Je Parle le Francais!

I started French classes a few weeks ago. I take three, 3.5-hour sessions per week. Pretty intense! I could not have found a better group. The professor has a great sense of humor. She's a little harsh, but that keeps everyone on their toes. We were already doing addition of long numbers (hundreds and thousands) on the second day of class! The professor would read each addition problem aloud and we were to write down the numbers and add them together. When all problems were finished, she called on us randomly to read back the numbers and the answers. We prepared for this exercise by doing a math drill where we had to calculate on the spot doing exponential addition by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, & 9. This was a rapid-fire session where she called on us to quickly add a number to the previous answer. We've done these exercises a few times since and each time she mentions the word "compte" or "count" we all moan and groan. This is a painful exercise, but I have found it to be very helpful already. I don't even like doing math in English!

There are 14 people in the class with 12 different countries being represented. We are truly an international group. There is one other American, but he's from Orange County, CA so he's a completely different breed altogether. He is actually a Korean-American, but his attitude is 100% Southern Californian! He has become a source of amusement for the entire class. Classes consist mainly of conversation. While this is somewhat intimidating, it helps one get over the fear of sounding ridiculous. It's nice to see how much others struggle with the language as I do. We all seem to have trouble with the accent, the weird choking sounds, and the liasons between words. Some of the people who speak English as a second language have told me that French is a much more difficult language to learn. We often get tired and giddy and spend a lot of time laughing and joking around. The professor doesn't mind, though. She just joins the party. When you're sitting in class for that long, you need some comic relief!

We had a break from classes last week in recogniton of Carnival. We arranged a meeting at a cafe one day to socialize. Only seven people showed up, but it was great fun. We managed to have something that resembled a conversation eventhough we didn't speak a common language. Our conversation consisted of a cacophony of English, Russian, Slovak, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Spanish. When we couldn't communicate otherwise, we used our limited French. The saving grace was that the Eastern Europeans all speak a little bit of Russian and some of them are fluent in English so they were able to translate. Also, a couple of the people can understand English, although they cannot actually speak it. It was a riot and we were quite a spectacle as we were seated in the center of the room. We got a lot of strange looks. I'm sure nobody knew what to think of us.

Many Europeans find it difficult to believe that Americans are not required to learn a second language. I tell them that it's optional, but that not many people bother and if we do take another language in middle/high school, we usually don't continue long enough to become fluent. Some of the theories as to why this is so are as follows: 1) English is a universal language and, therefore, there is no need; 2) It's different than Europe in that you don't have several small countries (with different languages) bordering one another; 3) Americans are lazy and/or arrogant. I think it's a combination of all of the above. With the growing Latin American population in the U.S., however, I believe that Spanish should become a required second language. I'm sure there is much oppostion to this opinion, so I am doubtful that it will ever happen.

Vous parler bientot! (Talk to you soon)