There are days when I wake up and I have to remind myself that life here is real. The French language is alive and well. Life here will go on for these people just the same after I leave as it has for their entire lives.
I know all this, and yet I still have to remind myself to remember this.
There are times when I forget that French is something more than a language spoken in the span of classes or that France is a real country and not an abstract place on a map. This is what studying it in the United States has done to me. Or maybe I just did it to myself by losing scope of it all.
Even now when I wake up in my room here I sometimes wonder if when I actually open my eyes and take stock of where I am, I will find myself back in Virginia and all this reduced to a memory, something infinitely more abstract than a classroom.
I know all this, and yet I still have to remind myself to remember this.
There are times when I forget that French is something more than a language spoken in the span of classes or that France is a real country and not an abstract place on a map. This is what studying it in the United States has done to me. Or maybe I just did it to myself by losing scope of it all.
Even now when I wake up in my room here I sometimes wonder if when I actually open my eyes and take stock of where I am, I will find myself back in Virginia and all this reduced to a memory, something infinitely more abstract than a classroom.
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