Today is 351 days since I began to learn Haitian Creole. I started with Duolingo, found that it wasn’t enough to teach me, hired one, then a second, and finally a third instructor, all who help me throughout the week with conversations and lessons that are both formal and informal.
All of my instructors are pushing me to become fluent—which is a good thing, right?!
But fluency isn’t about learning stuff and stitching it together grammatically (even though that is a task I still cannot do well). Fluency is about the ability to express yourself in your new language as well as you do in your current, “mother” tongue. Fluency is talking about complex topics, switching contexts easily, getting the jokes and wordplay, talking about dreams and plans, and all the rest. To be fluent in a language is to use the language as the invisible tool connecting your mind with your community.
I’m so not there yet. Still, I’m trying.
My task two weeks ago was to write a short story about an event in my life, so I wrote about a time when I was approached by an attractive woman in a restaurant who invited me to sit with her. She began by asking me questions about my life’s plans—was I going to marry, would I have kids, would I be preparing for their education?
I was quite bowled over and seriously thinking about the next steps when she plopped a contract in front of me so that I could…buy life insurance.
Well, it was a memory, and I wrote it with as much flair and gusto as I could with my limited vocabulary and grammar. I turned it in to my teacher last week, who responded that he really enjoyed it, and even laughed at the right spots—which is good for me to hear from anyone who reads my comic writing.
Then tonight we began working through what I wrote, correcting line after line of “no, it’s not quite like that. No, we don’t use that word in that way. No, don’t use that word because it makes you look ignorant or unkind or foolish…”
It kinda hurts, but in a good way. The gist of the story is okay. I got some of it right. But there is still this cloud of words that I pick from and I’m not always picking the right one, exactly, but one that’s close & yet that comes with unanticipated pitfalls.
It’s the trap of language fluency. You get to a point where you have a good working vocabulary and a general sense of grammar, and you can read something or hear someone and translate it fairly easily. (Or better, not translate it but understand it without translating.) I can do that well enough if the speaker is speaking at a normal English rate of speaking. (Haitian Creole seems to be like many other languages that are definitely not indexed on speaking at a comfortable speed. Woah Nelly, native speakers talk fast.)
But then you start constructing your more complicated sentences and paragraphs, and it seems that every phrase has another chance to pick the not-quite-right grammatical construction or phrase or word.
Sigh. It’s just going to take time. And practice. And conversations. It’s difficult to speed it up more than I’m doing already. (It’s been less than a year since I started and I’m able to have conversations, so not too shabby!)
Still, I wish I could learn it faster.
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Photographer https://www.pexels.com/@philkallahar/