19. In Paris, I’m doing my best to speak French and not English.

Mon dieu, c’est très difficile.

Vince Duqué Stories
Inside Me Inside Paris
3 min readApr 21, 2020

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Bienvenue to the 19th article in my Medium publication, Inside Me Inside Paris, a work-in-progress memoir about my 2016 deep-dive into Paris & my journey to find my soul amidst the onslaught of depression…

C’est 16 juillet 2016:

I vowed that as long as I was in Paris, I’d be an atypical American and speak French and not speak English. The consequence is that my head hurts everyday— summoning the right words, conjugating the right verb and wanting to be grammatically correct, listening to conversations in French, concentrating on words and phrases that I might recognize and assembling a rudimentary logical construction that I can comprehend. But they’re all talking in slang and dropping words that if you did that in French class, you’d fail the class. It’s mentally exhausting.

I know there’s gotta be a way to grasp the language more easily — like the way a toddler absorbs and learns words and phrases but also comprehends.

When in Paris, speak French! Photo by Vince Duque on Unsplash

I know there’s gotta be a way to grasp the language more easily — like the way a toddler absorbs and learns words and phrases but also comprehends. With a baby’s mind — that’s how I want to be able to understand French. And live life again, for that matter. I’m trying too hard to speak perfect French and doing this thing where I’m translating directly from English. I won’t let myself keep things simple and use the words I have. It’s depressing me that I can’t get it. I need to get over the embarrassment of speaking crap French, but my perfectionist tendencies are flaring up.

I’ve been taking on-line French lessons once a week on an internet / Skype based service called iTalki. The lessons are inexpensive and it’s fun to talk with someone for an hour, speaking with a native speaker — except in this case, my teacher is not native, but he knows four to five languages, so I guess he’s an expert linguist, but I feel like I’m getting formal academic French and not colloquial conversational French.

I just want to be able to speak about things that I want and describe things and get the gist of conversations.

Come to think of it, that’s how I want to approach creativity. Without the noise and the perfectionism and the restrictions and the judging that comes with being a jaded adult and having an über self-critical mind.

Every so often, I’ll hear a passerby speaking American English and I want to say “hello, fellow American!” But I don’t. I’m purposely staying away from the Americans because I don’t want to get into the habit I fell into when I was in Germany back in my Army days, which was to be around American vibes because it was comfortable. I’m not here to be comfortable. I’m here for full Parisien immersion, as painful as it is.

I sure don’t make it easy on myself.

Thank you very much for reading this memoir I’m workshopping. Looking for publishers! I’m a writer/photographer based in Burbank, California. Some of my work is visible on my Instagram.

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Vince Duqué Stories
Inside Me Inside Paris

Freelance writer & filmmaker living in Paris, FR. Fresh takes experiencing the human carnival since ‘69 with a Filipino, American & French soul