Although I took one psycho-linguistics course in undergrad (very interesting, by the way), I never thought I would be able to apply the theories and examples I learned in that class to real-life. As I navigated my first-year of academic librarianship in a bilingual French-English institution, I slowly began to accumulate routines and activities that worked for me the most. With French being my third language, I wanted to take this post to share strategies and tips that helped me in my first year to improve my French more than it ever has.
Identifying Needs
Something that I found to be helpful is to organize my own personal needs in recognizing what skills I lacked the most. For me, they were conversational and oral skills, especially during bilingual meetings or when listening to presentations. Identifying a set of words that were commonly used within everyday work was something I quickly recognized that helped immensely in these everyday situations. In addition, really getting myself out there in terms of French training, lectures, workshops, events, conferences, symposiums and volunteering for co-teaching and shadowing opportunities were other ways to quickly be exposed to an immersed setting.
Confidence
Frenglish is definitely real. I use Konglish (Korean+English) quite often with my family, but I always thought that my French had to be perfect before I opened my mouth, especially in professional settings. If there is something I learned this year, it really is that trying is often enough! I often think about my parents when I think I speak broken French. When they first immigrated to Canada, they must have also felt this fear and wall in communication, accents, and judgement. Most people are simply just grateful that I am trying to speak and communicate, and often to help them! My favourite memory from a teaching session is a student coming up to me after and thanking me for learning French. These little fragments of memory and experiences really motivate me in wanting to learn and refine my skills further.
Building a Network
It is honestly 110% due to my amazing co-workers and supportive network that I continued to work hard on my French this year. From external French courses, to French courses through the university, conversation circles both within the university and at the public library, bi-weekly chats with co-workers, weekly lessons with a French tutor, group lessons, and much more were some ways I received help from my network. Making friends is definitely not something that comes natural to me, but when sharing the same struggles such as learning a new language together, it does become easier. Holding each other accountable and continuing to expand my network without any language barriers has been a challenging, yet rewarding process of this language acquiring journey.
Mélange into your Hobbies
As mentioned in a previous blog post here, one of my favourite ways to spend leisure time is to go out to cinemas and watch movies. Building a routine into incorporating French into my hobbies has been ideal as I find it to be a low-stress, yet beneficial use of my time (we love efficiency!). Things like the French cinema club, French film festivals, Québécois film festivals, purposely watching movies without subtitles, and trying to finish a French director’s filmography, are some fun ways I expanded learning into my time off. The different accents, countries, and cultures are only a snapshot, but the films provide stories and insight into atmospheres and environments that I found to be critical in understanding the language in a colonial, communal, historical, and different socioeconomical contexts.
Overall, I am quite pleased at how much my French has struggled and improved this past year. Having the confidence to teach in French was something unimaginable last summer but now I am happy to have taught 4 sessions in my third language. Of course, the learning never really stops, especially in librarianship, but I am looking forward to more that I will learn with this new lens of a third language.
