The Path of Most Resistance
...is the path a masochist learner like me is going to take, obviously
The French phrase for this post is ça roule.
Today, I started meeting a small group I discovered on a Facebook community. A few weeks back, one of the group members, Mary, posted on social media that she was looking for fellow French learners who wanted to meet regularly with a French teacher who could guide us with our French. I commented that I was interested, along with two other people: a Venezuelan guy who recently moved to Montpellier and an Australian who was married to a French woman. We met at Café Joyeux (an interesting place: hired people with special needs, sadly no vegan food) last week to get to know each other and gauge whether we’d find it tolerable to spend the next couple of weeks together.
We decided to meet twice a week for one and a half hours to talk in French. Over lunch earlier, the French teacher, Karen, said that she’ll try to explain French as easily as possible, and we’re free to interrupt her if we don’t understand some words or concepts. Otherwise, we can say, ça marche, or as native speakers would say, ça roule. Literally: that rolls. Metaphorically: it’s going well. It's okay. Carry on.
I’m doing this on top of my one-on-one online classes at Lingoculture, which I’ve been trying to join at least four times a week. I’ve progressed a lot: I’ve now officially reached the intermediate level (B1), confirmed by my test results (I took the TCF at Alliance Française last year). That’s good enough for getting by light, sustained conversations in French but not advanced enough to have debates with people who cut the line, give you horrible service, or support anti-immigration laws.
Progressing is weird because it never feels like you’ve actually progressed. It’s not a lightbulb moment where you instantly realize you’ve made it. From nothing to something, fast. Instead, it’s like a dimmer slowly increasing the light. You know it’s not as dark anymore, but you wonder whether it’s already at the maximum, and if it isn’t, can someone just make it brighter instantly because you're not sure if you're at the right place?
It’s frustrating to be aware of your ignorance but also realize there’s no easy way to do this. I remember a story I read before where Euclid, while teaching Ptolemy, supposedly uttered: “There is no royal road to geometry.” I wish learning something was as simple as uploading knowledge to your brain, kind of like The Matrix.
What grates me even more is the idea that for some people, language learning comes so naturally, as if their mind is this greedy sponge that sucks up all the French grammar and vocabulary. I get ticked off when I see someone humblebragging that they managed to reach C1 in a matter of months on some random Reddit post, when instead I could choose to feel freudenfreude, which I suppose comes naturally for a lot of people, too. There’s this nice polyglot Chinese Youtuber I used to hate-watch because she speaks French on top of her native tongue plus English, German, Arabic, Turkish, Persian. I thought the niceness coupled with her talent was so patronizing.
But then I wonder if my ego is just too bloated, and I find it a targeted affront that I’m not as gifted as those other people. Frankly, I find my own stupidity insulting. I am aware it's silly and petulant to get angry at the mere display of intelligence. I know that the problem is not other people, it's me. Being aware of it of course doesn't make it hurt a little less. In one way I think it motivates me, in a masochistic way. I'm not special so I have to try harder than the rest. I have to put in the hours, push a bit more against the dam that is my ignorance, trying to crack it so the floodgates burst open.
The gracious lesson that this should offer me is I should be even more empathetic to those who are trying as hard as I am to learn and improve themselves. But I'm not as gracious. I wish I were. I do try to understand, trust me. I am very unforgiving towards myself, holding myself up to a higher standard, one which is utterly unattainable. There's no way going around your own genetic limitations, after all. I can wish until I breathe my last breath that I could be gifted, but it's never going to happen.
Oh well, ça roule.