“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 the words where meanings vanish–but it was also quite wearing, and it had the effect of shutting me 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.” from The Locked Room in The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
How precise this is to describe the experience of speaking a foreign language which one does not master very well. To me, it would never be a pleasure, but a torture as you look totally dumb without being able to give any appropriate response in the language context.
More to life 