Life in France: new language, new culture, new people

It takes a while...

It’s not France, it’s you.

“Look, you’re not going to change France,” a friend told me when I expressed frustration over a store being closed when it said it was going to be open. It was lunchtime. “If anything, France is going to change you.”

It’s hard for me to ignore the logic of that.

We have been in France for a little over a year now and just a bit over 6 months settling into our apartment. Friends at home often ask me if I am making friends, a bit as if it were my first few weeks at a new school.

Well, kind of. It takes time and I don’t think is true only of the French, but of people in general. Your experiences may differ.

In France, it truly matters that you make an effort to learn the language, which I am doing with the help of some teachers on italki, daily practice and, with some difficulty, making the effort to speak to people in French. After all, it is quite challenging to get to know someone who you can’t speak to.

Although it can be challenging to learn a language as an adult, I also find that as we get older, we have more understandings from other places that can help us to make connections to a new language. For me, the biggest challenge is the awkwardness of struggling with it and really, often failing, even though my experiences as a teacher have often reminded me that failing is a great way to learn.

And so I keep trying. I think it’s starting to work.

We moved to make a change.

I have a friend who has lived in Germany for at least 15 years now and when I last spoke to him, he seemed to be angry at the entire country. This man has a German wife and a German child. He has been there for many years and yet I am really not so sure how well that he speaks the language. As one studies a language you will alos inevitable come to some understanding of the culture as well.

“I’ve been here for 15 years and I don’t have one German friend,” he told me.

To which I responded, “I don’t think it’s Germany, really: I think it’s you. You’ve got to try to fit in a bit, even I it will never be perfect. ‘I’m the one with the accent here,’ as Ted Lasso had said.”

“You moved to make a change, right? Then maybe you need to change a little…?”

We haven’t really spoken much since then, although I do hope he’ll continue to make the effort. After all, he said that’s what he wants.

I’ve seen this in a lot of countries, where a foreigner comes to the place with the best of intentions and yet after a long time, they still don’t quite feel at home there. I never expect for us to become French, per se, but I do expect that we’ll find our own way in the country and start to feel a bit integrated here in some way. Getting to know people takes time. The things that frustrate you in a new country do, in fact, have their own sense and logic and it’ valuable to understand them, even if they continue to frustrate you.

I spent the first several months here trying to get errands done between 12-2pm, when now I simply won’t bother. In the US, that was my habit when I had the time, but I am not in the US and the rules are different. I’m starting to like it and now I try to eat lunch during those hours, ideally at one of the bistros in the area that I like, which are really social and getting to be more and more familiar to me - and I am becoming familiar to the folks there.

It just takes time to develop new habits in new places. If it’s not inconvenient, I try to make my own patterns a bit obvious to people, if I can. I try to go to the same café, to the same barber, do some errands at the same places - as long as I like those places. The more people see you, unless you’re a jerk, the more people will like to see you is my general experience.

People like familiarity.

Tourism vs. settling in and the logic of new places

There is tourism and seeing the country and the inevitable moving around that is likely to happen before you find a place that you want to be for a while. Then it naturally takes time to become a part of a community. In the middle of learning a language, dealing with the various aspects of French culture that might be confusing or unfamiliar, it can be hard to remember that this is a bit normal in most places.

Very few people will just come right out and talk to you off the bat, pretty much anywhere except the United States, in my experience. That is, unless they are in some hospitality role or the pair of you work together. The majority of people that I have met kind of hang back, maybe get a sense of who you are and how you behave and then, once you become familiar to them, they’ll start talking to you. An American I met last winter who owns a shop over here told me, “Americans are like the Labradors of the world – we’ll be excited to meet anybody.”

I guessed that, by her metaphor, other people from other places would have behaved differently, even if I didn’t love being compared to a dog – even a nice one.