Lost in translation

Tonight was my placement test. I was actually pretty calm going into it, even when they handed me the 60-question examen and then said there would be an oral en francais component. I figured that the oral would be a piece of cake, that I'd stumbled on the written part. For, you see, writing in French has never been my strong suit. I managed to avoid grammar for my last two years in high school by going into the literature track. Which means I can read 16th century French lit and speak well, but cannot write to save my life.

Well, it was the exact opposite. I did fine on the reading and better than I expected on the written part. The meltdown came during the oral part of the examination. I lost it about thirty seconds after Madame said bonjour and it was all downhill from there. It was frankly quite embarassing. Especially the part where I couldn't remember the word for brother. ::facepalm:: The word for sister? Right there at the very tip of my tongue, but not brother -- frère, yes, yes, I've got it now, but what good does it do me now? If I'd had half a brain, I would have invented a soeur on the spot.

Trust me. It gets worse. Much worse.

I couldn't remember the word for 'little'. Couldn't remember 'petit' to save my life -- I was fixated on the same word in another language. Every time I tried to come up with a word, this other language which I most recently heard yesterday came to the forefront and gained ascendency over poor French. Madame was staring at me in a mixture of horror and pity. I thought about talking about the war of languages in my head, that one language was fighting for supremacy over the other and was winning, but then she'd think I was psycho and I'd end up kicked out of the program and across the street at the World Famous Medical Center (tm), with a padded room to call my own and a wardrobe entirely consisting of white garments with lots of buckles being the uniform du jour. See? I can so come up with the right words not under pressure. ::nods::

I honestly think it should be okay, in foreign language classes, to substitute words from other languages at a moment's notice when the right language doesn't come to mind. I'm just sayin'. The results come out on Friday, I think, and I'm a little pensive about what it all will mean.

It was... so not good.