Monday, March 21, 2011

French Classes

I started French classes today, offered through my work. This introductory course is three hours per week for ten weeks. I was very nervous about the course - I completely lacked confidence in my language skills.

However, my ego got a small boost today when I met my two classmates: a man from Australia with no French background and a woman from China who has completed one beginner course. Even though I had convinced myself that my elementary (and grade 9-10) French education was poor, all of a sudden I was top of my class, at least in terms of knowing nouns and verbs. All due respect to my classmates!

Our instructor is a really great young woman, she seems like she's been doing this job long enough to be good at it. After the first 15 minutes she told us that she was switching to 100% French instruction for the remainder of the course.

Funniest moment: our instructor was trying to explain common greetings and responses to my Australian colleague, for instance, "Comment ça va?" "ça va bien" etc, but she was not giving any clues in English. When the tenth "comment ça va" finally clicked, he responded, "je vais tres mal" (very bad) and everyone burst out laughing.

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