When Félipe Horta, a Brazilian anesthesiologist, first arrived in France, he found administrative procedures less daunting than conversations with patients. "At first, it happened to me. I had to ask: can you repeat that?" he recalls. Sometimes, rather than admitting he didn't understand, he preferred to pretend. "I realized it was not too important, so I let it go," he says. The challenge isn't necessarily the medical vocabulary, but the language patients use—common expressions, metaphors, or childlike terms, such as "zizi" or "nénette," which are not taught in medical French classes. These can lead to amusing situations, like when Félipe once asked an elderly patient how long he had had "the tube in his cock." "The nurse was [shocked]... and at first I did not understand. And the patient, he laughed," he explains. The doctor had simply repeated a term he learned from a colleague, but he had used the wrong register of language, not the wrong medical term. Pascaline Faure, a linguist specializing in medical languages and a teacher at the Sorbonne, notes that "the language that will cause the most problems is the language of the patients." She explains that common expressions, slang, and evolving language can be difficult for non-native speakers to grasp. "As soon as one starts using common language, or even slang, then the Padhue has no chance of understanding," she says, referring to the French term for a non-native French speaker. This challenge is compounded by the fact that such language "is constantly evolving," making it difficult to keep up with. For Dr. Babay Asma Rais, a general practitioner from Tunisia and now a psychiatrist, the challenge is not only linguistic but also internal. "At first, I had a tendency to think in Arabic. Sometimes it was not very spontaneous when I spoke," she admits. Even today, she says, "there is a psychological effort to be in control." However, her native language has also become a strength. In her department, she is regularly called upon to communicate with Arabic-speaking patients. "When it comes to talking about emotions, it is necessarily more authentic to speak in one's mother tongue," she says with a smile. At the Château-Gontier hospital in Mayenne, the importance of language is recognized from the recruitment process. For the director Éric-Alban Giroux, mastery of language is particularly essential in psychiatry: "Understanding the subtlety of words and the subtlety of expressions is essential." In this rural establishment, he also emphasizes the human dimension: "I need to have people who, when they come here, feel confident." For these doctors, learning French is not only about learning words—it is also about learning to listen, understand, and be understood. This is an essential step before facing another challenge: the knowledge verification exams, a very feared test to obtain the equivalence of diplomas.