#someone I know who is from France said my vocabulary is technically fine it's just my accent sounds kind of annoying to people from France

[madanimalscientist]

I once (due to jet lag) managed to forget the French word for sheep, despite having taken 3 years of French (plus learning it concurrently with English as a child, thanks to my great aunt who was a native speaker). So I'm on the train in Quebec and making polite small talk with the woman next to me and it's going pretty well and she asks me what I do and I say "je travaille avec les vaches et les..." (I work with cows and...) and I forgot the word for sheep so I just do a very realistic baa and she laughs and goes "moutons!" and I nod and go "oui, merci, moutons".

(on that same trip I also managed to also mix up "poutine" and "putain" and accidentally excitedly announce a restaurant had gluten-free hookers, for which I have no excuse except that it had been a long week and alcohol was involved and honestly both of those incidents were pretty funny)

I actually really like the thing when you're starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn't natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me "every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week." And I understood.

I don't think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words "humidity" or "stress", I managed to string together: "This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me." And she understood.

And sometimes you just say things weird, but it's better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn't know the spanish word for "hurry", but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english "I have all the time in the world."

The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn't expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.