Parlez-vous français ?

Many of my Malaysian buddies have fled our homeland to another continent. Most of them are in an anglophone country for obvious reasons, people speak English thus making communication a breeze. Then you have others, others who migrated to sushi-land, ice-land, orthodox-land and croissant-land - that would be moi.

While moving to another country means discovering the culture, weather, walking/driving on the other side (for some), getting the right accent/slang so people get you, eating the local food - fitting-in in the whole, there's an extra element in my situation - learning the language, French.
That's the first thing that needs attention.

There is no way in hell one can survive in France without knowing the language. There! I said it.
It's inevitable, you see it, you hear it and you MUST eventually speak it.

It took me a good 6-8 months to learn the basics and now it's a matter of practise and adding vocabularies. Sounds easy right? Well, not so. What happens when you learn French in France? You learn fairly quick, you make great efforts to understand and be understood. Then when you switch to converse in English, everything goes haywire!

I often mix up my English and French grammars. For example, instead of saying, "I watch television", I'd now say "I watch the television".
First of, to understand this, you must know that in the French grammar, there's always an article to every noun in a sentence.
Then there are the spelling similarities like 'example' - 'exemple', future' - 'futur' and more. And of course words that are spelled the same but have a different meaning to them. Let's not even go to Bahasa Melayu cos as I attempt to speak it, only French phrases come out of my mouth and I don't even realise it! How shameful.

This is how I speak to PM and my fellow friends who are like me, on a daily basis,
"You want some menthe in your tisane?" or "I'm fatiguée !".
Frankly I don't mind the teasings I get from my family or friends on my English-French cocktail of words. However I do mind it, alot, when my teaching job requires me to have prefect English. You cannot imagine how annoying it can get when you think of a word and it systematically comes out in français.

Oh well, as a consolation, I'm quadlingual!