I have a small proud moment to share: i’m reading my first book in French.
My system is simple and slow. I read the whole chapter first, sometimes more than once, and try to understand as much as I can without translating. I let myself not know things or try to guess. Only after that do I open a translation app and check the parts I didn’t get.
Somewhere in the middle of the chapter, a phrase that stopped me: Je vis des montagnes russes émotionnelles.
“I am going through emotional Russian mountains”. What?
When my translation app doesn't make sense, I go to Google Images to see what it is.
And this is what I got with montagnes russes:
Roller coasters. Why do French call them Russian mountains?
In fact, I know for sure that in Russian they’re called американские горки — literally, American hills.
So now I’m confused. There should be a story, right?
In 17th-century St Petersburg, winter entertainment included huge ice slides: wooden structures covered in ice, made for sliding down fast on sleds or blocks of ice. Apparently, they were intense, a bit dangerous, and very popular. Europeans saw them, copied the idea, and when similar rides appeared in France, they kept the reference to where the idea came from.
Hence: Russian mountains.
Later, when Americans turned this into a mechanical, steel, modern ride, that version traveled back east. Russians named it after where that version came from.
Hence: American hills.
I love these moments when learning a language quietly turns into a history lesson. You think you’re just decoding a sentence, and suddenly you’re tracing how ideas moved, who borrowed from whom, and who gets remembered in the word.
This is why I like reading slowly in another language. You don’t just learn new words. You notice how cultures point at each other.
And that feels like progress, even if I still need the translation app every few paragraphs.
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