It was lunchtime on a Tuesday in the student lounge at ENSEA, three weeks into the semester. Someone asked what I thought about young graduates struggling to find work. It isn’t a hard question, and I had plenty to say about it. But the sentence was assembling itself in the wrong language, and what came out of my mouth was slower and smaller than what I meant. It was my thinking with most of the thinking taken out. I nodded more than I spoke. Somebody moved the conversation along, kindly, the way people do when they can tell you’re struggling. I sat there feeling something I didn’t have a name for yet. It wasn’t quite embarrassment. It was closer to grief.

Because French isn’t a foreign language to me. French is my first language. And I had just failed to say a simple thing in it, in front of people, in the country where it belongs. I had assumed my French would be waiting for me in France, the way you assume your own name will be. It wasn’t gone. It was just badly out of practice, and I couldn’t reach the words for anything that actually mattered.

That was my “aha” moment, and it wasn’t about France. It was about me. The fix wasn’t going to come from a class. ENSEA is an electrical engineering school, and FAME takes second and third year students majoring in electrical engineering or computer science, so teaching French was never the purpose of any of it. French students there have had the language since childhood, and the courses I took existed for exchange students like me, which is the point of the program, so nobody was going to make me speak French. I had to go and find it.

I found it in the same lounge where I’d failed. One of the FAME students had a roommate who was French-Colombian and active in the student organization, and at a school that size she seemed to know everyone. She sat with us at lunch, introduced us to people, and then those people introduced us to others. There was a piano, a foosball table, a shelf of board games. I had no strategy at all. I just showed up, day after day, and over a few weeks the room filled with faces I knew.

What happened next taught me more about communication than any course could have. French students would come over to practice their English on us. I’d answer them in French, to practice mine. Neither side would give ground. We were using each other for exactly the same thing, we both knew it, and it made us friends anyway.

I’ll admit something less flattering too. For the first few weeks I tried to pass as American and let people assume I didn’t speak French. It wasn’t shame. It was that the moment French students learn you speak French, the whole conversation switches, and if you’re the only person at the table with both languages, you become the group’s translator for the rest of the afternoon. I didn’t want the job. My accent gave me away anyway, every single time. And the role I’d been avoiding turned out to be the thing that taught me the most, because I ended up speaking more French than English that semester whether I’d agreed to it or not.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t in January. A language doesn’t leave you. It goes quiet when you stop giving it somewhere to live. Mine had been living in one house in Pittsburgh. In France I gave it a lounge, a foosball table, and a room full of people who wanted something from me in return.