Overqualified Snippet 2

"On my second day in France, I was struck by an automobile. It was only a Vespa, and the doctors insisted that I wasn't seriously injured, but after the accident I started to notice gaps in my ability to speak French. The French language I had begun to love was turning back into a hodgepodge of unintelligible sounds. It was no longer poetry in my ears, but noise.

My sentences became simpler and simpler. My vocabulary began to narrow. And so I threw myself into the study of the language again, but it was no use. If I was studying the tenses, my ability to remember the vocabulary would all but vanish. If I were studying vocabulary, my ability to conjugate verbs would falter. It seemed impossible, but I have never been a quitter.

I found that there is a window of time between when I learn the language rules and when I forget them. If I study all weekend, I can function as a bilingual for all of Monday and well into Tuesday morning. Sometimes into Wednesday, if I spend my lunch hours reviewing. But then it is gone again." --Joey Comeau