Bonjour, c’est encore moi

I’m the only French speaker in my own house.

I live in southern Italy, in Naples, nine months of the year. My children answer me in Italian most of the time. Italian is their language at school, with their friends, and in the street, while French is the language of one person in their life, and that person is me. Nothing in their normal day holds it up. It stays alive only if I keep using it out loud with them.

None of this is a theory I read about language learners. It is the arithmetic of my week.

A language doesn’t survive on your level. It survives on use.

My French is native and it still goes quiet (and poorer) if I let it. When I’m the only French in the room, speaking it becomes a decision I make several times a day, and some days I don’t make it. That is how a language starts to shrink, and it has nothing to do with what you know.

You are living the same thing from the other side. French is all around you; you follow it without effort, and you still hand the turn back in English. Nobody is going to make you take it. That choice, repeated, is the whole difference between someone who understands French and someone who lives in it.

For eighteen years, my English decided how much of me got into the room.

I spent those years in the humanitarian sector, where the working language was English. I could do the job, and I could write the report and defend the budget on paper. In my early career, it went differently, because I was still building my sentence while the meeting moved, and the person with the most comfortable English usually carried the point, whatever the point was worth. I sat on good arguments because they weren’t ready in time.

I became the quiet one in meetings, which is not who I am in French.

What changed it was not a course. I had no way out. There was no moment where I could switch back to French and still be understood, so I spoke badly, in front of people who mattered, for a long time, and it slowly stopped costing me anything.

That exit is the one thing you still have. English is always there, one sentence away, and it works. Every time you reach for it the room gets easier and your French stays exactly where it is. Most of my job is taking that exit away from you, somewhere it’s safe to lose it.

It started as a stopgap.

My first kid was born in February 2020. Humanitarian work does not exactly fit a family that stays in one place. So I left the sector. Without a plan, because I couldn’t plan the next thing while still in that one. A few weeks later, the country closed down (oh hey Covid!), and I needed work I could do from a table at home. There was a baby to look after. What followed was two years of whatever paid, online, none of it worth naming here. Then in February 2022 I gave a French lesson, on a whim, thinking it would only be for a few days. No plans, he said.

Reality is, I really enjoyed it and kept going. And I kept hearing my own problem come back at me in another language, from people who had already tried more vocabulary and another app and still went silent at the moment it counted.

About a hundred hours in, I still felt like I was fumbling and making it up as I went, and I expected someone to say so eventually. You’re busted Yann! Nobody expects the French grammar police.

Then Liliana, one of my first students, told me at the end of a lesson that she looked forward to those fifty minutes because of the way I explained things, and that it was useful to her. She wrote the same thing publicly a few days later. That got me. It was the first time I thought I might be able to give someone something solid.

About 7,500 hours later, I can usually hear where it breaks in the first twenty minutes of talking to someone, and it is not their French. It is one habit they built to protect themselves and avoid being less good than in English, and it is specific enough that we can work on it directly instead of working on everything.

This is not a language job. When someone gets their opinions back in French, they don’t come back telling me their grammar improved. They tell me they said the thing at the table, or that a colleague laughed at their joke. I stayed for that.

Everyone I work with is already good at French.

Some need B2 on paper, for a residence file or an exam with a date on it, and the deadline is what brings them to me. Others have no exam at all. They have been here for years; they follow every conversation without effort, and they still hand the turn back in English at the table.

It is the same work. The exam version has a calendar and a format to respect, and the other one has a wild apero on Wednesday or a wedding next Saturday, but we are fixing the same thing: the distance between what you can say and what you actually say.

At some point I will talk to you about Brittany.

I’m from there and I keep a house by the sea, and I objectively think it’s so beautiful that you need to know about it. I live in Italy for most of the year and I like it there, but I still count the weeks until we go back.

Those weeks are the only time my children get French from everywhere instead of from one person. It comes from the baker, the neighbors, and the kids on the beach, and I stop being the whole supply of French (phew!). Those weeks do more for their French than anything I set up at home.

So when I tell you that a language stays alive only when you use it out loud, that is not something I read in a method.