Post by Peter MoylanI did French for six years at school.
My parochial primary school had "conversational" French, taught by
nuns whose first language probably was, starting in second grade. It
was mostly rote repetation of stock phrases and one shor story about a
flat tire, but it gave me a decent grounding in pronunciation. We
didn't actually start learning proper French grammar until seventh
grade, and I surprised the middle-school French teacher by having
good pronunciation but not much grammar. (I remember being particularly
baffled by negative existential clauses.)
In high school we actually started reading proper French literature;
our French teacher (who I loved and was the only teacher I kept in
touch with after graduation) typed up her own editions of most of the
works we used in class and ran copies off on the spirit duplicator,
some of which I still have today, including "Candide" and "Le tour du
monde en 80 jours" (don't think we learned French editorial
conventions for capitalization of titles, though). But then I went to
Finland on an exchange student, and trying to learn Finnish -- and not
being exposed to French for nearly a year -- destroyed both my
self-confidence with language in general, and my ability to speak
French conversationally in particular, without really replacing it
with anything.
In college I took one or maybe two semesters of French and I was
really shocked at how much of the basics I still knew and my fellow
students didn't, in particular when it was appropriate to use the
familiar second person, but that didn't make it any easier to actually
converse -- despite having the ability to watch Radio-Canada on TV any
time I wanted. The texts we were to read were much more challenging:
Gabrielle Roy's "Rue Deschambault" and Jean Anouilh's "L'Alouette",
both of which I still have, but I don't think I read either one of
them all the way through, just enough to keep up with class.
Now, I'm even less able to understand fluent conversational French
(whether of the Hexagon or in Quebec) and certainly can't compose
sentences fast enough to respond conversationally, which is a
tremendous frustration, since not only is that a skill I used to have,
but half my ancestry is francophone. I can still read some formal
written French, particularly if I already have some idea of the topic.
I try to follow some French social media accounts and occasionally
look things up in French Wikipedia just to avoid losing even more.
But there aren't many places I would be likely to go where most people
only speak French.
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
***@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)
