Learning French (again!)

LUCY BURDETTE: You already know this by now, but I confess, I’ve got a thing for France, especially Paris. When I was a junior in college, I took a half year study abroad, spending one month in Paris, and four in Avignon. I was devastatingly homesick, and did not take the best advantage of my time there. I feel like I’ve been trying to make up for that ever since! This time out, I was headed to Paris for a week with two girlfriends. Carol, my copine on a previous food tour in Paris, has visited the city many times, and like me, can’t get enough. Yvonne visited only once many years ago.

In January, I decided that it was time to up my French speaking game. There are a million ways to try to learn a language, including Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, Pimsleur, Babbel,…I ended up going with a company called Comme une Française that focuses on speaking. There are five or six teachers who hold about 21 weekly classes on zoom. You choose how many and when you attend, like a gym membership.



Our theme of the week

There is a theme of the week with vocabulary and YouTube videos so you can study ahead. At the beginning of each session, the professors give a little talk about this subject. Then we are divided into groups of two or three where we stumble through 20 minutes of conversation (hopefully all in French no matter how halting!)





The prof of the day lurks with each of the groups and then we gather together again for feedback and corrections. Then on a new sub group, and more chatting.



my chat buddies, David and Rowna

A major challenge has been deciding when to attempt to move up from the debutant to intermediate. So scary!

I love many things about this style of teaching – first of all, it forces me to speak French, which compared to listening and reading, is my absolute weak spot. Second, the students are from all over the world and it’s a lot of fun to learn about their experiences and why they’re interested in speaking this language. The teachers are patient and focused, and some quite funny. But it’s so much harder to learn at this age than it would have been to persevere when I was young! 

I’ve been rereading FLIRTING WITH FRENCH, by William Alexander—the story of his attempts to “master” the French language. And also David Lebovitz's The Sweet Life in Paris. It’s reassuring to hear that both of them struggled mightily too.

Back from Paris now, I have to say I was very pleased with how it went. It was easy to panic and lapse into English under stress, but I was not shy about trying to speak French. As far as I know, I made no major gaffes:). Okay wait, that's not quite true. There was the early-in-the-trip reservation at a small cutting edge restaurant where I inadvertently added an extra reservation rather than changing the date. The owner (I think) called me, quite irate (clearly) and informed me (I'm pretty sure) that would be charging me a 60 euro no-show fee. He also, in a fit of French pique (I learned,) cancelled my second reservation.  Our new friend the real Emily in Paris kindly tried to intervene, explaining that I was a tourist without much French and was extremely désolée. Interesting to hear from her that she feels she's hit a ceiling with her French. She speaks perfectly fluently from what I heard, but she told us she'll never sound like a Paris native. She'll forever be pegged as Australian!

Your turn Reds...Do you speak another language? Or are you tempted to learn one? Any tips or failures or success stories?

Lucy Takes Spanish

LUCY BURDETTE: I’ve spent a lot of years of my life in school. Even so, it’s been a long time since I had to try to learn a completely new skill, complete with homework and drills and memorization. (Not counting book deadlines as homework, or classes on the finer points of writing…which hmmm, probably should count, right?) But when the Key West library offered Spanish lessons, John and I couldn’t resist signing up. Why, you might ask? We’ve always heard that learning something new is good for the rusty synapses, but that wasn’t our chief motivation. More and more people in the US speak Spanish, for one. I wanted to be able to communicate!

And for two, there have been times when some well-placed Spanish comprehension would have come in handy in our travels. Take for example the time we were in Barcelona without a word of Spanish between us other than hola. When we wanted to buy something, we were reduced to holding out handfuls of coins and hoping the shopkeepers were honest. Then there was the day we came through customs in a small town in Cuba. I emerged from the passport line with no problems, and then waited and waited for John to show up. As it turned out, he hadn’t understood what the customs agent was asking.

“Ha viajado en África durante los últimos dos años?” the man asked (or something like that.)

“Yes,” John answered cheerfully, not wishing to be seen as an uncooperative, Ugly American. If he’d understood their question: “Have you traveled in Africa in the past two years?” he would have answered No! rather than Si! And then he wouldn’t have been pulled aside and screened by a barrage of other authorities with questions about his possible exposure to ebola…

El profesor, Edgardo

la clase

That said, we are heading into our seventh week of class and finding it quite challenging. Even though we study a little bit every day and have a wonderful teacher (Edgardo, who hails from Puerto Rico, works at the Key West library, and also happens to be an amazing poet) and even though the old rusty brain cogs are creaking as fast as they can, French words are what come to my mind when he asks a question.

Here was one of my first assignments after Edgardo was done correcting it:

Yo soy de Nueva Jersey. Juan es mon (mi) eposo (esposo) gracioso y bello. Yo soy carto (baja) (corto and largo refere to length, not height). Juan es alto. Nosotros vivemos (vivimos) en Cayo Hueso. Yo soy psicologo y escritora. Yo escribe quince novelas de misterio. (We probably won't be able to discuss the past tense but the sentence should be "Yo he escrito quince novelas de misterio) Yoda es mi gato gris. Tonka es mi perro con pelo negro y castana (castaño). Nosotro tenemos dos muchachos (hijos?)  y una nieta. 

Oh holy yikes, Batman! What did I get myself into? The good news is, since I’m taking Spanish, Hayley Snow is too! You’ll see some of that surface in the 8^th food critic mystery, coming in 2018.

How about you Reds, are you good students of foreign languages? Have you tried something else new lately, out of your comfort zone?