As part of my lessons in learning Haitian Creole, my instructors have me reading short stories that explore various grammatical forms. One of my instructors and I have been hammering out a story for three weeks now, a relatively simple tale of a man who is going to buy a book for his girlfriend but can’t remember the title. The shop clerk interacts with him to find the right book and ends up convincing him to buy both books by the same author.
It’s an interesting short story, not written with an eye to winning a contest or being sold to a magazine for publication, but with the idea of teaching dialog, interaction, and choices.
Fine and good, and all that.
But then this week’s follow-up assignment was to write my own story, in Haitian Creole, using the grammatical constructions, and build out a similar example of dialog, interaction, and choices. Then, after writing it, I had to read the story and record it, and send the recording to my instructor.
I’ll admit that I cheated in that I wrote the story out first in English, then translated each sentence into Haitian Creole using whatever I could remember or find in my notes. I did look up one word – “until” – because I couldn’t remember the word and the story needed it, but in general, if I couldn’t remember a word, I changed the English word or phrase so that I could continue the story using only the words I knew.
Writing the story was not as hard as I thought it might be – I banged out 400 words in Haitian Creole fairly easily.
What is hard is writing literate, smoothly flowing kreyòl. I suspect that I sound like someone with a dictionary and a hazy idea of grammar. Which, of course, is what I am. ☹
I sent it off to one of my instructors who did not find a terrible number of mistakes, but indeed there were mistakes.
The most common mistake is forgetting to put in the actor for an action. In English, we often know by context who is doing an action, but in kreyòl the actor must be included for most actions. So that got marked: “I went to the store to buy me some food” is how it might look in English. We would say the “me” isn’t needed there, but in kreyòl it’s just good grammar.
The other thing, which is harder to learn, is to write not just technically correct sentences, but sentences that sound like a native speaker might say. In that aspect, I do not do as well. Partly it is just a lack of experience. I am not a native speaker of Haitian Creole! I’m learning every bit of it—there is nothing in my head already except some weird ideas about French words transmogrified into English words. And partly it is that when I flounder to find the right word or remember the right syntax and inflection for a word or phrase, I just write around it, making my sentences convoluted and flowery. (For example, because I couldn’t remember the word for “tomorrow”—demen—I wrote about “saving this for another day.” Which my instructor called out as “who has time to listen to all these words?”
It bugs me how poorly I construct sentences. I know it takes time and practice and experience. But I want to be fluent now.
I forget that it took me 12 years of school to be literate. I might be able to “speed run” kreyòl, but I don’t think I can shave much off that time. I need to read more widely in kreyòl, listen to many more people, write many more stories and letters, and speak far, far more than I am right now.
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