Désolé, je ne parle pas français

Tonight we had an office dinner near Versailles. It was really good, and over 2 dozen employees and spouses showed up, so most everyone got to meet Kara.

She did incredibly well at being able to follow and contribute to the conversation since she speaks French decently enough now. It's not quite fluent, but she can work around any words she doesn't know yet and if you asked anyone back home they would say "Yeah, she speaks French"

It does make me embarrassed at how terrible mine still is, and quite lonely since I mostly just sit in silence for the most part then during the dinner and most days at lunch. I'm slowly starting to understand more when hearing it, but my ability to create and pronounce French is still really terrible. It doesn't help that even understanding it is a slow process, so by the time I finish "deciphering" it in my head (assuming I even can, as the Parisian accent is very hard to understand since they like to "swallow their vowels" and not enunciate clearly), at that point the conversation is way past any response, much less the far longer time it would take me to create a response (and this assumes I actually have the words to create one...). I have 2 and a half months left, but I'm really not sure how much better at speaking French I'll be by the end of this. We'll see.

Interestingly I can actually understand our newest French office employee, from Romania, the best because he speaks so slowly and deliberately. And if I had to read the title to this post ("Sorry, I don't speak French") I could easily read it. But it just doesn't sound anything like I would imagine it would, and when speaking it, it does take me a while to remember the words, and more importantly, how to pronounce it.

I always did really well in school, except for foreign languages (Spanish). And even there I did "well" academically speaking, but just enough to cram for a test and regurgitate it out later to make my A. Spanish is 7th grade was the only class I've ever made a "C" in my life, so I think I was doomed for languages.