The most obvious difficulty about being in Paris that I think everyone realizes is the language barrier. What I never realized was that there is another language barrier entirely, that exists between me and an unexpected group of people: the English.
Other than the Americans in my program, the other foreigners living in Paris that I interact with the most are British people. They make up the majority of the players on my lacrosse club team, and there are a significant number of them in the english teaching program with me. At first, it seemed to me to be a way for me to "broaden my cultural horizons", without going through the hardship of learning/speaking (or stumbling through) a different language. But little by little, I realized that their language can be almost as foreign to me as the French language sometimes. It has gotten to the point where, when I am with a large group of them, they are constantly looking at my face to make sure I understand what they are saying. They often even immediately translate, because they know that there are certain words I won't understand. For example, they refer to sweaters as "jumpers", college is "uni" (that is more confusing to them than to me, so I have to be sure to refer to school as "university"), long spandex for exercising is not spandex (I still haven't gotten a specific translation yet), french fries are chips, chips are crisps, cookies are biscuits, and "have you got" is a perfectly grammatical and even more sophisticated version of "do you have".
The most recent one that caused a lot of problems was when my friend was talking to a few of us about her friend's wedding, and how she has to be home in time for her "hen-do". Embarrassed by constantly having to ask for translations, I just sat quietly hoping to get some clues from the conversation as to the meaning of this word. I couldn't even spell it, let alone figure out what it would be. I thought it was some exotic word borrowed from another language. Finally, noticing my furrowed brows and relatively spaced-out look, my friend looked to me and came up with the translation: bachelorette party. Apparently, a "do" is the equivalent of like a party or a get-together (ex. "just a little Christmas-do", this is a direct quote of an example of this word used in a sentence. it is the only one they could come up with). And apparently, "hen" is a colloquial phrase for women, and "stag" is for men, despite the fact that the species don't exactly match up (though I guess there is a reason they don't call it a cock-do).
To add to this whole struggle, most of the time the teaching materials my French counterparts have for their classes are based on British-English. So they hear someone speaking from a CD or singing a song, and then they have to listen to me pronounce it in almost a completely different way. Just trying to keep these 7 year olds on their toes I guess. But it wasn't a struggle for me, really, until I started teaching classroom objects. I held up the flash-card for eraser, and said the word. The teacher looked at me confusedly, however, and showed me that in her book they had written the word "rubber". Now I have a hard time saying the word "rubber" to a classroom of 7-9 year olds, because I'm pretty sure in America it has nothing to do with writing, pencils, or school. Nothing AT ALL. And I couldn't explain that to the teacher in French, in front of the entire class, because my vocabulary is not sophisticated enough to do so, and neither is my poise. So I was left blubbering nonsense for a few minutes, until the teacher realized that it was something to discuss at a later time. Though I now say rubber, because I realize it is easier for the kids to pronounce, I've never quite gotten comfortable with it but c'est la vie.
So I feel like I am learning just as much about the English language here as I am about the French. Though it doesn't have anything to do with the difference between British-English and American-English, the 11-year old students I tutor today asked me why we use, and how to categorize, words like "eaten", "taken", "been", "chosen", when we already have the past tense form: "ate", "took", "was", "chose", respectively (and why every verb doesn't have an equivalent form). I made some crap up, and eventually ended the explanation with something like "it's too sophisticated for you to understand". Tutoring is usually the only time during my week when I actually feel like I have the upper-hand on someone, but today Maybe someday their more qualified english teachers will explain it to them, and they can come back and tell me the real reason.
