How Learning French is like Learning to Ski — Part 2

Read Part One first:

Duolingo occasionally flashes a motivational quote about how you learn most from your mistakes. This is easy enough to take when you just get a little ding and lose a heart, but sounding stupid while speaking to a real-life person is another matter. It is without question my biggest weakness when learning a language—I knew even during high school Spanish, when I absolutely refused to practice speaking with a native speaker outside of class, that I was limiting myself.

And still, on arrival in France, I found myself speaking almost no French at all. I had no idea what other people were saying. I defaulted to “Parlez-vous anglais?” and stuck with English at work. I was so terrified to call a French doctor’s office that I scoured the online network to find an appointment bookable online. I knew I should try to speak more, but when I knew it would consist almost entirely of tongue-tying, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Is there any sense in practicing above your level?

Is there any good in skiing on a piste that you aren’t ready for? After a few more goes on the green piste (half falls, half progress), my group wants to try one higher up the mountain. Long story short, despite promises, we end up at the top of a blue piste, the next level up from green. If the first green piste was daunting, this is Everest. I know I can’t control my turns enough to ski down. But I also know that it isn’t one long straight slope; if I go horizontally enough around the little hillocks of heavy, sun-glazed snow I can just keep falling sideways and eventually flub my way to the bottom.

So I go. And despite my efforts, it is fast. I tumble face-first a few times, rolling in ways I can’t recreate mentally with joints pulling in undesired directions, but I am never actually injured because the skis release. This means having to snap them back on in the steep, slick snow, and even with my roommate’s generous help, I am simply physically incapable of doing it and have to walk.

By the time I get to the bottom, the only thing I’ve learned is how to keep moving my limbs when I’m nearing my limit—which, I suppose, isn’t nothing.

The slippery slope of learning: to study, to flub

Any illusions that I would quickly absorb French just by listening to native speakers talk have been dispensed with. I do get to listen to a lot of French. My coworkers, though they can speak English, prefer French. At church, while my friend translates, I hear two hours of French at a stretch. I eavesdrop on the tram. But even a month later I could only pick out words here and there among all the liaisons and slang and even more dropped sounds than formal French. And conversations don’t come with captions (alas, I’m much better at puzzling out written French).

I know better than ever that it won’t be automatic; I have to speak, I have to study, I have to flub. Listening to international friends who, after a year or two here, are chattering away in French, is very much like watching skiers zag past me with ease and imagining all the months of muscle fatigue and falls it will take to get there. It would be so easy, like some other international friends, not to prioritize it, to step back from the slope and make do with English and a scattering of French phrases.

Fear versus courage

My roommates have found a way to the chairlift that goes to a high-elevation green piste. Despite genuinely wondering if I have it in me to make it back down, I decide I want to try. I make it onto the chairlift—my first—without dropping a ski. We glide up away from the slushy snow and the theme-park-like lift queues, higher into the crystalline air where we can see the Belledonne massif arrayed around us.

The promised green piste is much more extensive, with several stages. Although it’s closer to my level than the blue piste was, there is a new hair-raising element: an actual edge to tumble over if I lose control. Some sections are also narrow enough to make wide turns difficult, thus inducing me into ever faster speeds. I have to recruit all my remaining muscle power and focus.

Some of my turns end in falls, but I don’t go over the edge, and my control improves as I go. The last stage widens into a deliciously broad hill where I can turn as wide as I want, and I manage to do so many turns in a row, leaning with all my strength, that I’m running out of breath and my muscles are trembling. It is, I will admit, a decent finish. I take a gondola lift down the rest of the way and wait for my roommates to ski down.

Color coding learning

After a month of feeling like my French might actually be regressing in France, I finally got organized enough to look into French courses. By a stroke of luck, a course at roughly my level was starting the next day and I was welcome to join. I also found a private coach who emphasizes speaking and using everyday pop culture and social media to practice.

I went to class and spoke for two hours straight—easier with fellow beginners, but still a confidence boost—and my Instagram algorithm has gradually been piling on the French reels. More phrases are starting to link up. At a social event, I exchanged two or three French sentences before reverting to English. I’m still just at the top of the piste, looking down—a green piste with edges, perhaps, rather than the blue (let alone black) for now. But I have started to go.

The reward of progress should be worth the pain

After my first ski trip, my entire body was sore for several days—more from getting up than from falling. Yet I recovered just fine. I know it will take many more exhausting, snowy weekends to reinforce the first synapses that my leaning muscles made. Admittedly, this is daunting.

However, imagining the reward, skis an extension of hips and knees, confident zigzags down those sparkling slopes just might be enough to get me back out there again and again.

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