One of the most important things about moving to a new country is learning the language. Before I moved from Colorado to France, I had very little knowledge of the French language. The semester of French class I took in my sophomore year had almost vanished completely from my memory by the time I moved here when I was thirty-two.
Sure…I had a few useless phrases & words. But I could only go so far on “Hello. I don’t have any diseases. Where is the bathroom thank you very much.”
The good part is, the French government wants us to learn French. So much so that they’re willing to foot the bill for some French classes.
The letter that they sent me provided the date & time of the class along with the address. The class was scheduled to start at 9am.
I found the address – it was a church. It didn’t seem right, but it was obvious that this was the place because of all of the non-French speaking people waiting outside.
We waited for almost an hour. The door to the church was locked. At about 10am, a short Romanian woman came who would be our teacher & let us all in.
We were corralled into the basement, and then stuffed into a small room filled with cobwebs & lights that didn’t work.
The room was empty – no tables or chairs. We were all put to work, moving dust-covered tables & chairs into an 8 by 10 room.
The room had no chalkboard or any sort of board for the teacher to write things. She scribbled French verbs & rules of grammar all over an old, metal filing cabinet with a dry erase marker. Damn. No eraser. Every day someone would bring her a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom to wipe the filing cabinet with.
After the third day, her new scribbles mingled with the old ones & finally it all looked like a big bunch of nothing.
The first week of class, we learned the alphabet. The French alphabet is the same as the English one – no funny characters or strange letters to learn. Each day, we learned about a new letter in the alphabet.
Feeling confident in my knowledge of the Roman alphabet, I dropped the class after 2 weeks.
Hey, I said that they pay for the classes – not that they always get you into a good one.
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[tags]French, Language, Learning[/tags]