John ’25, reflects on the importance of stepping out of your comfort zone to fully immerse in the language.
From talks with my host families to attempting to order un pain au chocolat at my favorite café spot, my time in Arles has been a struggle to say the least when it came to speaking the language and conversing with locals. The process of trying to have a conversation in French requires a lot of effort to both understand French and reply with coherent sentences. However, I found that the best method was just diving straight into it. When I tried speaking with my host family or my teachers I struggled with not knowing my vocabulary and it was very tedious to have to pull out a dictionary every time. When it came to speaking with my host family, it was difficult to communicate effectively without either having to ask them to repeat what they said multiple times or having to pull out an English to French Dictionary. Although it was tedious, I would say that I learned just as much from my host family as I did from the daily language classes.
After a while I realized that in this foreign setting you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. If you stay focused on trying to speak perfect French all the time, you’ll start tripping over yourself. What’s really helped me was our daily French classes and language lunches that forced me to speak French with the people around me, especially the teachers. I find it important to play around with the language through new vocabulary and techniques and my random conversations from French politics to tennis with my teachers have been pushing me to experiment more and become ever so slightly more fluent in French. For example, during the second week, there was the EU elections and some people, including my host family, weren’t happy with the results. So I used this opportunity to converse with my friends and teachers concerning the future of politics. However, to be fully immersed in the language requires the commitment of not defaulting back to English even when I was trying to speak with my friends. If there was one thing I learned from this trip is that there is no gimmick to learning a new language, no one thing that you can just memorize. To become better at a language requires a different commitment from any other school subject.
