The Epic of Learning French
Chapter two: Parlez-vous français, or learning with professionals
The first thing that I’ve enjoyed in school was not surprisingly the fact that someone else had already thought hard and devised a study program, then had it tested on hundreds of students thus allowing me the time and the brain cycles, so to say, to throw on the studying itself. On a funnier side note, my first teacher was a native Russian speaker, but it did not land me a favourite’s position. Studying was not easy to begin with, especially so because we were having classes five days a week, from 08:30 till 15:30 with a few breaks thrown in between. Of those five one day was held at the center, while the other four online and the misery of “intuitive” interface added to our experience.
Because of my previous attempts to master the language I did end up in the middle of the program, level 4a of totality of 8 in this center. Most of my comrades knew each other from the beginning, but they were an open and friendly bunch, so we got on like a house on fire. The morning part of the classes was mainly dedicated to the study of new grammar, exercises both written and spoken, while the afternoon part, known as atelier, resembled more of a club meeting with a main target of making students speak on various subjects. They expect you to speak in French from the beginning, some teachers even used to impose foreign language fine of 50 cents or so to discourage slacking and to fund a pizza for the everyone after the class back in the days when getting vaccinated to protect others was not a polarizing political issue. You might ask how the hell am I supposed to speak if I am here to learn the language in the first place? Well, not very well, hesitantly, with many a pause but with your best foot forward. I would not say that I see this approach as suitable for everyone, but it is probably the most natural way to learn — the way kids do. It seemed to work well and if sometimes the teacher could not explain something by wild use of synonyms and rephrasing, they would proceed to English or other language.
Ultimately and most importantly, what the center gave me is the confidence to speak. After a month or two, I stopped getting tongue tied in response to a question I did not understand and was able to proceed to a sophisticated “Pardon?” or even further to the suave “Pouvez-vous repeter, s’il vous plaît?” (Could you repeat, please?). I still did not understand a lot, but joining a community of fellow learners was not only a social boon during the lock down.
From the beginning we were exposed to both French of France (standard or metripolitan French), as well as the Quebecois French. The debate on the differences and similarities is endless and it has been addressed in hundreds of videos, such as this one (my favorite), or this one (a bit more serious), or lastly this one. As one may imagine being separated from the influence of France since the 1763 (after the loss in what is called French and Indian War) meant that there are sufficient differences between the modern versions to add to the challenge of the language learning. There are not so many differences in formal usage, but the vocabulary and especially the pronunciation in an informal, familiar setting differ as explained in this video.
As the time went by we’ve struggled through the tenses to finally arrive to where the texts in textbooks had became interesting and realistically written ( and not all in present tense, which I find particularly irritating, as nobody speaks like that in real life). Gradually, I noticed how with improvement of French the other languages I speak started to vane to the point where I would struggle to find a particular word in French, try to reach to English or Russian just to find that it was not there either. We’ve discussed this matter in class and everyone else was experiencing these symptoms to lesser or greater degree. Then I remembered reading about how even if a person might master multiple languages, the overall memory capacity is still limited and if one reached further and further, then loss of depth on already learnt becomes inevitable. Unfortunately, as of today I could not find the source to verify this hypothesis.
