LEARNING FRENCH

Learning French has been the most challenging and difficult objective in my life, so far.  The past two plus years have been a period of frustration, disappointment, and an ever-present sense that it may be time just to give up.  There comes a time when the millstone of discouragement hangs so heavy that there may be only one remaining thread between perseverance and defeat and even that last gossamer cord seems to be in the process of unraveling.  The thread that checked my surrender was simple, but very enduring; failure was not an option.  God had given me the task.  Without a working knowledge of French I could not advance on the path He had set before me.

 Saint Paul set down God’s words when wrote, “…suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”  Maybe there was more, much more than French that God wanted me to learn before I made it to the mission field.  The days, weeks, months, and years of suffering through inscrutable grammar, confounding syntax, and physically impossible pronunciation may also have been the means to another end, or two.   

My experience with learning a new language may be very similar to our waiting upon our peripatetic crate of supplies.  The much-needed box filled with tools, utensils, equipment, clothing and furnishings has been forever arriving, but never really here.  I have been forced to repair everything including furniture, plumbing, electrical devices, laptops, doors, and even our truck with little more than my Victorinox pocket tool and a few simple hand tools and at times even a stone as a hammer.. 

I have had to improvise and make do with what I had on hand. I had to learn to do much more than I thought I could with much less than I thought that I needed.  I have had to learn to use what I have to the greatest possible utility.  It has been much like that with my French language skills.  My vocabulary toolbox is still very light and relatively empty.  Lacking the size and depth of vocabulary, I have been forced to combine and arrange my poverty of words to express thoughts and subjects that normally demand more a specific and specialized vocabulary. 

Much like using a tool for a purpose for which it was not intended, an increased reliance on imagination rather than competency has been a means to an end in both repairing things and expressing myself in a still-foreign language.  I have learned that it is not so much the breadth of the tool collection or the depth  of one’s vocabulary, but how one uses the resources at one’s disposal that determines how close we come to reaching our objectives—fixing a toaster or successfully expressing an idea.

There is still the rub that this works in but one direction when it comes to language.  I may devise linguistic work-arounds by using the few primary colors of my limited vocabulary to mix more complex hues and shades, but this skill is of little to no use when the flow in in the other direction.

I cannot comprehend words and terms that I do not know.  The time required to extract meaning by contextualizing unknown words is too great when listening to someone speaking.  Words are lost in the interim while searching mental registers for possible meanings to an unrecognized word. 

Comprehension is the other half of the equation.  There a few if any work-arounds to simply understanding the spoken word if the word is unknown.  A limited vocabulary is more constraining when receiving a message than when sending.  So two lessons attended my comprehension: first, endurance does indeed produce character (or some degree of language skill) and second, while there may be work-arounds and interim solutions, they are only transitional.  In the end only continued hard work and perseverance will accomplish the objective.  So as suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope, there is hope that one day I will reach my objective to speak good French well and that I will have learned a lesson or two in suffering through learning a new language.

In that day when I finally am able to speak and understand French adequate to the task it will be much like the day when I finally experience the joy of opening our wandering crate of tools designed for the task and need not hobble about making do with a limited inventory of either words or hand tools.  When learning a language or repairing something there are times when “good enough” isn’t.