Living in a place where the language used is not your own mother tongue, you start to get some sense of appreciation for what it is like to not be able to communicate as efficiently or effectively as you would like.
I was sitting somewhere and someone was struggling to make clear what they wanted to say. I found that I was – at some subconscious level – passing some kind of judgment on their ability/knowledge on what was being discussed. I very quickly realized that they must feel the same way I do when trying to make myself understood in French. It is a very frustrating feeling to have thoughts that you have formed, that you want to communicate to others – but there is awkward transformation of my ideas into the too-limited number of words that I have mastery of at my disposal. It feels like trying to poor clear water through an unreasonably messy filter that allows only partial thoughts through, often with sludgy grammar, and unwanted extra bits – while all too often the clarity of what I had started with seems partially or completely lost.
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