My French Journey Part One
As I start to intensify my study of French after several months of being in a maintenance mode, including a brief break for 8 weeks while I brushed up what German I had for a trip to Zürich, I thought it might be interesting and helpful to look at my journey with the French language.
School Days
I recall a single French lesson in the last year of my junior school aged 10-11 but my first proper encounter with the French language began when I started senior school aged 11. It wasn't my best subject by a long way, in fact it was my worst. When I went in to the second year at senior school that was the only subject where I wasn't in the top set but instead in the second set (out of three).
By the third year of senior school I was in the top set and I remained there until I dropped French as a subject altogether when I started my O-levels two years later, but I was consistently in bottom three or four of the class and it was my least favourite subject. A perfect negative feedback loop there, I think.
French at the Wheel
In the early to mid-nineties (yes I am that old) I was working as field engineer for a software company that made systems to run corrugated box factories. This meant visiting factories in various parts of the UK and occasionally in continental Europe including France.
I began to have regular visits to France where I would stay for a week at a time every couple of months to install or upgrade software and especially train people in its use, so I decided being able to speak more French would be advantageous. I was getting by at the hotel with what I remembered from school ten years earlier but it was pretty basic.
This was in the days when to learn something you went to a physical book shop and got a book about it or maybe you went to classes for it. Classes weren't an option as I was always away from home so a book it was to be, however I came across an audio course called French at the Wheel made by Hugo.(Amazingly I found a copy listed on Amazon in the US . Though "currently unavailable" unsurprisingly )
It was a structured course with English explanations and then conversations in French where you listened along then repeated and filled in one side of the conversation. I took the course quite literally and did it while driving in the UK and France as part of my job.
Looking at the tag line of the course now "No books to read, no written work to do" it seems that it was trying to tell me something my future self would take years to realise, but more on that in part two.
The course worked really well and I soon became able to conduct more and more of my working days in France only speaking French, even the training courses for the software I worked with (which was translated into French). Looking back I realise how little I could actually say and how far you can get with a vocabulary of probably 500 words.
One thing in my favour was that a lot of the people I was talking to had a genuine motivation to understand what I was saying. They needed to know how to use the software I was installing or upgrading and they often didn't speak English that well themselves. There's a world of difference speaking French to someone who needs to know what you are saying so they can do their job better when you are gone and a bored Parisian waiter at the end of his shift.
Another thing in my favour was that I had a really quite good French accent probably because of the way the French at Wheel course was structured. This meant the people I spoke to just had to deal with my lack of vocabulary and poor grammatical constructions. Having a good accent is of course a double edged sword as it can give your interlocutor a false impression about how good your understanding of French is. Especially if they have only just met you.
Just as an aside, because this blog post is clearly isn't long enough already, I used the German version of the "at the wheel course" when I started to travel to Germany for the same job and I achieved similar though slightly "weaker" results. I do recall it was significantly harder to get going in German compared to French where I still retained some of the basics from school.
I put this relative success with French down to three factors:-
- The method of learning.
- My motivation to learn.
- Opportunity to practice in the real world.
I left that job in the late 90s and aside from a couple of trips to France in the 00s and 10s (teens?) my French remained dormant and I only really picked it up again thanks to Covid-19 but I'll go into that in part two...