L’anglais

Tuesdays are when we have our weekly French lessons. We are diligently trying to learn our French grammar, building the right foundation for understanding and speaking the language. We decided early on that learning French was very important for us to be accepted, so we started our learning whilst we still lived in the UK. We got very distracted though with day-to-day living, and found it difficult to find the time. Now that we are living in France we make sure that we practice regularly, and there are obviously many more opportunities to experience real life situations.

My understanding of French grows with every new aspect of the language I learn, and more and more I find I can follow the thread of what people are saying. I try to listen in on conversations in the markets, or cafés that I don’t know the subject of, to see if I can pick up on what they are talking about. One of my biggest challenges though is just making simple conversation. If there is a purpose for what I need to say, I’m better, but to start a simple conversation, beyond ‘How are you? Isn’t it a lovely day’ is very awkward for me. I’m picking up more vocabulary now though, and I am pushing myself and trying hard to form casual sentences. I feel that I’m making progress.

Brian throws himself completely into speaking, and is far better at it than me, but for some reason he finds it hard to understand what’s being said. I think he tries to translate words as he goes, rather than listen to a whole sentence and then piece it together, which means he ends up missing whole chunks of what’s been said. Between us though we seem to get by, mostly!

What we have found are some very patient French friends, who also help us and support our learning. Along with listening, watching French news programmes, Duolingo, written material, and the day-to-day living, we are slowly getting there. The main thing is, we are both really enjoying learning French. it can be a lot of fun, and what’s the worse that can happen? So far, we are only aware that we’ve missed one appointment, nearly employed a plumber by mistake and bought a lamp we didn’t want! We have definitely discovered that there is no easy way to learn a foreign language, certainly later in life, but I can recommend it as a great way to keep your brain active.

Let’s see how we progress over the next 12 months.