Language?!

Language, as we all know, fascinates me. That a child's developing brain can automatically pick up, sort out, and reduplicate any language completely blows my mind. You don't even think about it, it just comes out naturally. And that linguists can map out the progress of language back over thousands and thousands of years is ridiculous--they've figured out the basic features of a language they call Proto IndoEuropean, which birthed a crapton of languages (in India and Europe, imagine that) that are spoken today. They're working towards a Proto-World. Maybe I'm just a nerd, but that completely blows me away.

You don't really realize what an essential tool language is until you're somewhere where you can't use it very well. After puberty, a person loses that magical ability that they once had to pick up and sort out languages. That's why someone can fail a foreign language class as easily as they can a math or science class, the information just doesn't stick as well. This little biological tidbit has caused me endless amounts of frustration; four-year-olds can speak French better than I can. Maybe it's just the American in me, but I feel like a person who can't use a language very well oftentimes comes across as less intelligent. Think about it: if you don't have language, how else do you convince someone that you're perfectly capable of higher thought? I say this not because I often think this of people who can't speak English well (I've tried to modify my perceptions of these people since starting to learn foreign languages), but because I feel dumb when I can't get basic points across in another language.

Interestingly enough, I haven't found the same attitudes towards foreign speakers here. Yes, the French make fun of me daily, but I feel like it's all in good spirit--instead of feeling belittled, I'm more inclined to laugh along with them. Maybe they're just more understanding of how difficult it is to learn a foreign language, since it's more common over here. It has to be--Europe is so compact and diverse; you have to learn at least a little of one or two extra languages unless you want to be stuck inside your tiny country for forever. Imagine if the East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, and Southern United States all had different languages--you'd be more inclined to learn them, because really, who wants to stay in the Midwest all their lives? (Well, lots of people actually, but that's besides the point.)
Maybe America's disinclination to study foreign languages and cultures is geographically-based. It's a fairly sizeable country with only two bordering neighbors, and other than that we're pretty isolated from everyone else. If there's so many distinct regions and cultures inside of our own country, why put up with the hassle to go somewhere else?
I still can't fully understand it, personally. In my book, Americans are still lazy and need to get off their asses and go experience the rest of the world.

Big tangents aside, I'm feeling more and more comfortable here with my terrible French as I get used to the fact that this culture doesn't think I'm (very) dumb for not being able to speak their language. I'm trying, right?

Another thing that's ridiculously interesting to me is speaking French with non-native, non-English speakers. First of all, it's interesting in its own right to talk to someone from the other side of the world; they tend to see things radically different from the way you do. But there's something else: just listening to the way they try to construct and pronounce the language gives you insight into how their native language is structured. For instance, when I speak French many times I'm translating in my head directly from English. If I'm speaking with my American friend, she'll understand me even if I'm making horrendous grammatical errors and my pronunciation is anything but French, because she's inclined or once was inclined to make the same mistakes that I do. However, if I'm talking to the Japanese girl that sits next to me in class, and neither of us have mastered French very well yet, there are big gaping holes in the conversation where I can't understand at all what she's saying, and vice-versa. I'm starting to figure it out--Japanese French, Chinese French, Arabic French--what grammatical errors they make, wrong sounds that they substitute for the right ones, etc. The first couple of weeks were pretty intense; I couldn't understand what half the people were saying in class. Now that I've started to figure it out, the linguistics nerd in me has started to piece together what might be some features of Japanese, or Chinese, or Arabic. Whereas up to now I've only been interested in Romance languages, I have a feeling that might change by the end of this trip.

I think that's enough of pouring my brain onto the internet for one day.