Being Bilingual

February 26th 2007

I was updating my CV a couple years ago, and I came to the language part. I had English as a native language of course, and for French I proudly put courant (”fluent”). At the time, I had only worked in a completely French environment for one year, my previous jobs were more international and we spoke a lot of French but documents were always written in English. So I asked my coworkers for feedback and I got an interesting feedback. They said to change the courant to bilingue (”Bilingual”). So after a brief discussion, I changed it to bilingue and then asked my wife about it when I got home.

In the beginning, which for me is when I moved to France as I divide my life into BF and AF, “Before France” and “After France”, I didn’t speak French so well. I could speak, read, and write (at a basic level) but I just didn’t understand. And that was after 1 year of private French lessons and a lot of studying on my part. I don’t mean to discourage anyone, I’m terrible at foreign languages. So my (future) wife, being fluent in English, talked to me in English a lot. She, like almost all younger generation French people, liked to practice her English. As I got better with my French, we started speaking more and more French. She said my French had gotten better than her English (although I disagreed), and so it was easier to talk in French. That suited me just fine.

Until now. A little over a year ago our daughter was born. Following the advice of every mixed marriage couple we knew, I would speak only in English with my daughter, and my wife would speak to her only in French. But what about between us? We were so used to speaking in French that we continued. And therein lies the delima and the point of this blog.

We recently started researching a Bilingual school for our daughter and have our sights set on la lycée internationale (”the international school”). The criteria for entering, besides academic excellence, is that the children must speak a foreign language (ie. a language other than French) fluently. And since there is a large demand for a limited number of spaces, they must speak very fluently. We spoke with a real estate agent yesterday whose children went to the school, and she advised us to move to the US for 3 years so that when we come back and our daughter takes the language tests, she will speak perfect English. I was kind of hoping she’d speak perfect English even if we stayed in France. But the more I think about it the more I think an hour a day isn’t enough (and that’s on days that I don’t have to stay late at the office!).

So I told my wife that from now on we speak English together, and each of us speaks our native language with our daughter. Easier said than done. Our English conversations usually last only 5 minutes before we’re back in French! When I started my new job recently, I was sitting next to someone else who recently started as well. He wanted to practice his English (which was good but not what I’d call fluent) so he suggested that we speak in English. I thought it was a good idea because I’m a bit tired of speaking French all the time. I’m happy to speak English with French people as long as it’s not too painful they have a good level. Our conversations at first would go 10-15 minutes before turning to French, but now that we’re really busy we have since abandoned the idea. My point in all this is that it’s not easy to speak English. Except with my daughter.

So my theory is this: When you meet someone, you determine the language that you will use to speak to that person and it’s really difficult to change. Which is why I spoke to my daughter in English since before she was even born.

So does all that make me bilingual? I guess that depends on the definition of bilingual. I find myself thinking in French all the time. Is that enough? I must admit that I don’t write well in French, which is really frustrating for me. It’s obvious which chapters in our documents were written by me, and if it weren’t for the spell checker in Microsoft Word I’d be ashamed to write at all. Bilingual certainly looks better on the CV (”resume”) so I’ll leave it.

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Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. BigGuy on March 13, 2007 11:34

    I know exactly what you mean.

    I think it’ll probably be allot easier for your daughter. I grew up talking English to my Mother, and Afrikaans to my Father, and occasionally Afrikaans to my Grandparents. While my reading and writing in English was slightly stronger, I was fluent enough in Afrikaans to pass for Afrikaans.

  2. Michael on March 18, 2007 9:08

    A few people pointed out horrible, inexcusable spelling errors on my part. I just want to point out that spelling isn’t my specialty in English or French. My Firefox has an English spell checker built-in, which leaves me vulnerable to the French words I use. Anyway, please excuse me for the spelling errors (which you don’t see because they’ve since been corrected).

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