If you have read my other blogs, skip the first paragraph:
I began to seriously study French a year and a half ago. I committed myself to studying French intensively and to make as much progress as I could as fast as I could. The summer of 2010, I was free to take the time to launch myself into something new so I took Intensive Beginning classes through The Alliance Française Minneapolis.
With 2 students and one instructor, our first 3-hour class meeting seemed like 15 minutes. That first day we covered almost everything I had previously learned in my brief encounters with French. Pronunciation, basic grammar, and the letters of the alphabet were all introduced while speaking and listening in French. (See my description of this experience on my “Sorting through French Language Study Options” of October 28, 2011)
Accounts of language immersion are sometimes less than enthusiastic. I remember a friend in my graduate school program had gone to Brazil for a couple of months as an exchange student. She said she didn’t learn any Portuguese and recalled the experience as one of the worst in her life. Apparently, her host family allowed her to just “hole up” in a bedroom.
I began to seriously study French a year and a half ago. I committed myself to studying French intensively and to make as much progress as I could as fast as I could. The summer of 2010, I was free to take the time to launch myself into something new so I took Intensive Beginning classes through The Alliance Française Minneapolis.
With 2 students and one instructor, our first 3-hour class meeting seemed like 15 minutes. That first day we covered almost everything I had previously learned in my brief encounters with French. Pronunciation, basic grammar, and the letters of the alphabet were all introduced while speaking and listening in French. (See my description of this experience on my “Sorting through French Language Study Options” of October 28, 2011)
Accounts of language immersion are sometimes less than enthusiastic. I remember a friend in my graduate school program had gone to Brazil for a couple of months as an exchange student. She said she didn’t learn any Portuguese and recalled the experience as one of the worst in her life. Apparently, her host family allowed her to just “hole up” in a bedroom.
Then another acquaintance of mine in college majoring in German, not only returned to college speaking German fluently after staying with a family for a summer, she also returned with a sophisticated style, new hair, new attitude and lots of confidence.
If one ventures into a language immersion experience, most bring back many stories and usually a bit of the language. A witty, but somewhat derogatory, account of this process was published by David Sedaris in a piece I read in one of my writing classes, “Me Talk Pretty One Day". Sedaris' account of his "Nazi" instructor in France doesn't do anything to promote American-French relationships. However, his recount rings true as it is a very emotional experience to suddenly "just speak only French". For Sedaris, the instructor became the target of his pent-up emotions. I recently read the book, “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and found this version was funnier with no mention of Nazis. Perhaps he met real Nazis and realized the difference.
I have my own stories. Even after living in Lyon for only 4 weeks, I had difficulty expressing myself in English. By using German as my back-up language, my verbs had migrated to the end of sentences and the French influence had shifted my adjectives and adverbs into unusual places.
Ten weeks after I had left home, I returned. A friend of mine, a high school French teacher, told me I was in culture shock. I’d gotten used to not understanding what was going on around me. Back at home when I rode the bus or ate in restaurants: understanding everyone around me was irritating! When someone asked me a question, I responded after long pauses searching for the right words. After eating French food in a lot of restaurants, I had to get used to the lower standards of American cuisine and for that matter, service.
We can laugh at ourselves later when remembering how challenging the process of sudden culture and language changes can be. The discomfort of being out of one’s usual element is frustrating, confusing, and at times pushes us close to anger. In a language class, it is easy to project the frustrations onto the teacher. The language instructor both confuses us and teaches us how to get into the subject at hand. The instructor’s duty is to simultaneously lead students into a new and uncomfortable situation yet hopefully make it bearable to return for another day of work.
Over the period of more than 20 weeks, my new instructor, Jamal, gave his students plenty of immersion angst but he also had a way of endearing himself. His point of view and interest in our progress helped to assuage the daily frustrations.
That first day, Jamal gave us a bit of homework and told us that tomorrow there would be more. I was excited to find out how much I could learn in my first 10-week class. So I went home for the first couple of days with the idea of spending more time studying. But it is extremely fatiguing to interact, even for a few hours a day, in another language. I found that I just needed a lot of sleep.
This exhaustion "era" lasted for about a week. The next week it became apparent what I needed to do to make progress. An impediment to me, our text book was not only written by French experts, it also made assumptions about what kind of exercises would best teach us new material. I began finding all sorts of supplementary materials: dictionaries, workbooks, movies, Internet sites, and conversation groups.
Maybe if I'd been taught in a different educational system I could have adapted better to the book used in my French classes. Often I didn’t understand the instructions given in the book for the exercises. I would do my homework only to find the next day that my answers were about 100% wrong while others in the class probably got 50% incorrect. It reminded me of my progress in learning algebra… the exercises were frustrating until I had mastered the “language” of the subject.
I have my own stories. Even after living in Lyon for only 4 weeks, I had difficulty expressing myself in English. By using German as my back-up language, my verbs had migrated to the end of sentences and the French influence had shifted my adjectives and adverbs into unusual places.
Ten weeks after I had left home, I returned. A friend of mine, a high school French teacher, told me I was in culture shock. I’d gotten used to not understanding what was going on around me. Back at home when I rode the bus or ate in restaurants: understanding everyone around me was irritating! When someone asked me a question, I responded after long pauses searching for the right words. After eating French food in a lot of restaurants, I had to get used to the lower standards of American cuisine and for that matter, service.
We can laugh at ourselves later when remembering how challenging the process of sudden culture and language changes can be. The discomfort of being out of one’s usual element is frustrating, confusing, and at times pushes us close to anger. In a language class, it is easy to project the frustrations onto the teacher. The language instructor both confuses us and teaches us how to get into the subject at hand. The instructor’s duty is to simultaneously lead students into a new and uncomfortable situation yet hopefully make it bearable to return for another day of work.
Over the period of more than 20 weeks, my new instructor, Jamal, gave his students plenty of immersion angst but he also had a way of endearing himself. His point of view and interest in our progress helped to assuage the daily frustrations.
That first day, Jamal gave us a bit of homework and told us that tomorrow there would be more. I was excited to find out how much I could learn in my first 10-week class. So I went home for the first couple of days with the idea of spending more time studying. But it is extremely fatiguing to interact, even for a few hours a day, in another language. I found that I just needed a lot of sleep.
This exhaustion "era" lasted for about a week. The next week it became apparent what I needed to do to make progress. An impediment to me, our text book was not only written by French experts, it also made assumptions about what kind of exercises would best teach us new material. I began finding all sorts of supplementary materials: dictionaries, workbooks, movies, Internet sites, and conversation groups.
Maybe if I'd been taught in a different educational system I could have adapted better to the book used in my French classes. Often I didn’t understand the instructions given in the book for the exercises. I would do my homework only to find the next day that my answers were about 100% wrong while others in the class probably got 50% incorrect. It reminded me of my progress in learning algebra… the exercises were frustrating until I had mastered the “language” of the subject.
Obviously I persisted anyway, for my inadequacy in French grammar was balanced by my increasing comprehension of the spoken and written word. It was reward enough to continue.
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