Don’t say “Je suis confus” unless you want to convey that you are addled and in need of psychiatric help. Try these instead:

Je comprends pas – lit. “I don’t understand” (notice the sheer simplicity of this phrase; translation need not be unnecessarily difficult. Also notice how the ‘ne’ has been dropped from the phrase as is standard in modern French)

Je m’y perds – lit. “I’m lost in it”

Je m’embrouille dans…/avec… (from the verb s’embrouiller meaning to get tangled or muddled up with/in something)

Je suis paumé – same meaning as “Je suis perdu” (lit. “I’m lost”) but more informal

C’est trop compliqué pour moi

When you were three, you might have picked up multiple languages simultaneously with little issue, but now you’re much older, and your brain is set in its ways as much as you are. Learning something as complex as a language is much more difficult, especially if you are not continually immersed in an environment where it is spoken.

Dictionaries can’t teach you grammar, and besides, who reads books these days?

In French, there are so many tenses as to make your head spin trying to understand them all. In English, there are nearly as many tenses, but employed slightly differently so that they don’t always align perfectly with French. Why, in Mandarin there are no grammatical tenses to speak of. And even the Why,… used in the previous sentence is not a question but an interjection used to signify mild surprise or hesitation. But you wouldn’t know that from just reading or hearing that sentence. And there are many fixed expressions like that in every language, that either require you to be an insider or explicitly told to know.

Most European languages, with the exception of English, have at least two genders (three in German), which means every time you learn a noun, you need to learn it with its gender. And while there are patterns (e.g. man, boy, etc. are masculine and woman, girl, etc. are feminine), they are not always intuitive or consistent across languages [table is feminine in French (une table) but masculine in German (ein Tisch)]. And you better get the gender right, because all those agreement rules revolve around gender and number. So now in addition to all the usual things, you’re worrying about whether it’s Elle s’est lavé or Elle s’est lavée.

But there is no gender to worry about in Dagaare. Or English, for that matter. Phew 😊.

Languages evolve, so what was perfectly fine to say two decades ago is now obsolete and makes you look like a senior citizen who rarely goes out anymore. And nowadays, the rate of decay is so fast that it takes very little time for something to go out of fashion, making you feel like you are listening to a completely foreign language. (Are the kids still saying, “That’s cap“?)

And what about idioms? When pigs fly becomes When chickens have teeth in French. It’s all Greek to me becomes Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof (I only understand the train station) in German. This is because idioms are culturally specific, and unless you know and understand the history and lifestyle of the culture in question they will make little sense to you.

And what about nuance? If you look up erforderlich, nötig and notwendig, the translation will say some version of ‘necessary’ for all three, but does that mean they can be used interchangeably? Only by consulting a native speaker will you know, because they have an intuitive and instinctive sense informed by a lifetime of speaking the language unconsciously. After nearly 1.5 decades of learning French, I still don’t know the difference between emmener and amener, or du moins and au moins. (For reference, erforderlich = required, has a formal, bureaucratic meaning; nötig = necessary, more informal and used mostly in speech; notwendig = necessary, more formal than nötig.)

German is a partially agglutinative language, which essentially means combining multiple words/word fragments to form one word. Would you like a ballpoint pen? Ask for ein Kugelschreiber [kugel = ballpoint + schreiber = pen]. Yearning to learn more about other cultures? Why not pick up a book from ein Kulturkaufhaus or cultural department store [kultur + kauf + haus]? If you are a Science teacher, like me, you would introduce yourself as ein Naturwissenschaftslehrer [natur + wissen + schafts + lehrer, literally ‘nature knowledge teacher’]. It may sound like a mouthful, but I’m sure when you’ve been saying it all your life it rolls off the tongue perfectly smoothly. Smooshing nouns together in this way seems very economical and efficient, two traits commonly ascribed to Germans (any German readers feel free to refute this claim). Another great example is wiedergabegeschwindigkeit.

And what about regionalism? The German spoken in Switzerland is different from that of Germany, and again Liechtenstein. Even within Germany itself you would find variations from region to region. If you go to Ghana, you will encounter Ghanaianisms in the way English is spoken, a result of the mixing that naturally occurs when many different languages and dialects are spoken in a common area.

And we can go on and on about false friends (actuellement and actually, sujet and matière) or words that essentially mean the same thing but are used in different grammatical contexts (connaître and savoir). But we won’t. We’ll settle for a spoonful of patience and a cup of determination to make our linguistic dreams come true.