Today marks the day that I tried 50 French tutors on italki, a language learning platform. I currently rank 24th in the language challenge leader board, having taken 44 hours of classes in the past 23 days. Not that the numbers mean anything other than that I have been taking French classes online excessively, more than an average employed person who has more important things to do can afford. Possibly a result of le confinement + feeling like a stupid sorry person about to go insane if I don’t use my brain for something productive, and no, free coding workshops don’t count. In the virtual sessions, when the tutors seem impressed by and comment on how well I can express myself verbally (no matter how genuine that is) for having learned French for only three months, it’s as if I’m dragged out of the dim reality into a COVID-less world where I emerge as a formidable and fearless multilingual monster with tons of future possibilities and no visa concerns.
There are young female tutors whom I go back to purely because I’d like to be friends with them — they are more charismatic and charming than effective as a teacher. Though I have to admit that it sounds a bit pathetic that I’m paying for the “friendship” hours and for their patience when I struggle in my attempt to get to know them. There’s a middle-aged man from a “petit village” called Demigny who is learning Japanese on the platform because he lost his job and visa in Singapore and moved to Japan where he knew no one but found a job last minute. Out of the thousand employees at the national pharmaceutical distributor in Osaka, only one co-worker speaks English and they stick together the whole time. “C’est bizarre!” He keeps saying. There’s also a professional tutor who could pass as a native British English speaker because of her perfect RP accent, but I was killing for our lesson to be over because as proficient a speaker of both languages as she is, she’s far from a good teacher. I kept a private note for personal use after every lesson and under her name I wrote “$15.5, cheap for a professional teacher, but never again. Not receptive to questions and didn’t care whether she’s being understood. Reminds me of Tilda Swinton in Narnia, only more condescending. Asked a series of structured questions but the conversation lacks natural flow. Didn’t give any comment and barely any corrections.” The worst thing is she laughed at my name— yes ice queen I was well aware that Momo is short for Muhammed and thus commonly perceived as a male name in francophone countries, but isn’t it just plainly wrong to tell someone that they shouldn’t be called how they’ve been called their whole life when you first meet them? How about some decent cultural relativism, eh?!
Okay two disclaimers: I love and respect Tilda Swinton as an actress, and I secretly find it funny to put a price tag next to every tutor’s name precisely because it looks like some sinister and sexually objectifying joke. It also shed some light on how arbitrary and subject to personal biases and preferences the recruitment interview processes can be, especially in the first round. My favorite tutors so far include an Algerian woman who knows the language in and out, whom I entrust with grammar and general practices, and a 50-year-old (self-claimed) Parisienne who works for British Airways, for whom I set an alarm to wake up early to mainly practice conversations.
All in all, I’ve been enjoying meeting people from outside of New York through my 13-inch laptop screen. It seems, at least some of my tutors sympathize with me, that the French pronunciation is more “regular” than that of English: once you master how certain letter combinations are pronounced you can expect to say a newly encountered word. On the other hand, why are the two “a”s in “amiable” pronounced differently? Why is some “h” silent but some not in English? Why is there an “f” sound in the word “enough”? My tutors asked me and I have no answer.
English is probably the hardest language I had to learn because it’s the first one I learned, and à cause de the grammar drillings at Chinese schools. I’m grateful that I can choose what language to learn now, and can afford to learn it in a way that I find comfortable and efficient as an adult. To tell a horror story, in first grade I couldn’t spell the English word “fish.” There was a spelling competition thing in class and I studied for it the night before, giving up children’s TV. My name was called and I stood up, feeling confident, then I got stuck at “f — i — ” and just couldn’t figure out what letters would make up the “sh” sound. I repeated f and i again and again, hoping the feeling or memory would come back. To be fair, it’s not that bad for a 6-year-old learner of English as a second language to not know how to spell fish, but it was shameful, or made to be. I don’t remember if I ever sat down, not able to finish the word. The teacher, whose name I still remember, did something really cruel at the time. She announced that all those who couldn’t spell well should buy or prepare things for the handful of students who did well, or in other words “won” the competition. A punishment for us and an award for them, killing two birds with one stone; how clever. I remember feeling angry and ashamed and about to cry at the same time, that I couldn’t bring myself to ask my parents for money to buy the award when I got home that night. I took the brand new journal my Mom gifted me as a birthday present and started to doodle on the first few pages before I was about to turn it in to pay my tribute to the students who could spell. Looking back, the treatment was deemed unfair by me and it induced a poorly thought out passive-aggressive move on my end: if I can’t have it, you cannot enjoy it either; I have to destroy it. Of course, my vindictive act got discovered and denounced. Those of us who were punished all lined up, gifts in hand, waiting to pay for our incompetency in spelling. Everyone else was sitting and watching. When it’s my turn she flipped through the pages and took no time to realize it’s not new, and started scolding me in front of the whole class for my flawed contribution, also hinting at my personality flaw of not able to keep things “new” or do anything right:
“Someone brought tissue packets. Like I said yesterday, it doesn’t have to be big; it could be as small as a tissue packet. Someone even brought toys. But you, you brought something used. Would you give someone a used thing as a gift? Also look at your textbook. Look at hers,” she said, pointing to a classmate who sits in the first row, “Yours are in such poor condition that the cover looks like a torn leaf.”
The classmate in the first row was wearing a high pigtail. She’s a dancer and is considered to be one of the prettiest girls in our class by other kids. Lying on the desk in front of her is her well-preserved textbook. I believe I wanted to say that my book looked shabby because I actually used it and tried to study, and preserving the condition of the material didn’t occur to me as a priority, but I wasn’t witty or daring enough at the time to utter any comeback.
I feel lucky that I wasn’t charred by this horrible event that I gave up and never spoke or attempted to spell a word of English ever since, but I was certainly influenced by it to care enough to write about it. After I graduated from college and worked with the DoE and a non-profit to teach math at a public high school in the Bronx, we frequently hold events and hand out prizes to encourage the students. Some of the students gave me a headache and sometimes I was abhorred by how bad the study habits, or the lack of discipline, the students have. But on the other hand, I start to wonder, what kind of teacher makes the students prepare the awards for others as a punishment? What kind of malicious competition or peer relationships it is going to foster? What kind of toxic emotions are going to fester and what kind of self-serving, sabotaging character is going to develop as a result, both for the “winner” and the “loser”? I probably would never find the answer as I hope no one learns a language, or anything, this way.
