By Kim Sotman

As I sat on the London Underground listening to the chatter of conversations around me the voices blended together. I couldn’t pick out individual conversations or understand actual words. That’s funny, I thought, what language is that?

Honing in on one single conversation, I listened intently, and suddenly realized that it was English! My ears have grown so accustomed to hearing French wherever I go that I actually didn’t recognize my native language. Granted, it was British English and I’m from Texas, but it was still harder for me to discern than if I’d been listening to a French conversation!

After two months in France, I made a trip to England to visit some friends who are studying there. The sea of people speaking English was a welcome sound to my ears, once I understood that’s what they were speaking, but it also made me realize how ingrained French has become in my brain.

Walking off the Eurostar train at London’s St Pancras station, I saw signs pointing me to the exit written in two languages. The first bold set of words said “Way Out” with an arrow. Way out? I thought …that’s not how I would say exit. I looked below and saw the French translation, “Sortie” which immediately clicked in my head with no hesitation.

How can it be that my native language was suddenly so foreign to me? This continued to happen to me throughout my five-day stay. When walking through a crowd, my first instinct was to utter the French “pardon” or “excusez-moi,” the simple English phrase escaping me. Ordering a coffee was effortlessly simple, and yet I found myself translating the phrase from French in my head when the words came out of my mouth in English. I didn’t have to plan what I was going to say or worry about conjugating my verbs correctly, but my head continued to do it anyway, the French gears still turning.

It was an odd sensation. It felt like my words were going through an extra distillation process—from English to French and back again. It made me realize how much my two months of full immersion in Paris have deepen my knowledge of French and how much deeper it’ll be by the time I leave Europe seven months from now.

Three weeks into my stay in Paris, I had a friend come visit me before her classes started in England for the semester. (She was one of the friends that I was visiting on the above-mentioned trip.) She had decided to study abroad in an English-speaking country because she didn’t speak a foreign language, thus she was pretty nervous about coming to Paris; French was a complete mystery to her.

During her stay, I served as her interpreter. Otherwise she would ask for things by pointing or through elaborate sign language. So I handled all of our transactions, from ordering at restaurants, to buying metro tickets, to conversing with my host family who were kind enough to let her stay with me. Even though I pretty much stuck to the script of communicating her wishes to others, anytime I wasn’t specifically ordering her food, she got nervous that I was talking about her. Paranoid would be a better word. She would become even more nervous if laughter was involved. My host family and I did in fact have a good laugh about this, possibly at her expense, saying that I really could say anything I want about her and she would never know.

I wonder if my friend had a more relaxing time (paranoia aside) not speaking French when in Paris than I did speaking English yet thinking French in London. After all, while in France she got to sit back while I took her words and decoded them for other French speakers. On the other hand, when I was in London my words went from English to French and back again, as though the French gears in my brain were saying “Don’t forget about us!”

But I’m glad to have those French gears turning, even if it sometimes interrupts my English, because it’s a precious sign that I’m learning and changing, and will continue to do so for the rest of my time in Europe.

Kim Sotman is a junior at Tulane University who is studying in Paris for the 2009-2010 school year. She is from Fort Worth, Texas.

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