28 July 2003

Learning to Speak French

I just returned from French class.  Ooo la la!  Somehow I have managed to meet up with the same teacher who humbled me a year ago.  This time I am feeling differently.

Before I tell all of the gory details I just want you to know that this is a really sweet place to spend my life.  Life is simple.  I hang clothes on a line to dry them.  I cook three meals a day.  Cat comes home from school for lunch.  I get to send lots of time with the two people I love most in this world.

This is also a really hard place to be.  I speak almost no French.  I understand more and more of the language each day.  BUT I don’t always understand the rules.  

A year ago I went to my first French class with Shie Mein, my Chinese friend who lives around the corner.  She speaks great French but she wants to be perfect.  I just want to speak. 

At my first class the women sitting around the table informed me that they had met me before at a coffee at someone's house.  The woman at the head of the class, Sophie, spoke English to me when I did not understand their French. I kept thinking her French was perfect and I even said, "You speak French too well to be in this class.".   She thought I said she spoke English perfectly which she took as a great compliment until Shie Mein translated in French what I had actually said.   This was my first mistake.

Then I made the fatal mistake of speaking English during class to Shie Mein.  That made for some very bad vibes from the “teacher”.

We spent the entire time copying recipes that the teacher read out so we could try to spell the words.  At first I was copying off of Shie Mein because I had no idea how to spell one single word.  It all sounded like gobbledegook to me.  After about 10 minutes of this the teacher motioned that I had to sit in the front of the class and copy from her book.  I guess I was being made an example of because she sure didn't speak directly to me from that point on.  Ouch! 

A year later I went back to French class.  It had taken me a whole year to work up my nerve again.  There was a new teacher who was wonderful.  I learned a ton of new things in just one class.  The next week I returned to find Sophie, the wicked soul from the year before.  This time I was ready for her.

She announced we would copy a recipe.  She read out the first words, “Ingredients” (on greed ee ont).  I wrote it down perfectly.  After each line from Sophie I spelled the words accurately.  At one point she jerked my paper away from me to see how I was doing.  The other women were really struggling to spell the words, but they could speak French.  My spelling was terrific, but my pronouncing abilities stink.  Just for good measure Sophie corrected my “I” in ingredient.  I guess I didn’t’ write it the French way.

After class I was so proud of myself.  In one year I realized I had learned so much, and I had enough confidence not to be intimidate by mean old Sophie.  One of the women who was new in the class called me up to ask what had happened to the “nice” teacher.  I am sad to say that I felt good about the fact that someone besides me could see how cruel Sophie can be.

In the end it doesn’t matter that I cannot speak French to suit Sophie.  I’ve made terrific friends here and I’ve had the time of my life.  When I am an old woman I will look back on these days with great warmth, and I will tell the story of Sophie, the teacher who helped me understand just how much I had learned.