As I was typing out the first few English words on this page, I was unsure about the spelling. I tentatively finished the first sentence, and I couldn’t help re-reading it again and again to make sure I didn’t make any silly mistakes. Why am I so nervous about writing in English now? Here’s the back story.
During the past 7 weeks, I was completely cut off from the English-speaking world, barely speaking, listening, reading or writing any English. Many English words have gradually faded away from my head or have been mixed up with their French counterparts.
This summer, I was studying French at the French School of Middlebury College, VT, experiencing a full immersion into French. There, all the signs I saw were written in French, my Middlebury email account received almost only French emails, and all notifications and news were sent out in French. Following this “French only” habit, I even changed the language setting of my phone into French. The director of French School told us that “language pledge” (a pledge that all French School students signed to show their determination to use French as the only language during their stay at Middlebury) is “magic”, and I was so lucky and bold to experience such “magic”.
Every weekday, I had three meals with friends, language assistants, and even professors, but all of them only spoke French with me. I took French courses with my classmates of the same level from 8 a.m. to noon. During my free time, I joined the choir and the photography workshop, but we only sang French songs and we learned photography skills only in French. Such singular linguistic absolutism significantly shaped our community of around 300 hundred French speaking people, no matter how broken our French is.
Through these 7 weeks of immersion, I made astonishing progress in French and I now feel truly belonged to this French speaking community. Within such a close-knit community, I was perfectly comfortable sitting down at almost any table as long as everybody in this table spoke French regardless of our differences in age, culture and habit. I’ve never done such a thing at Brown where I eat with only the people I already know (because everyone speaks English at Brown, there’s nothing special about speaking English, but there’s something special about speaking French at Middlebury). Even though I feel belonged to both communities at Middlebury and at Brown, the two have quite different atmospheres.
At Brown, we have much more freedom in terms of choosing courses, activities and even friends, but the whole community seems to be more loosely connected. However, at Middlebury, we had very limited choices, but such limitation solidified our friendship.
At Middlebury, the one-language rule is paramount. When no one is allowed to speak any other language but French, French became an important common ground for all French School students and faculty. The French-only restriction prevented us from forming smaller circles based on our individual native languages or foreign linguistic abilities. Here, I hardly saw any Spanish-speaking or Chinese-speaking students forming their own circles. In addition, I spent much more time with my classmates because we took the same course for 4 hours everyday, ate at the same and only dining hall, and worked all together for the final presentation. Thus, I became really good friends with my classmates, who reminded me of my high school in Beijing – where students in the same class formed a very close-knit community because they spent most of their time together doing almost the same thing everyday.
The strict rules at French school focused us on our common grounds – enabling us to share much more through one language, one dining hall, one class – and thus we’d become really close friends. On the other hand, if we had been given more freedom in terms of the courses we choose or the languages we speak, we would have lost such close personal connections.
As for me, I probably still wish to have more freedom, but either form of community brings me the sense of belonging through different ways.
When no one speaks English, the “magic” is not only evident in our progress in French, but also indispensable to forging a truly close-knit community.