36. Gain Valuable Feedback from Experts in the Field
There's nothing like the pure disdain of a four year old Parisian.
My kid corrects my French. A lot. I don't mind when she does it because she is four years old, and it's more cute than demoralizing. Though her French isn't perfect, she has a flawless accent, as she has been surrounded by French speakers since she was sent to crèche at 3 months old.
She corrects my pronunciation more than anything else. I recently chaperoned her class field trip to the movie theater, and she interrupted me wrangling her cohorts to school me in the correct way to say "petit train." I repeated after her, but still got it wrong. She said it again, and again, I got it wrong. She grew frustrated with me and gave up, saying, "C'est pas grave." It was the most French I've ever seen her act before.
Most people don't witness their kids surpassing them until much later in life, but it's humbling to see your offspring speak a language better than you ever will. Again, I find it more amusing than anything else. Plus in the grand scheme of having my French corrected, it's relatively harmless.
When I first moved to Paris, I felt like most times I opened my mouth to speak French in public, I was met with a very distinct nose scrunch + eye squint (NSES) combo. This was the expression I got when a French person was trying to understand what I was saying. The more I tried to explain myself, the harder the person's nose scrunched, the harder their eyes squinted. It didn't take me long to recognize that this expression would haunt me for most of my time here, no matter how much my French improved.
I still get the NSES combo to this day, usually when I misgender a noun or butcher a word's pronunciation. This baffled expression used to annoy me and fill me with a certain nihilism regarding ever mastering the French language, but now, it's simply a daily part of my life here: I take the metro, I go to the pharmacy, I make at least two French people scrunch their noses and squint their eyes at me.
That's why I far prefer my daughter's less-than-subtle way of correcting me -- it sticks more. Thanks to her particular brand of shaming, I have never mispronounced certain words again. Plus she enjoys the power imbalance of this certain aspect of our relationship; she knows that no matter how much I try, I will never roll my R's with the same Gallic ease as her.
I'm grateful for this, as it's another reminder to savor these years before she eventually grows up and becomes a French adult, and she'll have no choice but to scrunch up her nose and squint at me when she can't understand a word I'm saying. But until then, I'm happy to let her correct me, even if I annoy her with my useless R's.