Language

Language is a beautiful thing. The only thing separating an English sentence from the same French sentence is the way someone positions their tongue and mouth, the way they use their vocal chords to make the sound come out a different way. It means the same thing. Yet, when we don't understand a language, it becomes meaningless background noise. Nonsense.

Here in Jonquière, I have become somewhat accustomed to hearing and speaking French in school and in various activity situations, but I still marvel when I hear French spoken in everyday life, in settings that I have no part in. I love hearing the little kids giggle and annoy each other at the waterpark. I love passing by ten-year-old boys on their BMX bikes at the skate park, as they talk about whatever it is that ten-year-old boys talk about. I like listening to local teenagers speaking to each other on the street, shooting my friends and I curious glances, because somehow everyone in the town knows who the new students are. I love trying to speak with the elderly gentleman we met in the park who didn't know how to take pictures with a digital camera.

Today, I came home and my host mother's 21-year-old daughter Marie-Julie was sitting in the living room, calling her boyfriend's dog over to her. Viens, viens ici! I loved the rerealization that French isn't just something foreign to be learned, it is simply another way to express oneself. There isn't anything integrally different from Viens, viens ici!, than from telling a dog to Come, come here!

Another language isn't simply a bunch of grammatical rules and verb tenses, it is an expression of life and thought just as central and natural to other people as English words are to me. And that is the real objective: to so thoroughly know a language that it is no longer English translated into something else; it is direct expression, it is thought instantaneously translated into sound and life.