Roadwork of the MInd

It just came out of my mouth without any thought.

"Et voila! Tres bien!"

I was sitting in Arabic class practicing a little scene with my two conversation partners, and the French phrase just popped out.

The three of us had finished greeting each other, asking how each other was doing, telling where we were from and what our occupations were, and introducing each other in turn. We had effectively exhausted all of our Arabic vocabulary.

The French phrases then leapt from my mouth, confusing my conversation partners and embarrassing myself.

We all laughed, then went back to practicing our boring little scene.

These last couple of weeks, my brain has been working overtime to memorize not only the sounds of Arabic words and phrases, but also the alien-looking script for those words and phrases. I have mastered the look and sound of the numbers one through ten, and I can greet my Arabic-speaking students in their native tongue without much stumbling.

But every time I try to think in Arabic, I end up thinking in French.

Which is a little perplexing, seeing as my French fluency was embarrassingly rusty earlier in the summer when we visited France for the fourth time. In Paris, Thenay, and Faverges, I had difficulty interacting with waiters and sales clerks, discerning menu details, and even conversing with the family I had lived with during my semester abroad. Five years ago, I had been the star performer among my fellow students in the summer abroad program, tutoring them on the intricacies of French grammar and slang. This summer, I was just another tourist fumbling through her rusty high-school-level language skills.

Perhaps the new pathways in my brain that are trying to form with this new language are the same pathways that once carried my French thinking. Those were etched pretty deep, it seems. And now they are getting tangled up with these new, very foreign Arabic sounds and symbols.

I'm doing everything I can to pave over these old pathways with Arabic asphalt, much as the local rod crews are repaving our little dead-end street. First they shaved off the old, patched up blacktop, leaving the road raw and grooved and a couple of inches lower than the jagged edge of our cement driveway.

Likewise, I spent a long, lazy summer shaving off the layers of French grammar I worked so hard for so long to learn, by immersing myself in online Solitaire and Netflix bingeing. My language center was left as exposed and unfinished looking as our street now is.

Next, the giant, smelly trucks carrying a load of steaming tar will lumber down our street and idle there, while a crew of four or five young, sweaty guys shovel heaps of thick, gravelly, vile-smelling goo over the grooved skeleton of our road, matching it up to the yards and driveways of all our neighbors.

The next few weeks will find my own language center attempting to fill gaps in my Arabic skill set with the stinking goo of alien sound combinations. I will try desperately to match these new sounds and scripts to pictures and ideas I already know in English and French: house, sister, bread, car, book, brother.

Inevitably, there will be potholes and crevasses where I've missed the mark. Patches will be necessary to link the new to the old.

And I will occasionally make up brand new sounds that do not make actual words in any of the three languages my poor brain is now juggling, like the weird sinkholes that sometimes spontaneously appear in a newly paved road. These are necessary depressions on the way to fluency, like speedbumps or the gouges left behind by snowplows.

My challenge is to keep on driving, despite the bumps in the linguistic road and the unposted rules of grammar and the other crazy drivers tempting me to mispronounce or reach for vocabulary that I'm not ready for yet.

I have to trust that I'll get used to these new roads eventually, like I got used to driving a manual transmission. My brain may jump and lurch and occasionally stall out. But with lots of repetition and practice, one day the correct sounds will fall from my mouth without any effort, just as I now downshift with total ease.

In the meantime, I think it's kind of good that French phrases surface unbidden from time to time. I think that means my brain is putting this new Arabic information in the correct compartments, filing it in the Language drawers I opened and organized all through my undergraduate career.

Now, if only I could link that drawer metaphor to the driving metaphor. Quel dommage.