Recently in Learning a Language Category

Ever since our first trip to Paris when Geoff ordered some shoes with mustard (chaussures avec moutard instead of saucisson avec moutard) from a street vendor, I knew that learning French was more than just being armed with the words. Unfortunately, you also need to pronounce them correctly.One might think that a year of grammar school French, four years of high school French, three adult education classes in the U.S. and four months of classes in Paris would render me fluent in French. If my admission of all this education for dubious results is met with astonishment, then I quickly blame the American school system which teaches children languages much too late. This usually gets me points by not only being self-deprecating, but also by criticizing social structure which is one of the French's favorite pastimes.One thing I have learned in all my classes is that proper pronunciation in French depends largely on the vowel sounds. For example, it's been a long-running joke in almost every French class I've taken that when students mean to be saying something about someone's beautiful long hair cheveux they actually wind up talking about her beautiful long horse chevaux.Just recently, I had one of...

Originally, Geoff and I had arranged for both our classes to be at 4 pm so that we could come and go together, even if we weren't actually in the same class. At L'Alliance Française, a new session began every month. So even though you might continue at the same time with the same teacher, technically it was a new class. Unfortunately this became clearer to me on the first day of my October class, when I learned that mine had been cancelled. Not enough of the students had renewed for that time slot. So the three of us who had registered were led down to the office to come up with a solution. After going through the options and deliberating, we all unfortunately ended up in different classes. The Japanese student Kiyoko took the 10:45 class, the girl from Mexico took the last slot at 1 pm, and I registered for the 6 pm. After entertaining myself with French audio in the media library, I met Geoff outside after his class. Talking it over with him, I realized the 6 pm class was a poor choice since we often wanted to have dinner or spend time together after work...

I had a pounding headache; my brain felt like it might explode from trying to learn French. Usually after three weeks of being in another country, Geoff and I would head home where we could order coffee in English, understand cashiers at convenience stores and successfully listen in on other people's conversations. Of course, the fact that we still had nearly three months left in Paris thrilled us. Unfortunately, my aching head didn't agree. It was fatigued from constantly thinking through every sentence.Then again, my headache could have been related to the fact that BuyIndies.com had ceased to take orders. For months our credit card processor software company had threatened to change servers but they never gave us an exact date. I had asked them to give me two weeks notice. Instead they gave us less than 24 hours. So Geoff had worked furiously all night, in an effort to get it working again. And it was awful to be in Paris and stuck on the computer.The next morning, we decided to take a break for something to eat. I picked a place outside our immediate neighborhood for a change of scenery. It was a gorgeous, clear and crisp day...

The day before, someone had buzzed our apartment from downstairs. Since this didn't happen often (or ever actually), it caught me off guard. Geoff was at work, so I tentatively picked up the intercom phone and mumbled a cross between "allo" and "hello." At that point, the woman on the other end began babbling in French and all I caught was something about a kitchen and bathroom. So I said, "je ne comprends pas." She asked if I spoke English and I said yes. Then she babbled in English and was equally incomprehensible. She kept saying "it's very important," but that was all I got. Figuring she must be trying to sell something, I simply hung up the phone and went back to my computer. At this point, she somehow had managed to get buzzed into the building and rang my doorbell which I ignored for several minutes. I figured that eventually she'd give up and go away. Considering I couldn't understand her at all, that really seemed for the best. Several minutes of ringing was followed by a brief silence. But within seconds, she returned to buzzing the downstairs intercom. So instead of my polite Franglish 'hallo' I now...

A stream of apartments blurred by today. Upon waking, I forced myself to pick up the phone. Each conversation started with me saying, "J'ai vu votre annonce à FUSAC," meaning (hopefully) I saw your ad in FUSAC. Then, "Parlez-vous anglais?" Twice the answer returned a firm "non." Luckily, they seemed to understand me better than I had expected. Perhaps when you're a potential customer worth thousands of euros, bad French is worth stomaching. One man I called, who probably could hear my heart pounding through the line, kept saying "Je vous écoute" ("I'm listening"). Ironically, even the English conversations seemed a bit strange. One woman warned us about the tricky stairs to her apartment and bluntly added that if we weren't interested in walking up two steep flights of stairs then please don't come. Quite a sales pitch. Another man asked my nationality and age. Apparently my bust size he could deduce in person.Somehow I arranged four appointments. Our first stop was rue de la Grande-Chaumière. The owner had given me the code to the outside door. Once inside, there was another door in the courtyard to buzz the apartment. In fact, it seems most Paris apartments use this system....

Ok, it's true that I still haven't actually seen any apartments yet, but I do feel like I made progress today. I spent the first few hours this morning in the hotel room looking through online listings. This isn't only because I'm afraid of calling people. But even if it was - how many fears can I tackle in a week? Anyway, I got an email response from a woman to my post on craigslist and it was a listing I had passed over since the rent was listed as 3,000 euros/month. Apparently she now offered it at 2,000. This got me thinking that maybe more people were negotiable than I thought. So I scoured the online listings - paris.craigslist.org and vrbo.com - and emailed basically anyone with a listing in the 5th or 6th Arrondisement. Not much has come of that. Tomorrow I will actually have to use the telephone. There also seem to be several promising listings in the site FUSAC (recommended by one of Geoff's colleagues) which list only phone numbers.Telephone calls are definitely the scariest since there's no pointing involved and you can't ask someone to "écrivez." I remember on one of our first trips to...