A weird thing happened to me some time ago. I got bored, with this angry sort of boredom, of my mother tongue. I had to think in english, and read stuff in english, even though I could find it more easily in french. Which is not the best way to go when you live in the middle of France and you have to deal with people only in french. But I couldn't tolerate french anymore. It is very weird because it never happened with the other languages I ever studied, so why should it happen with the first one I ever learned ?
I have always been interested in other languages as far as I can recall, and technically the first language I spoke when I was a kid was not french, but that's another story, and I was never a fan of my own language, it was just a mean to read stories, but not a enjoyable thing in itself. I was more interested in what I didn't understand. And I always viewed french as particularly unattractive language, with flat sounds and no rythm, compared to my father's italian or the english and spanish we learned at school. So I have always been enjoying foreign languages, but it never led me to despise the french language or get bored of it. I even discovered the ultimate antidote to the flatness of french : reading books by Victor Hugo. This is the only author I ever read who manages to make french beautiful to my ears, to the point I'd read aloud whole paragraphs, for the sheer beauty of the sentences.
So I never had any reason to get bored of my mother tongue, only not to use it more than I had to.
But some time ago I also realized how much I forgot as to my french culture and knowledge, and how many years I spent reading tons of books ... In english or arabic, but no more than a dozen in french.
So I saw in the library a book, written by a famous living french author, member of the French Academy, I read 2 paragraphs, found her style rather nice, so I borrowed it, thinking «that's good to get back into the french, a book by a talented writer that I certainly should know more about» ... And I have started to read it, and the more I read, the more I disliked it : the style appeared to me pompous, overdone, poetic but to the point where some sentences didn't have any meaning (grammaticaly correct but didn't correspond to anything in the story), and the story, well, very disappointing. Very orientalist in the sense that it is exaclty what the french intelligenstia wants to read on the subject, though I sometimes enjoy orientalist stuff (being an Edward Said's fan doesn't prevent from enjoying orientalist stuff when it's well done), so cliché in everything ... And still I forced myself to go on, because I had set it a goal «I have to read this author, it's part of the french culture, etc», homework-style.
And days after it struck me that I got this bad habit back, doing «homework». One of the greatest language-learning tips
website out there (
AJATT)* explains it perfectly : you don't get better at something by doing stuff you don't like. I had applied his counsel on my foreign languages learning, doing stuff I liked and nothing else, not doing it because «I should» but because I liked it, like a kid learning ... Well, learning his mother tongue. So what I was doing well with my foreign languages I forgot to apply to my mother tongue, as if it was an entirely different matter. But, it's just a language, the fact that it's the first I learned doesn't matter. So I stopped reading the book, and took up reading something else. And since then, my angry boredom is already deflating, if not entirely gone.
But th delfating tendency reassures me since I'm planning to take up 3 years of study to train as a FLE teacher ( French as a Foreign Language teacher)**, the best way I found up to now to go and live overseas. I have other plans, with the same goal, but this one looks great, with great opportunities in countries I'd love to live in (i.e. Northen Iraq, or iraqi kurdistan). (I know, I tend to like places that make my parents suddenly scream in alarm). So it's not totally lost, I might yet enjoy my mother tongue again ! Especially given the fact that I know I always enjoyed it more when I was in a foreign country. "Having the monopole of exosticism" says my sister. The notion deserves a whole post I think !
* A website dedicated to japanese, but all the author's tips and counsels are in english, and it's all true for any language you might want to learn. This website actually helped me a lot to keep my motivation intact with my learning process, and to find new ways of enjoying this process. And still does, obviously, even for my mother tongue.
** which is not my core studies and interests ( middle-eastern languages and history, anthropology ), but a PhD in history or social anthropology - which I plan to do someday - doesn't give you a job in France. The closest thing to my goals, as a mean to economically survive in this world, is then translator or FLE teacher. And for that, well, other diplomas are needed ... ( But I don't complain, I love studies ! )
