Some notes on language learning:

1. Everything’s harder with diarrhea.
2. Even without diarrhea, language learning is still stinking difficult. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I came.
3. I currently speak French on about the same level as a curiously intellectual five-year-old. Slightly worse, probably. (The five-year-old has a bigger vocabulary and may know more verb tenses than I do.) This is tremendously frustrating, since I don’t think on the level of a five-year-old. I’m simply unable to speak as I think. As a result, a great deal of my thoughts, beliefs, and experiences are, at this point, more or less incommunicable to my French hosts. It’s like the language barrier is a funnel, and all the G — family can see of my life is the tiny bit that squeezes through the hole.
   The goal, of course, is to widen the funnel until there’s no barrier at all. But this is a long, formidable, lonely process.
4. At the same time, speaking five-year-old French is eons ahead of speaking no French at all. In Germany, I sat in the nosebleed section and watched. Here in France, I’m slipping on the ice and getting sliced by skates and stabbed by pucks and bruised by misplaced fists — but I’m still in the game. And I can tell I’m getting better. Slowly, maybe, but better nonetheless. I’m in the game. It’s worth it.
5. The only way forward is to forge ahead. There’s no success without discomfort. There’s no morning without midnight. There’s no resurrection without the crucifixion.
6. Fear of being unable to communicate has been a new experience for me this summer. I’ve never had to worry before that when I spoke I wouldn’t be understood, or that I wouldn’t understand when spoken to. But I’ve learned that this fear cuts both ways, and the person I’m afraid to talk to is often afraid to talk to me, for the inverse reason. The solution is to go ahead and try. Try to communicate. And do it because —
7. Kindness cuts through the language barrier.