Second Childhood

I feel like learning a new language is like being a child again. All of the sudden you get reduced from adult banter, like “why are there goats everywhere and how come you are allowed to have animals in your house?” To toddler-level conversation like “thirsty where water?” After 10 weeks here, my French is decent. I couldn’t tell you how to change the battery on your cell phone but I can now construct complex sentences like “I didn’t think you were coming so I left without you.” Now that I speak enough French I have started taking Wolof lessons in French. It’s been hard. The “what-did-you-just-fucking-say?” stares and the “boy-are-you-retarded?” looks have diminished with French, not disappeared by far, but diminished and now it’s hard to go back there with Wolof. It’s even harder cause with French I can at least try to guess what the word might be. This usually entails trying to “frenchify” whatever the corresponding word is in Spanish. It actually works often with the big words, like “colonizar” in Spanish is “colonizer” in French, but when I try the same trick with other words like bed (“cama” in Spanish) and say things like “came” I get one of those “boy-are-you-retarded?” stares (the word in French is “lit”). It’s also really annoying when people tell me how easy their language is. Of course it’s easy for you, you already speak it!