reprend la langue française

I went to go write an entry and I accidentally said that I’d accomplished this goal. Crap! I may start a new one under a different title, since I really like having it and clearly have not reprended enough…

In better news, I signed up for a new class over at FIAF, and despite my cold, I was able to have most of the conversation in French. It helps that at my level, the francophones in their office kinda insist that you can, indeed, speak French and make you do it. when I slipped out of French, they roped me back in. The teacher recommended a woman who speaks 5 languages fluently and told me to go downstairs to take a look at the library. I checked out two movies [Eyes without a Face and One Million by René Clair] and two comic books. Their DVDs are arranged by director’s name [ugh], so I’m going to bring a list if I keep doing there.

Ma class de film was cancelled! I need to figure out what else in my level fits into my schedule…

Ma classe commencera le 10 janvier, et j’ai deux objectives que je veux entamer en avance. Je veux améliorer mes conjugaisons avec mon jeu et je veux m’enseigner plus de vocabulaire. Mon autre classe n’a beaucoup de devoirs, et j’ai plus de temps libre cet hiver qu’en l’automne.

I do feel like the grammaire class helped and I’m looking forward to next semester. I’ve gotten used to listening to Americans speak French, which is tricky, and I’ve also gotten used to listening to my prof and the presenters on TV5 monde. My reading comprehension is much higher too. I still need to study vocab and eventually need to take more grammar, but I’m looking forward to a semester that’ll be a little lighter, subject-wise.

I’m hoping that I can spend some of the downtime reading. I’ve been collecting livres, but I haven’t cracked any of them open… Time to fix that!

En août, j’ai acheté deux jeux vidéo français. Ils sont pour les petits qui veux practiquer leur grammaire et maths. C’était très difficile, en réalité, de trouver et d’acheter ces choses. Il y avais seulement un site qui le vende et qui aussi livrait aux États Unis, et en transit, ils les ont perdus. J’ai écrit plusiers emails à eux et voici… Ce matin, je les ai reçus. Aaarrrggg!

In August, I bought two French video games. They were for kids to practice grammar and math. It was actually pretty hard to find and buy these things. There was only one site that sold them and would deliver to the US, and in transit, they lost them. I had to write several emails to them and look! This morning, I received them. Aaarrrggg!

I can’t believe it took all that freaking time to get them to me. It’s been a good learning experience, though. I bought them before I started classes at FIAF, and I think I actually bought them before I even wrote out the test for FIAF, it was so long ago… It took a lot of wrangling to get people to admit that they had lost my package, and it also took a few emails back and forth between me and le poste and the store that sold them to me before they admitted that these things were really, actually lost. In any case, they’ve shown up and now I can test my French skills against those of a 7-11 year old. I hope I haven’t aged out of them in the meantime!

When I was in high school, I relied on index cards and the like to help me memorise things for French class and while I could sorta do things, it’s not fun to sit around and go over an irregular verb or list of vocab ‘til you get it straight. I like games and websites for these sorts of drills now. I like being told right away if I’ve done something properly. Some of the vocab lists I’ve been working with are 60+ words, and I’ve been just fine learning them online. You can’t learn everything by rote, but for things that you just have to be able to recall, like verb conjugations and vocab, it’s great to have a system like that. I wish it were easier to do this stuff than going online to a store in France. If I weren’t an adult who vaguely speaks French, I would have had a horrible time. Right now I have to carefully read an email that I would have skimmed and filed away right when I got it otherwise.

I spent a good chunk of today studying French and trying to cram as many rules into my head as possible. The workbook that we’re using is the older cousin of the workbook that I was using to study on my own. I wrote down that we didn’t have any homework other than the reading, which seems wierd, so I went ahead and did the exercises in the chapter in my easy workbook. I felt like I couldn’t memorize the rules without working on examples. I’m glad I went ahead and did them because I figured out how to Frenchify my sister’s copy of MS Word while I was at it! It’s actually really useful. About half of the mistakes I make in French are easy to catch with a spell checker, but the grammatical ones are more tricky. I have a really hard time with gender, since I learned a bunch of words before I understood why anyone cared whether a word would be masculin or feminine. I basically have to look up every noun, which is as annoying as it seems. Word knows the gender of each word and also picked up on a few sentences where I’d done stupid things to the verbs. Usually I can figure out what I’ve done wrong just by having the wiggly line underneath, but sometimes I’ve had to poke into the spellcheck [which is appallingly bad; I wrote diferente instead of diffèrent and it didn’t understand me. I mean, granted I got the wrong language there, but anyone listening to me would have picked it up and would have chalked it up to weird pronounciation, not me making up words…]

So, yeah… studying! maybe even some progress there…

This week’s lesson is all about indefinites and has a bunch of grammar rules. I know most of the vocabulary, but I don’t know how I’m going to remember all of these little rules. [Par example, “Je n’ai jamais vu” mais “Je n’ai vu personne”... Arg!] I’ll just have to sit down sometime this weekend and work them all out. I know how to memorize verbs, but I’m not sure how to memorize these rules and usage things. For verbs I make little index cards and read them over and over again and it pretty much does the trick. Any tips for learning these usage rules? I guess I could write out the trickier samples and carry them around…

I had my first class last night at the Alliance Français. I’m still nervous about it… I haven’t taken a class in years [14, to be exact…] and while I can talk and write functionally, it’s a class in grammar and my grammar is crappy when I have anything complex to say. I felt nervous and like I didn’t say much in class, but someone came up to me afterwards and complimented me on my accent.

