Not Speaking Perfect English Doesn't Make You an Idiot

During my time in Paris, I am doing an internship teaching English. Back when I was deciding my courses, I knew that I wanted to do an internship because I saw it as an opportunity to get to know Paris better. Also, I did an internship in Hartford my second year with an organization that works with refugees, teaching them English and getting them ready for the citizenship test. I had a great experience and was able to learn about what it takes to run nonprofits. Going back to my current internship, I am definitely enjoying the experience. I am finding all these rules that we have in the English language that I learned somewhere along the line but forgot. For example, since when do we use the future perfect continuous? Why does it matter that when you arrive tomorrow, I will be tired since I will have been working in the garden? This experience is forcing me to rethink things that I know because I speak English but have to find different ways to explain to someone else. What a difference eleven years has made in my life! I went from speaking no English to being able to help someone else learn it.

Being in Paris has allowed me to get more comfortable speaking French and using it in everyday life. There have been moments where I've questioned everything I know but for the most part, I am very happy to be from a place where French is one of the language spoken and therefore having been exposed to it at a young age. Being at Sciences Po has introduced me to an education system where English isn't the dominant language. At the orientation program, we were reminded to be kind to our classmates since some students may be better at English than French and vice versa. The reason why I even bring this up is that sometimes in the US, we treat people like idiots because they don’t speak English the best. I completely understand that learning the language of the country you are in is a must. If you come to France and can’t even say a few words in French, you might run into a problem. Going back to the US, there are times that the person struggling with English knows 2 or 3 other languages and maybe this one is taking more time to come through. Of course we wouldn’t know this because we were getting frustrated with people not meeting our expectations of speaking perfect English.