La Langue Francaise

As mummy dearest suggested, I am going to start doing some thematic blog posts in an attempt to cut down on the length of posts. And this is a topic that has some relevance to today, because I found out my results from the IES French test we took during orientation. (Albeit inadvertently. I overheard Madame Rouchet, one of our program directors, talking to the phonetics professor about how all of us Americans tend to stand around speaking in awkward French to one another. I laughed, and Madame Rouchet and I started talking about my French comprehension. And she asked me if I wanted to see my test scores).

Not to toot my own horn, but out of all 60 students that took the test, I scored the 4th highest. And I got the highest listening comprehension score out of everybody. My grammar score was fairly average, which didn't really surprise me, since it's been a looonggg time since I've thought much about grammar.

Considering that I haven't spent much time in a French speaking country before, I was rather pleased to find that from the first day I arrived I could understand things fairly well. I can understand everything that they tell us at IES, I can understand everything my host parents say to me (except when there's some obscure vocab word thrown in) and I can understand the news on TV. Understanding French children, any movie or TV show and slang-y French is much more of an issue, although I can generally get the main idea. I plan to watch lotsss and lotsss of French TV to work on this.

My speaking ability seems to depend on the day largely. Some days are just peachy, others not so much. I can communicate everything I need to, but my accent largely depends on the day and who I am speaking to as well (better around French people of course).

Overall I'm very pleased to be in living in a country where I actually speak the language decently, unlike my previous experiences. It's made the transition into life here pretty easy. Although it's notoriously hard to make French friends, I'm sure speaking French already will help enormously. And I'm having a grand time with my host family because we can actually have decent conversations about a multitude of topics.

Speaking French is really quite fun, it is.