Improve my French

After I got back from vacation I procrastinated on calling my tutor and now he is gone back to France. Darn!

Now my goal is to go visit the French Centre at the university to assess how easy it is to get there and how much time it takes from my day. Maybe I can squeeze it in at lunch once or twice a week…

Went to Second Cup and met up with my new tutor yesterday afternoon for the first time. He is a young fellow over here for a year from France. Nice guy and really wanted to be helpful. The session more or less confirmed what I suspected: good reading, reasonable listening and weak speaking due to lack of vocabulary and general slowness.
He’s going back to France at the end of April and I’m on vacation for 2 weeks in March so I won’t see him too many more times, but I think that I’m on the right track with this approach. If I had more time during the day I could get this kind of help for free at the university, but right now that is not feasible because work is too busy.

This has proved the theory that getting started is the hardest part, but I am finally meeting my new French tutor tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it and I hope that this will be just the incentive I need to start working on it myself as well.

I was starting to think that NOBODY wanted to be my French tutor, but I have found someone now and will hopefully start this week.

I slowed down on this for a while, but I have now identified four potential French tutors (and any native French speakers who live in Calgary are encouraged to contact me in case I’m still looking) and I am planning to spend an hour a week with the tutor that I select working on conversation and reading to start.

Well a random conversation with a co-worker today led to my new (temporary) ownership of L’Etranger in the original French in both book and CD format (read by Camus himself!). Cool.
I’m going to try reading first and then listening to each chapter after I’ve read it. I’m told that he reads very quickly so I think I’ll need the advance prep.
Stay tuned…

I took six weeks with Alliance Francaise in the fall, and though I enjoyed it I did not feel that it was worth the money in terms of where my French got to during that time.
So this time, I am trying another approach. I am borrowing French novels from the library and trying to read them. It is slow and sometimes painful, but I can already tell that it is worth it.
Also, I have a friend who teaches high school French and I am going to get some materials from her to review some grammar concepts. I hope that by doing these two things I can give my French a bit more of a push. Then I might look for a tutor or a different class in a few months.