How I struggle to speak my own native language

I promise this is not as stupid as it sounds

Illustration by ChatGPT4/DallE. AI image gen still sucks a bit at text, but hey, that kind of works in this context

French is my native language. For the last 15+ years, Japanese is the language I have been speaking the most in any given day (both at home and at work). And English is the language I do the vast majority of my reading in, as mentioned in my previous and inaugural post.
While I'm fairly comfortable with all three, it's a given that French is still the language I have the best mastery of. That most likely will never change. Yet over the years, I have been increasingly bumping into difficulty speaking what should be my most natural, effortless language.

I'm not talking about the quality of my French becoming worse- though that's also a thing, to some extent. You may have heard this one before: spend enough time speaking a foreign language rather than your first, and you start struggling to find some words in your own mother tongue, become unsure about grammar, etc. Many long term migrants and expats will have felt that, especially when going back home after a while. Words don't come quite as naturally as they should. Maybe you even get a joke or two out of people about how you forgot how to speak your own language, ha ha. I'm no stranger to that one either.

But that's not at all what I'm talking about here. What I have been chronically struggling with is using French in the first place. More specifically, making the choice to use French in a context where it would be better for me to do so. Not that I ramble in Japanese at people who I know don't understand it; I'm thankfully not that far gone. But in the (admittedly narrow, but very relevant to me) case where I'm talking to someone who understands both, I have a lot more trouble making the switch than you'd expect I would.

In practical terms, this is mostly about talking to my daughter. She's a French and Japanese binational in Japan, in a household where her parents talk to each other in Japanese, about 10,000km away from any French speaking family member. It was pretty obvious from the start, even as a clueless first time parent, that I absolutely needed to talk to her in French if there was to be any hope of her actually speaking the language natively.

So I set out to do just that: we agreed that I should use only French when talking to her, right from the baby days. It bears mentioning that this was 5 years or so after I first came to Japan, and my Japanese level was nowhere near where it is today. In fact, not long before that, we still had to switch to English regularly with the wife because my Japanese just sucked that much. So how hard could it be, right?

Quite hard, it turns out. Much harder than I could imagine before trying, anyway. I failed at it very regularly. My exasperated wife had to remind me constantly, sometimes daily. Even with the perspective of years, I don't think it was just a failure of will or a lack of trying; it's only become clearer since that this is genuinely difficult thing for me to do. (The jury is still out whether that's a “human brain” thing or a “Thomas’ brain” thing…)

The core reason for this is, in the end, relatively straightforward: the only other person I was talking to in the home environment, including directly before and after talking to the little one, was my dear wife, and we talk to each other in Japanese. So even at my shoddy Japanese proficiency level of the time, my head was in “Japanese mode” by default, and I had to consciously make the switch to French mode. And there definitely is a “switching cost” here, though not quite the kind that tech platforms use to entrap you in increasingly shitty services (unrelated to the topic at hand, but still do go read Cory Doctorow urgently if you're not familiar with the concept of enshittification).

This really isn't just about remembering to flip a switch, however much I wish it was. Being in Japanese mode, switching to French essentially means translating myself before talking. The process looks something like this:

• Something to say comes to my mind, in Japanese

• I remind myself I should say it in French (failure point 1)

• I try to do a direct translation of the thing I was about to say (failure point 2)

• Failing that, I pause to re-think what I was about to say and find an appropriate reformulation in French

Anyone who has any experience interpreting from one language to another, especially languages nowhere near the same family like French and Japanese, knows how mentally taxing this kind of translation can be. It also makes for an often weird and intrusive pause of a few seconds before talking, not to mention the numerous times I end up using profoundly weird (if not plain wrong) turns of phrase. By the way, I hope to make another post some day about the distance between languages and the woes of translation between the more distant ones. You can look forward to such bangers as “French and English are mostly the same language, right?”, courtesy of the wife (a perspective I’ve grown to understand and even on some level agree with now, but which at the time certainly left my European self “sur le cul”, as we’d say back where I come from).

This need for self-translation all hinges, of course, on the fact I am forming sentences in my head in Japanese in the first place. How about I just not do that? Again, my answer is “I wish I could”. I do not know how to control it. I don’t know where that setting is. I'm not even sure I understand the mechanisms of it. It's a complex product of immediate physical and social environment, topic, and sometimes even stuff like state of mind or fatigue levels. But that's also a whole other topic to be explored in yet another future post, as this one is maybe getting long enough as is (one point I'll probably try to make there: thinking in a language and forming sentences in that language are entirely separate things!).

Coming back to actually trying to speak to my daughter in French, I struggled daily, but overall I'd say it still more or less happened. She spent her first couple of years hearing at least some French, which I'd like to think helped later. But when the time came for her to form her own words and sentences, it was Japanese that came out. That's quite natural when growing up spending more time with her Japanese mother and going to Japanese daycare, of course. Especially when it was plain for her to see that I could understand Japanese just fine, so she needn't bother (even barely verbal kids are sneaky smart like that). Still, she just would not speak to me in French at all, regardless of my efforts to unilaterally keep to the French regime.

That's actually where my switching woes became significantly worse, not better. Now I had to hold conversations with French on one end, and Japanese on the other, and that's orders of magnitude more difficult. Parents will know that conversations with toddlers involve a whole lot of repetition: getting them to understand and stay engaged involves a lot of mimicry and reinforcement, which in practice involves re-using and emphasizing the same words they use. I think that’s also relevant in conversations between adults, actually. But that’s obviously much more difficult to do when you’re not using the same language! Regardless of which language I actively form sentences in, what I’m responding to is itself in Japanese, so the translation step becomes unavoidable. Every word, turn of phrase, nuance must pass through that big, complex filter before coming out. All this is every bit as true on the other side of the conversation, by the way: but if the little one has been feeling the strain from it, it sure did not show much. A young native polyglot’s mind will never cease to amaze me! (I suspect it is fundamentally different from the mind of a “learned in adulthood” polyglot, but wouldn’t dare to guess how. Hopefully the daughter will be able to share some insights into that with me at some point.)

These days, she’s being going to French school for a majority of her life, and thankfully is growing up a true bilingual (and a bi-cultural too - another important distinction worth exploring in depth, some other time maybe). She oftens starts conversations with me in French now, thankfully bypassing my poor old’s brains limitations. Yet I still catch myself, to this day, starting conversations in Japanese, including on topics where I really should be using French and not Japanese (because my mastery of it just isn’t up to snuff for the appropriate nuance needed on some topics - topic for another post #5). I don’t know that I’ll ever have the capability to get that right every time. Thankfully, I have my ever watchful beloved wife at my side to set me on the right path! :)