As mentioned recently in another post about our fall activities, we’re making a committed effort to increase our ability to speak and understand French. We’ve been taking French lessons twice weekly for the last three weeks. I can’t lie — it’s hard! Our teacher is tough and very focused on giving us a solid foundation for our French language education, and I need that support and accountability.

We sit in a classroom of other new French speakers for 1.75 hours each evening, no breaks, so 3.5 hours a week, and have a couple hours of homework as well. There are about 12 of us, people from all around the world (India, Japan, Morocco, Ukraine, Sudan, and others) and we are the only Americans. Only French is spoken as we don’t all have another unifying language, though several people do speak some English. We are humbled to know that many of them speak multiple languages while we just fret over learning French.

There are two things that have surprised me about this experience:

• I took French classes for three years in high school. I was never taught how to say the alphabet in French. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it blew my mind that the pronunciation of letters I’ve used all my life is not the same across languages. How Anglo-centric of me to think that the way it is said in English is what the world uses! I had to learn how to say the letters of my name using the French pronunciations: M (“em”) – I (“ee”) – C (“seh”) – H (“ahsh”) – E (“oo” like in “book”) – LL (“duz elle” or two Ls as you don’t say them separately) – E (“oo”). WHEW!
• We’ve been using Duolingo for 1.5 years to prep for this adventure. It has been very helpful to us in helping us learn to read pretty decently in French. Pronunciation-wise and listening skill building though, I only give it three stars as we are lagging in both of these areas.

Fun facts about letter pronunciation: Q is “quah”, W is “du-bloo-veh”, X is “eeks”, Z is “zed”, and the best one: Y is “ey-greck”

Another fun fact, nouns have genders which sometimes follow patterns (loosely, with many exceptions) and which affect sentence construction and pronunciation.

We’ve also joined a conversation group of newer French speakers which has been a pretty safe place to stumble through saying things in slow, shaky French while learning to listen to others practice their slow, shaky French. Last week, we had to bring in objects that were meaningful to us and explain why we liked them. Much support and knowing laughter was shared.

Lastly, we have started watching an old PBS series from the 1980s designed to improve your ability to listen to French being spoken and train your ears to the cadence and patterns. We also have a very patient French friend who has offered to try to converse with us in French, slowly and casually. Send kind thoughts her way!