Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle or My first week at school!

I have signed up for Intensive French classes for two weeks. The class runs from Tuesday – Friday from 8:20-12:25. It’s an excellent opportunity to learn French. On my way to school I pass right by the Eiffel Tower every morning on the metro. I feel like Madeline!

On Monday I went to complete the registration and they gave me a written test. I have never studied French so I just sat there staring blankly at the paper. Every once in awhile someone would come and fetch us one at a time. When it was my turn, the fella turned to me to and said, “You do not speak any French?”. He seemed kind of concerned but I was placed into a class.
My class has about eight students from all over the place. There are students from Japan, Spain, Italy and Brazil and I am the only one from America (Etas Unis). The teacher of course is from Paris. I was wondering how you teach a class full of students that do not know French and have no other language in common? It turns out that most of the students speak English better than French. The teacher however does not speak English very well. At times the Italian and Spanish students ask for her to translate into English and then they translate into their language and then vice versa. It is fascinating to watch all this transpire. The teacher at times does not know English so well and will ask me how to say something in English like the word for scratch paper or notebook or to show. I have trouble sometimes thinking of what the word might and feel very silly. I am very glad that the teacher at times will translate into English otherwise I may be completely lost! One day after class I started noticing the Metro signs and that I could read some of them or sort of read them! I got so excited. I only know the present tense and three verbs at the moment.

I still cannot understand when people speak unless it is slow and they say words I know. The problem is that there are so many vowel sounds in French. I feel like it’s all just like oo, oh, a, and uhs. Most of the time you do not pronounce the last letter and then all of sudden something changes and you do pronounce it! Then there is learning when to blend the sounds of words when speaking. If the word has a vowel then sometimes the word before it will be blended with the next word to form a liaison. A lot of verbs are pronounced the same way but spelled completely different. Then there are words that are only vowels like the word “ou”. Is this in the scrabble dictionary? I have a long way to go before I will feel comfortable speaking French. I spend about 1 hour in the speech lab and the evening hours with J., aka Henry Higgins, constantly correcting me, aka Eliza. Today in class they were asking me about special things from the US and I said Madonna. They all laughed at my English pronunciation of the word.

One day Maho, a Japanese student, and I went to lunch at a Parisian style café. I tried out some French and the lady says, “What??” and then spoke English to us. She was so kind and patient. I am in need of a conversation and pronunciation practice but when you only know a few words the conversation does not go very far.

The numbers are very interesting. When you reach 80 you say 40-20(quatre-vingts) in French. The number for 90 is 40-20-11(quatre-vingts-onze). In addition to pronouncing this I must now add! Now for some French -

Salut! Je m'appelle Stephanie. Je suis americaine. J'ai habite a Cite' U. a Paris en France avec mon mari. Il est sympa. J' aime le cours de francais.

a demain! See you tomorrow!

Au revior!