On Language + Listening

Travelling around rural Québec for two weeks taught me more than just a few new French words.

It also gave me an insight into how important it is to try. Even if you can’t do it perfectly, just trying counts for so much.

Let me explain.

My French is nowhere near fluent. Even though I’ve studied it off and on for the last 30 years, I’ve never truly been immersed and forced to make it my own language.

But this summer — outside of bilingual Montreal — I learned that I could use my primitive French to help other people feel more comfortable talking to me.

Even if they knew a bit of English, I could tell right away that so many people weren’t comfortable speaking it with me. They were afraid of the same thing I am afraid of in French: that someone will start speaking quickly and I’ll be completely lost.

Slowly, I started to form basic sentences and move my lips around those hoity-toity (to an anglophone!) vowel sounds of “tu” and “vous.”

I’m sure this was sometimes a painstakingly-long process for the people I was talking to.

But you know what?

They never let on. They nodded, they smiled, they spoke slowly back to me … and we had a conversation.

We made a connection through my poorly-formed words and sentences. And that was the important part. The language itself — even the words — didn’t actually matter.

One lovely example of this played out on the front deck of a cozy bed and breakfast in Cap Chat, called Gîte au Crépuscule. (The name roughly translates to “cottage at sunset.”)

Our hosts were happy to spend hours sitting out on the deck, chatting with visitors and looking for whales in the distance.

But they were francophones and we could see right away that they really appreciated it when we tried to speak French with them.

So we sat on the deck — my husband Scott with even less French than me — and we all talked. In French. It was slow and I’m sure we made a mistake with every other word.

It didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were trying. That is true conversation.

We could look for whales. We could talk about how the St. Lawrence River turned into the sea at exactly their house. We could tell them about our day hiking in the Parc national de la Gaspésie. We could watch the sunset together.

We talked and talked. And, after a while, the language became our own.