The Value in Misspeaking

One of the scenes of my many misunderstandings (Photo: Lucy Thomas)

Operating in a second language on a day-to-day basis can feel like being invited onto the dance-floor of a ballroom without knowing any of the steps. Interacting with natives on my year abroad, I have often become frustrated with the difficulty of conveying the tone, meaning, or warmth that I intend to. 

I do not have to think for long to recall missteps that I have taken in the first couple of months of my year in France. After at least a month of vousvoyer-ing the other teachers, a teaching assistant took pity on me and let me know that this was unnecessary, and that it even came across as cold and overly formal. Navigating the difficulties of starting a new job has an added layer of challenge. For instance, when I misinterpreted the fact that I had been asked to prepare a lesson and showed up emptyhanded, explaining in French that this was not one of my responsibilities whilst still trying to remain polite was not easy.  

My Anglophone friends on their Year Abroad echo this sentiment. One accidentally called the dinner her host family had made for her ‘merde’, rather than the ‘meilleur’ that she had had so far. Another friend on her Year Abroad in Italy hadn’t realised that ‘vabbè’ does not have quite the same meaning as ‘va bene’ - she received a few angry glances. Yet equally, when the man at the fish counter or the ticket inspector on the train switches to English, this does not bring a sense of relief but instead one of failure that can be hard to shake.

The knowledge that the subtleties and nuances of social interactions in French fly over my head despite earning it for so many years is depressing. Communicating in a second language can feel like going onto a stage for a performance you haven’t yet learnt the lines to. Even though I can mostly understand French on a literal level, and convey most of the things I want to in one way or another, there is a whole kind of benign social subtext that I am isolated from.

Everything feels messy – the controlled prose that I was able to cultivate in my translations last year has collapsed under the pressure of social interactions. Language learning in the real world can seem like a complicated, Sisyphean battle. The necessary art of using an acquired language is the vulnerability that we are insulated from in the classroom, the lecture hall, and even the supervision room – practicing your language in the wild is an equivocal surrender of control. As we are encouraged to do at Cambridge, I often find myself searching for perfection when I can find it – perfectly rehearsing each interaction and looking up all vocabulary I can anticipate when I talk to someone. Yet often the conversation spirals out of my comfort zone anyway.

Yet I find that my efforts have not gone unnoticed. I am slowly but surely building up relationships with the teachers who were initially frosty, and now know many of the kids in my school by name. The staffroom lunches are becoming easier to participate in. 

Part of learning to exist comfortably in a second language is about learning to live with imperfection. The vulnerability that the Year Abroad demands is why it is such a formative and unique experience, perhaps particularly for those of us for whom English is our first language. 

 As Anglophones, it is rare that we are ever made linguistically vulnerable, as we are usually able to coast on English’s global dominance. The Year Abroad experience demands that we fully exist in a second language – an incredibly rewarding, but also humbling, experience. 

With the rise of AI translators, and sharp declines in entries to language courses, we are often asked to explain our choice to study languages – a decision that to some seems mystifying.

Yet of course, the monolingual trend in Anglophones countries is not representative of the broader linguistic landscape. It is estimated that probably more than half of the world’s population speaks more than one language fluently, compared to the 1/5 of Britons. The US has recently made the bizarre assertion that English is its official language – a choice that is at best unnecessary and at worst xenophobic.

The tendency towards monolingualism is the exception, not the norm. To this end, there is a lot that technology can do, but it cannot replicate the sociological and psychological distance that speaking another language gives us from the comfort of not only our established social norms, but also ourselves.