And now for our next challenge - French, as she is spoken!
We were both very keen to improve our spoken French to a point where we could converse comfortably in French with those we met during our time in France - and beyond! Richard was quickly on to this and found a native French speaker, Valerie Heaney, who lived about 10 miles away and gave French lessons. Perfect! Richard and Valerie spoke on the phone and it was arranged that he and I would have a one hour lesson together with her every Wednesday afternoon. Our first lesson was on 30th August. We had four months to lose our inhibitions and be happy to risk making fools of ourselves speaking French with the French.
To our delight, Valerie turned out to be a very pretty, petite blond in her fifties with, fortunately for us all, an excellent sense of humour. Valerie told us the first lesson would be to assess our French language skills so that she could plan our course for the next four months. Over the following hour she discovered a lot more about our German language skills than she did about our French! Anyone who has become reasonably competent in another language, and particularly if they lived in that country for some time, will recognise the difficulty we found ourselves facing. We spent eight years living in Germany in the nineties and both were pretty fluent by the time we returned home to the UK. However hard we tried, our sentences emerged sprinkled liberally with German words. When searching for a word, the brain went onto ‘auto pilot’ and produced the appropriate word in the inappropriate language. It is extremely frustrating and it becomes a real battle to subdue and smother the German while hunting for the French. Valerie, to her credit, found this highly entertaining and, being a linguist, completely understood our predicament. With much laughter we battled through our first lesson. At the end we thanked her for our French lesson and she thanked us for her German lesson! We collapsed back into the car to drive home exhausted!
We were then emailed homework! This took the form of listening to a French script and answering a couple of questions on what we may have understood by ticking the right box. The French speak very fast! Valerie spoke very fast, but it is easier to grab the odd recognisable word when looking at someone speaking than when listening to an audio clip. We could tell we had a mountain to climb, quite a challenge! Week by week we were emailed more and more, and longer and longer scripts to listen to and answer questions on. Some were conversational mother to daughter type of telephone conversations, some were more business like, more technical essays. How the words didn’t get rubbed off the tape with the amount of rewinds required to get the sense of some of these I really don’t know! However, it taught us to listen hard.
We thoroughly enjoyed our weekly lessons with Valerie and looked forward to them each week. She was always so positive about our efforts and encouraging about our progress. Valerie dressed with colour. Her dresses and tops were usually brightly patterned in primary colours, and to add some Parisian flair, she clearly had a good selection of reading glasses with bold coloured frames to match each outfit.. One. week her eyes lit upon a pair of reading glasses that Richard had just placed upon his nose. “I’ve been looking for frames in just that colour”, she cried, “where did you get them?” Richard took them off to see what colour they were and was surprised to find they were bright pillar box red! He then explained that, as he could never find a pair of reading glasses in the house when he needed them, he had sent off for a pack of nine pairs in assorted colours! In fact he had ended up with eighteen pairs of reading glasses in assorted colours, as he thought his first order had not gone through and he had repeated the order! Not being a fashion conscious Parisian, he had just grabbed a pair, without giving any thought to his whole ensemble. Sadly for Valerie, who definitely had her eye on relieving Richard of his bright red glasses, the strength of his lenses was quite wrong for her. For our lessons Valerie sat on one side of a table and Richard and I sat on the other. The table was covered in paper, piles and piles of seemingly unorganised papers, usually with a glass of water, a pot of assorted pens and some french learning books somewhere in their midst. However, if Valerie ever needed to illustrate some point of grammar to us, she would go unerringly to a pile and triumphantly produce the appropriate piece of paper with a flourish, like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It was what you might call ‘organised chaos’!
One of Richard’s more endearing characteristics is his enthusiasm! He had, and still has, enormous enthusiasm for learning French. This ‘enthusiasm’ was inclined to take over during our lessons. Valerie would be carefully leading us through on a planned course, when Richard would be prompted, for some reason or other, to interrupt animatedly, recounting some tale or idea, and do so determinedly in French. Rather than find a short way, in simple French words, to relay whatever had come into his mind, he would battle to translate literally from somewhat complicated English. It was not easy and involved much gesturing, looking to me for help with vocabulary, fixing Valerie with a look that said ‘don’t stop me, I’m getting there’, and fighting to subdue the inevitable German words. This happened quite regularly and after a time I’d sense him getting animated and try to discourage him from continuing. Rolling my eyes to heaven, I’d look desperately across to Valerie and she’d be smothering a laugh at the two of us. One of the first easy to read French books I bought to get me going is a book called Voyage en France. The author, Sylvie Lainé, who has written a number of books for French language learners, writes with a lot of humour. This particular book made me laugh a lot, as it is the story of an English retired couple, Louis and Melba, travelling to France.. Excitable and enthusiastic Louis creates some hilarious situations with his beginner’s French, and his long suffering wife steps in where necessary to sort out the mess and misunderstandings. Sound familiar?!
To Valerie’s credit, after four months of one lesson per week and quite a lot of homework, our French had improved enormously. Nothing could stop a determined German word from butting in uninvited still, when anxiety levels were rising, but generally we were more than ready to give it a go in France in French.
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