Practicing My Verb Endings: An Adventure in Re-learning the French Language

Once upon a time, I took five years of French. The Montessori pre-school I attended also taught us rudimentary French. Let's call that a quarter of a year. Five and one-quarter years of French...and do I remember anything? Well, sort of. As I sit here reading through lessons on verb endings, the cadences feel familiar: "Regular ER verbs...E, Es, E; Ons, Ez, Ent." So I memorized some things in my formal classes and just sort of drooled through others. "IS, IS, IT; ISSONS, ISSEZ, ISSENT..."

French was the only course I had a rough time with in high school, and not because I didn't enjoy it - I wanted desperately to speak with the fluency of the tapes we listened to in class and during the aural component of our National French exam. I'm not sure what it was. As a student who liked school, but was disillusioned by the students at my school who didn't, I think I'd given up on learning anything useful from my 8th period class the last year I took a language course. Maybe it was the fact that a lot of it was listening, a little bit of writing, and zero oral practice. I'm one of those people that needs the information in as many ways as possible, and I need to practice using it or it will be gone. Or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that our teacher, by no fault of her own, had to spend more time dismantling desk towers constructed by the boys in the class than discussing when to use Faire or Avoire or Etre.

I will be honest - there was at least one assignment in which google translate was involved, and I owned copies of le petit prince in French and English. Vivez les moutons!

Now I'm BFF's with Mango Languages (thank you, thank you, thank you, public library systems who subscribe to language learning programs!) because of that whole moving to Montreal in three weeks thing. I started out viewing this as sheer necessity, but now it's turned into something else. I'm discovering that I still love the sound and flow of the French language - that slightly guttural, glottal-stop feeling you get on certain words. It is definitely a battle though, as I'm discovering that people are not kidding when they say that there are differences between Quebecois and "pure" French. Maybe it's a good thing I didn't remember more from my high school days?

Mango's been really helpful, supplemented by my writing things down as I learn them. There's that -get it in every way possible- again. B is lucky, he's doing some bartering for lessons from an Obie and his Quebecois wife; in exchange for dinner and a homework assignment, he's painting walls, mowing grass, etc. Pretty great deal. I'm hoping that some of this practice actually works. I'm nervous that everything people tell me about language purists in Montreal will be true - that if I stutter, people will only speak to me in English, that if my accent isn't just right, they'll know...

But the thing is this: In three weeks time, I will be a denizen of Montreal, and I will be learning the language in a place I will call my home for the next two years. I will learn it, I will use it, and I will love it.

It's all part of the journey. In the mean time, je m'appelle gorbonk!