"My french was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking was difficult, and there were times when no words came to my lips, when I struggled to say even the simplest things. There was a certain pleasure in this, I believe--to experience language as a collection of sounds, to be forced to the surface of words where meanings vanish--but it was also quite wearing, and it had the effect of shutting my up in my thoughts. In order to understand what people were saying, I had to translate everything silently into English, which meant that even when I understood, I was understanding at one remove--doing twice the work and getting half the result. Nuances, subliminal associations, undercurrents--all these things were lost on me. In the end, it would probably not be wrong to say that everything was lost on me."
The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster pg 338