I'm Not As Dumb As I Look." I read the article and wondered what it would be like to walk into a building and be recognized. It was hard to imagine, but it happened sometimes in Paris when I'd go for a walk. I'd turn the corner or walk into a restaurant and receive a "wow, monsieur" from an elderly lady. "Monsieur!" she'd say with such enthusiasm as if she were meeting a long lost relative. "Welcome back, monsieur!" Her face would light up and she'd beam at me like a young girl being given her first kiss. I never knew why she recognized me. I felt like an imposter and became nervous when people said, "How did you get here?" Once, I overheard a gentleman talking on the phone saying, "You won't believe who showed up this morning." I watched the man stare at me as I left the building and then I heard him say to his friend, "That was him." It took time for me to get comfortable around people in Paris, but eventually I was comfortable. After being recognized and the occasional catcall, it was normal for me to be recognized in America. It took time to get used to but I eventually got used to it and didn't feel like an imposter. Walking around New York City, people don't really look you in the eye; they tend to look straight ahead and talk with their hands. In Paris, people speak with their hands as well, but there's something else that's a bit different. People have such style over here. It's different from what I see in the United States. People here wear expensive suits and dresses and the colors are bold. The ties are always a tie that matches their suit, but the best ones I've seen are from Italy and Sweden. French people have great taste, so it makes sense that their ties are nice, too. It's a city full of contrasts. Beautiful, quiet places next to noisy, busy places and you can find anything: quiet and intimate and noisy and crowded. There is a huge concentration of people, but the city never feels crowded. There's so much open space with a big park called Parc Monceau, huge buildings with parks and shops, plazas with fountains and benches, and a great subway system. Paris has such beautiful architectural features, all the buildings with big windows and pretty lights at night. The city is so clean and the sidewalks are usually swept twice a day. It's amazing. The city is old and it still works. It's a city that runs smoothly and it always seems like the world is at peace here. You feel like you're a part of it. The city is open to the public with restaurants and cafés everywhere. It's a great way to meet other people or eat dinner and talk. If you want a real sense of who a person is, walk along the Seine and go sit on a bench. People there are generally tourists and workers. As a way of meeting people, it's a good place to sit. People from the south of France sit by the Seine, the northern Europeans by the Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue de Seine, and the Americans tend to gravitate to the places around Columbia University. Those are the areas where you'll see the most American people. * * * After I got a job at the University of New York at Binghamton in New York, I didn't need to work for only one company at a time so I could be in France as much as I wanted, but I had to take breaks between classes so I didn't get too far behind. I could feel that my language skills were improving, but I wasn't getting the fluency that I wanted. Language is all about learning patterns and memorizing things, and that's the next step after I learned basic expressions. I wasn't getting those memorized easily enough and it was frustrating. Even when I was sitting around people, they still didn't always understand me. It felt like I wasn't talking correctly in French and I didn't really know why. My grammar was fine and it seemed that I didn't have enough vocabulary and could never remember expressions. I hadn't lost my accent, but I was still having a tough time getting better. I felt that it was going to take time, like learning to drive, because people wanted perfection. It's normal to be frustrated when you're learning a second language and just can't seem to learn things fast enough. I felt that I couldn't get to the same level in French that I was in German, and that was really frustrating. A friend from America once told me that learning another language was like learning to play a violin. You don't know the rules for playing the violin, and you're just making up your own rules as you go. It sounds easy, but that's hard work, and even though I was getting better, it was still tough. I felt that people really want to push and push and push so that when they do teach you, you'll be fine. It's tough work. It's very tough work. I don't know if I ever got to the point where I was fluent in French. It's been three years now and my work is all at the University of New York and not on the job market or in an office, so I'm really happy with my progress. But people might think that my French could have gotten better by now if I hadn't had this job, but I just didn't have the time to take some big classes or to devote a lot of time to practice because of my studies. I knew how to work with a lot of guys and women who were a lot smarter than me and I had to show up to class every day and study or else I wouldn't be doing well. When I'm with people who don't know me, they don't see how hard I work or how many hours I put into it, and they're not impressed. It's harder to work than it looks, but it's only because I like to push myself and I'm not afraid to spend time at home practicing. I don't expect a grade or a grade, but I do expect to get there. I know that I want to be able to speak fluently in French and know how to have a conversation with someone who speaks it really well. I wish I could go back in time and I'd tell my student self, "Listen to me. Don't waste your time. Get there. Know that language." I wish someone had taught me how to do this sooner. I feel like if I didn't go to university for a couple of years, I could have done a lot better. That's the thing with learning a language—some people learn at a fast pace and they move to the next level. That's not me. I go slow. I take in all the information I can and I keep it on my mind. It's like I take pictures of everything. I'm never going to forget that. I know that if I'm ever back in France and it's for some reason, like I'm in a car accident or I'm robbed, and I want to get help from someone, I'll need those French expressions. When people in the States hear that there's a French person in the crowd, they know that person has a different accent and that means they speak it. No matter how well you know French, if you come to France and get lost or anything happens, you're not going to be safe. People look at you like you're a foreigner. At the same time, it's much better than the way I first came here. It's a long story that I'll get into later, but it took me a really long time to get the courage to do it. I didn't get to practice the way I wanted to in America because I had to do really boring stuff. I had to do things in between classes that could have been eliminated or the people that I did them for could have been sent to a different job. Then I would have more time and could work with more people. So my advice is that if you're learning a language, do it your way and spend as much time as you can, and if you do that, you can move fast. And if you have friends who can give you support and who are patient, try to find friends who are willing to be your audience. That's key. A lot of people don't put enough time into the things that they care about, and I know I was guilty of that. If I had just been forced to go to class on Monday and come home on Friday, I would have stayed in my first year. When I was first here, I had people who didn't know me pushing me. They told me, "You have to go back to class tomorrow and you have to turn this in, and you're spending too much time on your studies." It made me feel really stressed out. I was forced to do the whole thing and it wasn't so fun for me. People don't really know how to teach students. You need to be patient and you need to encourage them and motivate them. If they don't want to do it, you have to work hard to get them to understand what you're doing. Sometimes I felt I would be better off alone doing it on my own. I don't think I would have done as well on my own. If you want to study another language, just go to the library and study the language or find a video in French. If you're not sure of what you're doing, go