In several posts, I mentioned one of my goals for this year is to learn the French language. It's been a desire of mine since I forgot what French I learned during two years of High School. What I've studied over the past fifty-three days has renewed my belief that one should never make fun of a person who struggles to speak another language.
I've had two years of French and two college semesters of Spanish. Learning to recognize and read words is actually easy. Learning to pronounce them correctly is a little more difficult. Learning to understand a different language when it's spoken to you and to think in that language well enough to respond properly is hard.
The difficulty doesn't just involve a lack of vocabulary. One can whip up a stack of flash cards and memorize words in a jiffy. Learning grammatical structure and tenses so you can place the correct words in the proper order at the right time is a different matter, especially when the sentence structure of one language differs from another.
Take, for instance, the way adjectives are placed in the English language. Those who know and speak English know the adjective is placed before the noun, e.g.:
I have a red car.
In French, as in Spanish, the adjective is usually placed after the noun:
J'ai une voiture rouge.
I say usually because I'm learning some adjectives are placed before the noun:
J'ai une petite voiture (I have a small car. So does that mean I have a small, red car is written as, J'ai une petite voiture rouge?)
Why are some adjectives in the French language placed before the noun and some after? I haven't a clue, and I'm still trying to figure out which ones goes where.
Add to that learning which nouns are masculine and which are feminine, because that drives how the preceding article and accompanying adjectives and plurals are written and pronounced, and you have a person who is trying their best to mentally figure out how to form a sentence and then to speak it so that it's understood by the listener.
It's confusing, so s'il vous plaît and por favor, do me a favor. When you encounter someone who struggles to speak your language, don't laugh at them. Help them out. I know what they're going through. It isn't fun to stand there feeling like an idiot because you're trying to communicate with someone in a different language.