"Grammar Smackdown: Why French and I Need Therapy"

When I moved to Paris, I imagined a version of myself that wore scarves correctly, ate pain au chocolat without flaking it all over my shirt, and casually tossed around French idioms like someone who wasn’t raised on suburban pop tarts and Nickelodeon.

Reality, however, took a sharp left turn at Charles de Gaulle.

My French was about as reliable as my high school GPA—which is to say, mostly decorative. I’d taken two years in college and one summer immersion course, which really just meant I sat in a room with other Americans and mispronounced fromage for three weeks while eating it in its many glorious forms.

Still, I was optimistic. I bought a pocket dictionary, downloaded an app with a cheerful owl that reminded me to study, and practiced rolling my R’s in the mirror. I told myself, “It’s just language. People have learned it before. You have a brain. Probably.”

My first class at the Institut de Langue Française was taught by a woman I now refer to only as “Madame Guillotine.” She was a small, compact woman with perfect posture and the emotional warmth of a border checkpoint. She entered the room like a verdict.

We began the class in total French immersion, which is a nice way of saying: “We’re going to speak quickly and you’re going to panic.”

“Parlez-moi de votre enfance,” she said, gesturing at me with a piece of chalk as if she were offering me my last cigarette. Talk about my childhood? In French? My childhood was barely coherent in English.

I panicked.

“Quand… je… petite,” I began, immediately using the wrong gender and wrong verb tense, “je… uh… joue avec… mon dog?”

“Chien,” she corrected sharply. “Dog est anglais. Vous parlez français ici.”

I nodded, suddenly aware that my armpits had become sentient waterfalls.

“Je joue avec mon chien. Il est… bon chien. Grand. Beaucoup bark.”

The class laughed.

And I laughed too, because if I didn’t, I might cry.

Over the next few weeks, I slowly adapted. I learned how to say “I don’t understand” in three different ways, and I deployed them liberally. I developed the survival reflexes of a tourist lost in the Louvre: smile, nod, and fake it until someone gives up and switches to English.

I also began cataloguing my daily humiliations.

There was the time I tried to order a bottle of water (eau) and accidentally asked for a bottle of oeufs—eggs. The waiter stared at me, then brought six hard-boiled eggs in a wine bucket like it was performance art.

Another time, I confidently told my landlady that the heat wasn’t working because the poêle was broken. Except poêle means “frying pan.” The word I wanted was chauffage. She now thinks I sleep with a pan for warmth. I didn’t correct her.

But gradually, something shifted.

Not my fluency—God no. I still sounded like a baguette trying to speak. But I started to understand more. My brain began connecting the dots, filling in the gaps, guessing meanings from context instead of freezing in terror. I could order coffee without crying. I made a joke in class that earned a genuine chuckle from Madame Guillotine. I walked home that day like I had just been knighted by the French Academy.

One evening, I was sitting at a café reading a children’s book—my level—and an old man next to me leaned over and said, in French, “You know, you have an accent like a German tourist.”

I nodded, and replied, “Yes, but I’m getting better.”

He smiled and raised his glass. “C’est vrai. You’re trying. That matters.”

And in that moment, it did.

Author’s Note
Language is hard. Learning it as an adult is harder. Learning it in front of judgmental strangers who all seem to be fluent in five languages while sipping espresso with literary detachment is borderline masochism. But it’s also funny. And weirdly beautiful. And very, very human.