About patchwork couples and language messes

If you know me, you know that my brain is a giant mess when it comes to languages. Sure, my CV states that I speak 4 of them, but in reality, calling what I speak one language would be somewhat of a euphemism. It all depends on the setting I'm in. When I lived in Germany, I was able to manage two languages perfectly fine. Russian at home, German outside of home. No problem so far. The problems started when Matt came in, basically. I consider us a patchwork couple because there's four languages involved. He doesn't speak German or Russian, my family doesn't speak French, everyone's English combined is insufficient for a fluent conversation and my brothers go through a phase where they only speak German anyway. Are you still following? Probably not.

The bottom line is that there is no one language we can rely on. Even between Matt and me, French just isn't enough. He's terrible at helping me find my words and there is no way that I'm gonna leave something unsaid just because of a language barrier. So I say it in German. Or English. Sometimes I have to teach him Russian words. So far so good, you might think - but it doesn't stop there. I tend to speak in expressions quite a bit - I mean, at least I try, considering that expressions are like the hardest thing to learn in a foreign language. Sometimes you translate something literally without even noticing - and then wonder why people don't get what you're saying (probably too stupid). But they're not - they just don't know that German expression you are trying to translate and have absolutely no idea why you look at them like a car (see what I did here?). So much for expressing you thoughts. Actually, you can't say "so much for ..." in French. Right now I'm not even sure if it works in English. Do you still follow me? Or do I suddenly speak Chinese?

The worst thing is that Matt picks up a lot of what I'm saying. I'm comfortable isn't something you can say in French, and yet I was missing that expression so I just invented it. I wasn't even serious about it. And yet it stuck around. Matt gets funny looks at work when he says that to people, considering he's supposed to be a real French. I've noticed how more and more of our friends have picked it up. It's still not a real thing.

Watching Netflix in English complicated things even further. Sometimes, the English language has great inventions. Like the word random, for example. Or craving something. How am I supposed to get by without using these? So I do. And yet "je crève quelque chose" clearly doesn't work.

Matt is trying to learn German. He's actually getting pretty good at it. But speaking German with my parents is the weirdest thing in the world for me! As soon as Matt leaves the room, we switch back to Russian. When he comes back, my dad, who is used to speaking English at work, sometimes gets the language confused. And I can't even count the times I was actually blabbering in Russian to Matt, him not saying anything but internally bursting with laughter because I'm so stupid.

Or that time I just got back from France and had a whole conversation with my mom.. before at one point she stopped me and told me that she didn't understand French. (I speak too much, clearly).

Getting multiple languages right is hard. Harder than you would expect, actually. Sometimes I feel so weird speaking German, although I have spoken it almost my entire life. Even your native language gets a bit rusty after two months of not speaking it out loud (WhatApp doesn't help). And while I'm completely comfortable with writing this article in English (not claiming that it isn't filled with mistakes though!), I couldn't have a conversation in English for the life of me.

I'm gonna get to the point and start rambling. Basically, being a patchwork couple sounds like a good idea to learn some languages. In my opinion, it's also a really great way to forget how to speak in only one language. I really love it though, in my opinion it just makes us creative.

Cheers!