I called my mom last night and chatted a bit. Apparently my dad has been pretty stressed by work lately (end of the year at a really posh private school) and he ran out of gas on the freeway last week. Just like in a movie, my mom had to fill up the lawn mower gas canister at the gas station and then find my dad on the shoulder.
When I got off the phone I turned to B. "Putain, je n'arrive plus à parler en anglais!" And he responded "Et pourtant tu parles meme pas le français!"
Sam once posted about it being impossible to be fully bi-lingual because you lose a little bit in one language when you gain in the other, and it sure does seem like that.
French words, expressions, and grammar just kept wanting to come out while I was talking with my mom. It must make me sound really disconnected because it can take me a while to finish a sentence or a thought while I fight the reflex to use French.
And while I do speak French well, B's partly right in that deep down I still have English logic. I wrote three pages in French explaining part of my group project for my Masters, and my group partners were unanimous in saying that it was good, but not correct French. Ça cloche. The more I delve into French, the more English comes out. And vice-versa.
Eh ben, the only thing to do is parler en franglais. Au moins comme ça I won't have to worry about syntax.
1 comment:
I just had a conversation last night with a professor and the other lecteurs about franglais. And how Jean-Claude Van Damme sounds like an idiot when he speaks French and puts random English words in, but it's totally okay when we do it.
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