Foreign languages are hard. Anyone who's taken a foreign language class can tell you that. It's a completely different world; most teachers will just teach the class in that language, leaving you to scramble and try and figure out what they're talking about based on pantomimes and desperate guessing, and you normally dread a lot of the class periods. Everything is stressful when you don't know the language that's being spoken around you.
I didn't mean to minor in French.
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I took French because I had nothing better to take. I was an incoming freshman in high school, and it's a good idea to take a foreign language in high school so that you don't have to in college. My friend wanted to do French, so we decided we'd do it together.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like I fell in love with the language. It wasn't anything so sentimental as that. No, I just kept going. I just took the second year because it was required to not have to take any in college, and then I took a third year because, hey, why not, and then I kept going and kept going and kept going and the next thing I knew, I was a French minor in a 390-level class alongside people that could speak the language much better than I could.
I am very paranoid about getting something wrong. This is true with everything I do, but even more so when it comes to French. Even though I know that learning a foreign language is hard and that it's not a language I grew up speaking and therefore not one that I should be expected to know right away, there's a part of me that's like, "Hey, you're in your fifth year of taking this language, you should know a bunch of it by now." It's things like that that kind of make me kind of hate French sometimes.
However.
There's a feeling, when you've been taking a foreign language for a few years that you get sometimes. When you end up muttering something in that, little things, like asking the time when pulling out your phone to check, or little, simple sentences about what's for lunch or who's around. Or when you write a paper in that language and you don't actually know how good it is, but it looks official. Little things like that that are so cool that you can't help but commit yourself to the language for as long as you need to - because there's nothing cooler than learning a foreign language.
So even though I really don't like speaking up in French class, especially when native speakers show up or if the classroom is fuller than normal. Even though I don't like that, I do still like French. I do still like the concept of learning another language, of knowing the translation if you run across something in a novel. It's maybe not knowing what you're doing all of the time, but it's, after a certain amount of time, getting an almost instinctual feel for the language that makes it so that your grammar's maybe not so bad all of the time.
I am a French minor, and I don't exactly know how that happened. I may have just sort of stumbled into it, but it is something that I'm going to learn, whether it kills me or not.
