Our Senior Year Abroad: Learning French in France

April 1, 2009

 

You lovers of French...I cringe to be placed under your microscope of assessment. After five months, I still stumble still over each word, missing tenses, agreement between subject and verb, searching for vocabulary. I do not warble in French. Pas du tout. But progress there is.

We went to a French friend's home this weekend and spoke French during a four hour French lunch. We attended and I understood an excellent three hour lecture in French. I write email sin French. So we have made progress, but we are not at all fluent.

How much one learns depends on capability, motivation and the learning environment. So lets get down and dirty and talk about what it means to join 20 year old college students from all over the world to learn French 16 hours a week at a public university in Montpellier.

First, the young have a distinct advantage. If you are over six and know only your native language, you can do it, but it takes longer, often a lot longer. Here is how we feel about our capability compared to the young students in our classes who often speak two or more languages fluently and usually are extending last semester's French studies into this semester in France.

Here is how we feel about our capability to understand and write compared to last fall. (Please note that I did not include our ability to speak!)

We are both, at heart, professional students, so learning French provides a structured stimulation we want at this point in our lives. However, learning here is not the same as learning in the US. As a whole, with only a few well beloved exceptions, the French educational system is hierarchical, one way and not at all oriented toward self examination.

Bob and I want to learn to speak French. First we need some vocabulary, some grammar and some phonetics, and then we need lots of practice. At school we get lots of grammar. (The French love their language like we love our college football teams. It is beyond rationale, but so real that you can touch it.) It is not that they think that speaking is not important, it is just not as important as grammar. First things first! So one hour of phonetics each week and three hours of grammar.

For those of us who don't take orders very well (that would be me) and who are strong self motivated impatient learners who are desperate to learn French (that would be Bob) some professors and parts of our university program to teach French to foreign students are irritating to say the least. This semester, I had only one arrogant professor at IEFE, M. Montenal, and five other excellent teachers. (With 18 in a class, excellence is still limited by size, not by teacher's competence or attitude.) Therefore, Bob quit about a month ago and found an excellent private tutor with whom he meets three times a week for a total of three hours. He mastered the basics at the university and now can benefit from one to one learning and speaking.

Our level of motivation:

We are persistent, but within limits. For example, we do not live with a French family. Immersion is the way to go to learn a language, for sure. The question: How deep does one dive? Students who live and talk with French friends or families probably double their time speaking French each week from 90 classroom minutes to 180 . Our ability to speak French will improve as we speak to each other more in French, find more time for community, get more one-to-one instruction, and find meaningful volunteer work with the French. All of this is possible.

We could go to more movies, watch more French movies on TV (it is required by law for the three state TV stations to dedicate a large part of their programming after 8 PM to French films) and go to more lectures. This would add to my total class room time, all in all, of about 16 hours a week of listening.

We could read French books before we went to bed at night. One of IEFE students has read 1,000 pages of Henry Potter in French since she got here in December!

So we are immersed, but only up to our neck—not up to our nose or over our head.

After a 5.5 months of trying this and that what do we recommend? If you have a year or so of basic college level instruction so you know the basics, then invest in two or three hours a week with an excellent and trained teacher born in France. Prepare for each class by writing a resume of an article of your choice. With the teacher, review your resume for vocabulary and grammar, talk about the article, and about life in general.

We haven't tried it, but we have heard that If you only want to learn to speak, you can cut costs by meeting with a small class of four people with similar skill levels.

Whatever you decide, you will find you will want to tinker and adjust your learning "program" continually as you gain skill, need more variety, run out of money, etc. The very best for learning comprehension is to find something you love like photography, art, science and take a course, in French of course. The very best for oral expression is to find a friend you love who wants to speak to you in French, for some mysterious reason, even though you bumble through your sentences. The very best for written expression is to find a reason to write in French (email works) The very best for written comprehension is to read something in French that you want to read. We have a friend her taught herself Greek by reading mystery stories.

As Julie said, only assess if you know more this week than last and let the rest take care of itself.