Good afternoon. Welcome back to a chaotic post no one asked me to make. As you can probably tell by the title of this post, this post is going to be about my journey with French and how hard it is to understand a new language, but with a twist.

So let’s start with a bit of background knowledge. This year I moved to the French part of Switzerland blah blah blah. Essentially, I go to a public school and all of my classes are taught in French. Swiss French might I add. All that means is that counting is easier than in normal French. It’s been an experience so far.

It seems appropriate to be writing this now as I can formulate sentences that vaguely get my point across. I understand what people are saying but sometimes it’s difficult to find the correct words to respond. I’m doing pretty good in my classes even with the language barrier and I’m quite proud of most of my marks.

With all that covered, let’s go back about 2 months. I couldn’t understand what was going on and was completely overwhelmed in all of my classes. Understanding what they were saying was exhausting and made me quite resentful of the opportunity I’ve been given.

To illustrate my point I will give you a basic scenario that would happen on the daily.

Teacher: Pouvez-vous expliquer ce que nous faisons pour me montrer que vous comprenez?

Zoe: Pardon?

Teacher: Tu comprendre?

Zoe: Non. 

Whether or not that was a good example, it is horrifying to have people speaking rapid-fire French when all you can understand is the pronouns.

To prove my point even further, let’s imagine that you are a Completely Normal Person. In this example, a Completely Normal Person would be someone with a nonexistent sense of humour and a desk job. It’s  not a bad thing to be, but it’s statistically average.

Imagine you emerge through the door at 5:30, taking off your brown leather shoes. Your toes relax after being shoved into hard cow skins two sizes small for nine hours. You collapse onto the mildly stained beige couch you’ve had for three years with the cheapest beer you could find. Grabbing the remote and pushing down on the small silicone buttons, you decide to watch HGTV with Dave Jonathan*, when a Flex Tape commercial comes on. More specifically, the Flex Tape Clear commercial.

With just this scenario in mind, I’d imagine that this typical person would feel the exact same way as I do when Swiss people talk at me in French. HORRIFIED AND SCARED.

With this rant over, I would like to thank y’all for reading and also go drink some water. Don’t be a dehydrated leather shoe. The end.

*A nonexistent 38 year old white dude who has no other qualifications to be a contractor other than a nice smile and a trophy wife.