I have always experienced difficulty with the French language. Honestly, I sometimes ask myself how (and why) on God’s earth have I maintained being a French major. Before coming to Bryn Mawr, I had never taken a French class. In high school, frustrated by the lack of options, I took the only language offered: Spanish. Four years later I only knew “Hola” and “Como Estas”. Those courses were a joke and were in no way preparatory for college language courses. I began at Bryn Mawr with a mandatory two year language sentence pinned on me. This was fine, because I knew that I would finally take the language that I yearned to learn the most: Français. My first year was not great. The other students I was in class with clearly had years and years of prior experience taking French courses. My very first French professor and I did not develop an outstanding relationship. In fact, when I made an error she would approach my desk—something I did not find particularly helpful. Instead, this made me nervous. Still, I thought “ If you are going to take a language two out of four years, why not make it count for you in the future?” After I had completed my requirement, I kept on going. I started to work with teachers who believed in me. I was told I had to score a certain average to study abroad and so I worked hard and requested a tutor. I didn’t know why people supported me when I felt so lost.  It seemed as though I was in a dark hole with this language, and I found it difficult to find a light at the end of tunnel. Then I went to Paris. Understanding came to me, and my ability to speak improved as well. I must say that I have lost a lot of the speaking ability since I returned to the U.S., but now I truly can understand the majority of what the professors say to me. I am also able to write coherent papers. It is incredibly hard to convey to others, as in moments of infancy, that I can understand what is going on despite the fact the words might not come out of my mouth just right. What has gotten me this far in the major has been the professors that clearly did not see my situation as a hopeless one. They saw my potential, and many of them helped me and challenged me in ways that were appropriate to my style of learning as well as my comfort level. I believe that perhaps 30 percent of learning a language is believing in yourself. I now know that another portion can be attributed to having wonderful people believe in you. After that, all that remains is hard work, dedication, and the eradication of nervousness. When I am nervous, I can barely even speak English, let alone French. I reminisce about all of the wonderful experiences I had in Paris. I should probably start a series of Paris happenings and recount all of the hilarious and crazy situations I fell into. A simple example: I was walking next to a French guy named Zohair, and I saw two people kissing on a bench. I say, “Regardez! L’amour!”(Look, the love!), but this in fact sounded like, “Regardez les morts” (Look, the dead people!). Evidently, pronunciation is my weak point. There were riots at our school, Nanterre Paris X, and it would not have been  too far-fetched to say there could have been dead people—we had seen farm animals on campus earlier that day and dumpsters blocked our classroom entry ways. And so, Zohair freaked out and started screaming “où !”, which meant, “where!” I realized had made an error and explained my mistake to him the best I could that there were not any dead people around, but there were people showing their love for each other. He smiled and we went to eat baguettes.