fluently speak two languages

Technically, I’m fluent. You could drop me in the center of Paris and I’d be able to navigate in French. However, I am still going to put off marking this as complete, because while I can understand, and speak at a slower pace, I don’t quite have the accent, speed, and pattern of speech. I’m still taking the literature class, which has proven quite interesting, though it introduces somewhat obsolete vocabulary as most of the stories were written hundreds of years ago. Still, I enjoy learning the words, like sword or battle, as they could be thrown into conversations metaphorically, such as I do in English all the time.

I have finished the French II portion, and because I was doing so well I got to finish French III before the rest of the term was up. Anyway, I got to teach myself French III and am going into French IV this coming fall. The other classes after that are French Civilization, French Literature, and AP French none of which are prerequisites to the others, the only prerequisites are French I-IV. Because of my schedule the only class I could take was French Lit, so that’s the one I’ll be taking. I plan to take French Civ, and AP French my junior year, next year is sophomore year, if my schedule allows for it, otherwise I’ll take one junior year and one senior.

I am improving and will have completed French I by the end of this week and I will be starting French II within a fortnight. Yay! I like to think I’m doing well, as I have the highest marks in the class, but I still butcher some of the uncommon pronunciation. And my English grammar is suffering because of all the time I spend writing in French. The main things I mean are the order of nouns and adjectives and I often fail to capitalize days of the week, months, and proper adjectives, due to the lack of comparative capitalization in French.

I’ve been having a lot of fun learning French and taking the class, though with all the teachers I’ve had some of them pronounce the words differently. I suppose when I go to France (eventually) I’ll just have to fine tune my accent. I am still far from fluent but I can form many sentences, use present and limited future tense, negate verbs, and I’ve learned the basic sentence structure. The hard part is remembering which way the accents go. And I have no idea how to type them either, I had to copy/paste to get it in the title.