French Lessons

We started going to French lessons provided free by the canton, because our eldest daughter goes to a local primary school.  I can't work out whether the idea of the free French lessons is benign, a gentle encouragement to learn the language so we can support our daughter in her school work, or aimed more at encouraging our cultural assimilation. The class is a ragtag of immigrants to Switzerland, a mixture of people from all over, but mainly, oddly, from Bolivia or Korea.  There are a few folk from the Middle East and one or two Europeans. None of us are very good at the language, we all try hard one way or another.
I particularly like it when we get to chant at the teacher, "le chien est sous la voiture". The teacher frowns and urges us to get the pronunciation right. "Sous" she says, "Sous" we say, "Sous, sous" she says with emphasis, "sous" we say, and so it goes on, until people are lying exhausted on the floor. I have no idea whether we get any closer to the correct pronunciation, but I know I'm trying my hardest.  Everyone else sounds like they're just making it up, which probably says more about how far away I am from getting it right.

I have to say I like the method of learning.  It's not particularly pacy, at only 90 minutes a week, but it means we spend a lot of time going over the four things we learn each week and, living in a Francophone city, we get to use the language in between our lessons, which helps I suppose. But on this point, our tutor recently asked us all why we were taking the lessons. Whilst I wasn't the only one learning it because of my kids, but I was slightly troubled to learn a number of people  were learning French so they could get a job. My only thought was; if you need French to get a job, and you're starting in this class, that's a long wait for a job! 

There are a couple of things that disturb me about the lesson, like the fact that the verb tables in the books we use make no sense as they don't follow the logical order: I, you, s/he, we, you, they.  Instead they the order is: I you, s/he, they, we, you.  Of course!! And that makes sense for what reason? By the way, whatever the reason it's not a good one. Someone at the company who designed the course thought "I know, verb tables shouldn't be ordered in the old 1st, 2nd, 3rd person fashion.  Let's jumble it up a bit.  That'll make things interesting.  Except you then have to remember that some had that dumb idea when you learn your verbs from this book, and you can't write them out just as verbs, you have to include the subject in the table so you don't forget that you've copied it from the ridiculous ICI 1 book.

Lastly, my favourite feature of my French lessons is that as some point I know I will lose the thread of the class completely and exactly a second later the tutor will ask me a question related to what she was just talking about.  I'll not have a clue what she is asking me.  This week we were reading from the book about how the verb to smoke declines into the verb to cough. Great joke, not good for teaching French however.  Just moments later the tutor is tapping her ear and saying something to me I have no understanding of.  For two minutes she continues to do this, whilst I say "je ne comprends". In the end I have no idea what she is asking me for.  A couple of weeks ago I had lost the thread of the class, couldn't understand a word she was saying and all of a sudden I'm being told "King of England", "Roi d'angleterre". "There isn't one" I said. That was the wrong answer, but I not sure what the right one would have been. If we're learning French this slowly, I don't think I'm going to do much damage to the language.

Sante!