#i guess?...

I now live in the fear of the day I’ll say it out loud while people are within earshot.

But hey, at least my accent on this sentence is impeccable!

Me:

They lay in silence except for the distant sounds of waves crashing on the shore, the occasional creak as the little cottage settles in the wind. “Are you lonely?’ Newt says quietly, remembering Hermann's earlier letters.

I’ve learned English predominantly by reading. And I learned the words not by checking their definition and learning it, but by judging the context and what should be happening given the story; mentally cross-checking the meaning I had attributed to it when stumbling upon it again in the next story. Yup, that’s how I like to learn. As you can guess, I missed a lot of infos in a lot of stories.

What it means is: I don’t have a clear definition/translation for most words, like I have with simple ones. Like, I can tell easily that “maison” is “house” and I can give you a quick definition.

But I know words like “stumble”, “wail”, “glint”,... I can’t give you a French equivalent. And I’ll have a fucking hard time explaining them. (I most likely won’t be able to) I just have... a feeling about what those words are.

The thing is, as I’m currently writing a story, those words are appearing out of thin air in my mind, I use them, before stopping like “Wait, are they actually used the way I’m using them right now?”. I can’t answer. But when I check for a translation, 90% of the cases, I’m using them correctly.

This is at the same time impressive and terribly frustrating.

I also have in mind words like “majoritairement”, “lampadaire”, “affectueux”, but I absolutely can’t find a English equivalent for any of them. When I do check, I realize I know all this words in English, I’ve seen them many many times. There’s simply no connection between the English and French words. So when I’m starting from a word in one language, I can’t find a path in my brain leading to the word in the other language.

It took me months to finally link “relevent” to “pertinent”, because we use “relevent” quite often in English, whereas “pertinent” is less prominent in French. The context in both languages is different, and it makes my brain go completely blank. So very often, when trying to write something in French, the word “relevent” would appear in my mind because that’s what I want to say dammit, but couldn’t find anything in French. I would then shamefully end on Google Translate to try to find the French word.

I think if it’s so much easier to use those words when I’m writing a story is because suddenly, I have the context. The context in which I most likely learned them at some point. Anb by god, my brain is like “FINALLY, WE CAN USE ALL THOSE WORDS STUCK THERE!”.

I feel like I’m just sitting there, watching some incredible vocab coming out of nowhere, and I’m like “Damn girl, this was unexpected”.

So yeah, I know a lot of words, but I can only use them in specific contexts. Veeery useful.