The teacher pointed out a page on the FIAF website that’s very good for language learners ...they have links to sites that focus on grammar, dictionaries, links to French media and learning sites. All sorts of stuff… Apparently we can also get French channels through our cable company for around $!0/month.

Today I took my placement test over to FIAF. I had a brief, terrifying conversation with a French teacher while he graded my writing. I make a lot of little mistakes in my writing and he discovered every one of them. I wanted to be in Review class 105, mais après tout, they placed me in a grammar and conversation class numbered 350. It’ll be challenging, but the other review class would be far too easy. Apparently my accent is good, my writing is horrible and I do pretty well conjugating verbs and I overuse d’après and ne…rien. The student who came after me was a man who had been teaching French kids English in Paris for the last few years and wanted to take more classes, and he was also placed with me.

Ils ont mon examin, maintenant… Je veux voir ce que j’ai fait et les chose que j’ai raté.

Rocket French is something of a bust in my book. I’d already established that the software is pretty crappy, but today I wanted to look something up grammar-wise and decided to look it up there. [J’oublie tout les temps quand on utilise les “e” ou “s” au fin de le passé composé.] I pretty much chose a chapter at random that sounded like it might be about the past tenses. Inside, they described the verb tenses using their english names, which is totally confusing, and went over both the imparfait and the passé composé so fast it left skid marks. They didn’t even explain which verbs get être and which get avoir or why. It’s a pretty tough thing to figure out without a real guide, and if you can’t do it, you just sound strange. I looked at a few of their examples and could reverse engineer the rule I wanted for the thing I was writing but, ugh… I can’t imagine using that as a real textbook.

In the meantime, I have been listening to the audio course to and from work. There are things that I can’t understand [usually new or new-old vocabulary]. When I first listened to them straight through I thought they were really boring and I hated that the anglophone presenter would natter on and veer a little off course, but I’ve warmed up to them. The dialogues are short, but they do go through every little thing and really break it down and they even point out pronunciation pitfalls. [In the last lesson it was “Porche” vs. “poche”.] I can’t imagine how an absolute beginner is going to get anything out of them, but for me it’s easy enough that I can tune them out when I need to and not feel lost afterwards.

Rocket French offers a 60-day money back guarantee and I’m not sure if I should take them up on it. After one week I’ve jettisoned most of the course! On Friday after I finished my lesson, I was thinking about how much I’d like to find a game of some sort that does drill me on the things I want to be drilled on, especially conjugation and the gender of nouns. When I went home I went online, first to amazon.ca and later to amazon.fr and looked for games for kids. I have a Mac and a Nintendo DS, so it was a little hard to find something for my system. It was even harder to find a review [very few people had bothered in either country] or screen shots or anything.

I finally found a range of games that I liked that was available as flash cards, a jeux vidéo pour le DS and also had an online component that I could try out. I played two games on their site and they were pretty much what I wanted. The language game was full of the sort of little gaffes that I make all the time and asked about conjugation and weird grammar/wrong words and it also had new words used in good sentences. If I were paying more attention, I would have learned the words for reindeer [rienne? something like that] and core, as in core of an apple. The English to French game was half in English but the instructions were mostly in French so it was actually kind of challenging. Translation is translation, no matter which side you’re on. I did learn that the English eat a cheese course after dessert, which was news to me. It took me a while to figure out which grade I’m in in a French elementary school, but I decided to buy two games that between them covered 2nd through 5th grade. It also took some digging to find a site that would sell me software and ship it to me in the US. [Amazon.fr won’t ship software outside the Eurozone.]

Even if they turn out to be only okay as games, it was worth it as an experience… I first learned “bonjourrrr, commantallezvous?” when I was all of five years old and my high school teachers were seriously into immersion, so I can slip in and out of kinda of a francophone trance pretty easily. I think that’s part of why I’ve retained French so well after 14 years of disuse. I managed to figure out the basic words for software, download, video game and their genres pretty easily on sites that were totally in French, and I spent about three hours in total trying to find french sites and news about these games, reading fr.wikipedia and looking up things on various educational sites, including the ministry of education. I managed to read things like shipping information even. It helps that most websites are pretty much the same no matter where you go, but I have to say I’m pretty proud…

Buying that game also got me thinking… well, I’ve been thinking this for a while, but it crystalized it. If I’m really going to get better, I need a real teacher. I can do little drills for myself, but no one is ever going to shake me out of bad habits or correct my accent like a real, live French teacher. I signed up for a class at my alma matter a few semesters ago, only to have it be cancelled. I’ve been debating taking lessons at FIAF, but I have to admit that the idea of taking a test and talking to someone to get into class is pretty scary. They also have a ton of courses so picking the right one is tough and the thought of getting up there at 9am on a Saturday is… less than delightful. However, today when I was looking at their website again, I noticed that they have a course that meets at 7:30. I get out of work around 6 or 7 and my hours are totally dependent on our workflow for the day. While I felt like I could sign up for an art class that met at 6:30, I didn’t feel the same about French class, but 7:30 is doable for me. I’ve started working on the test. So far I’ve done five mini-essays out of eight and I’ve written an introduction, given someone directions, nicely declined a wedding invitation, written a postcard and explained my goals for learning French again. Three more to go… I plan on finishing them this weekend and taking them over to FIAF on Friday when they have open hours to meet with les profs and talk about courses.