After only three days in France, my understanding is already improving. My host family, God bless them, only speaks to me in French, and has been known to keep others from helping me understand. They are the sort of host parents who withhold in an attempt to make their children stronger. That may be an awful or misunderstood explanation, but I understand it, and it is my blog so...
For instance, at dinner on Sunday, I did not understand the word "pays" when a guest was asking me "De quel pays venez-vous?" (or something like that), meaning, which country are you from. And my "host brother", Ramon from Spain, knows english and started to help me when Francois, my "host father", hushed him and forced me to figure it out as the interrogator re-worded the question and, in essence, defined "pays" in terms simple enough for me to understand.
That is the sort of experience that a host family provides; it is one that is immeasurably important when somebody truly wants to learn a foreign language. I am very lucky that my family is so helpful and continues to speak in French around me despite my lack of involvement. At dinner, a conversation will get heated (usually about Federer and Nadal, between the French host father and the Spanish host brother), and after a few minutes (MEE-NOOOT, as Francois emphasizes when Ramon's Spanish accent ignores the French language requisites) Francois will slow down and explain to me in slower and easier French.
My confidence, though weak, is already gaining strength. Ramon and I walk to school together in the morning, a 10 minute walk, and we talk in French the whole time. He usually dominates the conversation, but I appreciate his commitment to the language, and to helping me. It's quite refreshing. My class consists of 10 students, only 3 of which are not American, and only one person speaks no english. Needless to say, most students revert to english even despite the professeur's dedication to keeping the classroom in French. I feel bad. There are two girls in the class who have very little understand comprehension of anything that is going on in the class, and sitting next to one of the girls, I tried to help her as much as I could. But when we would be assigned to group work (small groups of 2-3 students), she would write in her journal. It seems clear to me that not everyone in my classroom has a desire to become fluent quite like I do. I just hope that the english-speakers in my classroom don't prevent me from progressing like I may have if nobody else spoke english in the class.
Alors, I am still learning. I had 5 hours of instruction today, which was long, but necessary. I had a second class today focused on writing and oral skills. Well, this class seemed to be a little bit basic for my skill level. I think a number of the students in the writing class have only started learning French this week. I think that the professor noticed and perhaps she will give me some more difficult tasks on Thursday. Otherwise, I may ask her what else I could do to further my learning.
My only other problem is my failure to push Chinese out of my mind. All day long, I want to start my French sentences with "you shi hou" ("sometimes" in Chinese), or "tamen" ("they" in Chinese), or even use the verb "kan" ("to see" in Chinese), which becomes old very fast. It only means that my brain must sift through more information before I figure out that (a) That's Chinese, not French, and (b) the real world for sometimes is "parfois". Because honestly, for a few hours the other day, I thought "suo yi" (pronounced swa-ee, meaning "so" in Chinese) meant "so" in French. Oh well, only time, and practice, will take care of that!!
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