Since I was at lower school I’ve been learning French in some description. My Dad tried to teach me some but because I didn’t really have the space to practice it, it kinda fell on deaf ears as such. Then I got to Middle School and we were taught French, I got to Upper School and had a fab teacher but part way through the year she went on maternity leave and our temporary teacher wasn’t very good, he couldn’t really control the class and that meant then he spend the whole lesson trying to get the naughty ones to be quiet while the rest of us who wanted to learn sat there doing nothing (or doing homework for other lessons).
Since coming back from Paris on Sunday I’ve been trying to read French blogs. I found one called Lili Est Folle and that’s kinda where I started with reading blogs. I went on the website for Le Figaro and started reading the British news in French. That way I had some idea of what was going on to start with lol.
So when GCSE choices came up I decided to drop French and carry on with Italian – I preferred Italian at the time. I could speak more of it and when it came to it I could recall more of it.
But now in my job there is more chance me needing to speak French, I occasionally type parts of emails to the Italian distributor in Italian because I can but it’s usually just asking then how they are and what the weather is like lol.
Si tu veux practiquer ton Français avec quelqu’un, nous pouvons converser!
(Yeah I probably got most of that wrong, my A-level French is getting worse these days since I’m not using it much!!)
hehe but I bet your Spanish is flourishing – I heard about you having to help my cousin in the airport and then ended up helping lots of other tourists because the signs were in Spanish and no English or something like that (Ali was singing praises etc)
When I learnt French at middle school (we had 3 tier system in Bradford!) I generally understood the theory but didn’t have any place to practice it. It always felt weird to ‘talk’ to a tape recording that had no idea what you were saying and still congratulated you regardless (Eddie Izzard has a fantastic sketch on this phenomenon by the way). In upper school, Yr 11, I was involved in an exchange program and it was only then that my French got pretty good. Two weeks in a foreign country really does help (coincidentally, a miserable, stubborn French exchange student who was unwilling to translate some of the more garbled phrases and local dialect also helped)! I found I was actually *thinking* in French and even ‘um’-ing and ‘ah’-ing with the French equivalent. I read a few years later that you were only really fluent in a language once you um’d and ah’d in the same way. I guess you could say I was fluent for a week…
So, erm, what I guess I’m trying to say is the only way you get good at summat is to force yourself to practise or to put yourself in a position that requires it… See, I *did* have a point!
We have the 3 tier system here in Bedford – although the council has decided now that we are going to go to 2 tier over the next few years. (They are staggering the change over to attempt to cause as least disruption as possible).
I think if its around you and almost “forced” onto you then you do start thinking that way.
I’m so impressed with your languages! I struggled with German although I was pretty good at picking up words. I just had a hard time with the sentence construction. I’m sure I sounded like an uneducated idiot.
Me hungry please? The salad to eat now.
Languages: I’m not that amazing at them lol.
The Salad? Where did that come from? hehe
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