Sunday, May 21, 2017

French - Three weeks in

I've finished my Charleston assignment in the Comptroller and Global Financial Services Bureau.  Now I'm temporarily in the DC area and am at the Foreign Service Institute learning French.  Yes, my job for the next few months is to learn French.

Mark and Cosmo are here, too, and we're all nestled into our temporary apartment in Sedona-Slate in Rosslyn.  It's nice to be all back together after being apart for a year and a half.

French class going fairly well.  It's a very well organized system designed to get one to the necessary level of speaking and reading as efficiently as possible.  Since I had a bit of French coming into the course, I'm what they call a "parachuter".  That means that the first week I moved around different sections to find the one that corresponds to the level I'm at.  That first week was spent saying je m'appelle Michael a lot.  Right now I'm in a section of two people.  At the end of May I'll go through another assessment and be put into another section.  For now I'm scheduled to be in French until mid-August.  However, I have my first language text on June 30.  If I obtain my target of 2/2 (2 speaking and 2 reading), then other options may come up.

French at FSI has also been humbling.  This first video is how I felt, smugly, about my French ability.  After my first assessment during the first week, the second video is more how I feel.





Well, maybe not quite that bad, but close.

My advice to anyone coming to FSI to learn a language:  bring your patience, desire to learn, and humility.  It can be fun, but it's also a lot of work.

I'll check back in a few weeks from now when I'm in my next section.

Here are ten reasons to learn French.


No comments:

Post a Comment