these experiences are annoying (and sometimes traumatizing), they point out two integrally related things: that stress and expression in a foreign language do not go together AND that if you just chilled out a little, speaking in a different language is so much easier. The worst case scenario is that your hand motions fail, and you have to apologize and say you can’t help, while the best case is that you get to show off your new vocabulary and fancy syntax. In any case, you will learn from experiences using and failing to use a language, and freaking out over having a perfect accent and impeccable grammar is not worth the stress. Sometimes you just have to go for it, whether or not you feel like you’re capable.

Another little piece of wisdom: The 365 days of zen page-a-day calendar I bought here tells me that if I like birdsongs, I should look into getting a CD of nature noises. Deep.

À la prochaine! 

Tom

8 euros well spent

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 18th, 2015 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.