French is Hard

I had an interesting day yesterday. First it was snowing still. It seems that everywhere we move the weather is not what it used to be. When we were in Iowa people there claimed that it was the most mild winter they had ever seen. When we moved to AZ somehow it rained more than they ever remembered. Now we are in France and funny thing it never snows this early. Second, I don’t know if the snow had anything to do with it, we lost our connection to the Internet for the entire day. Our Internet connection went down and I tried everything to get it back. I did not call tech support because I was afraid to do so. The missionaries came to dinner and I had them call and they told me that there was a recording saying that there was a general problem in the area. I went over to McDonald’s to try and use the Internet there, but theirs was down too. Now I cannot work without the Internet. I cannot email, I cannot call. If I were in the US I could call someone and tell them that I would be out the rest of the day. So I was a little worried, but decided to relax and not worry about something over which I had no control. So I skipped work. When I logged back into work today I found out there was a big meeting where big changes were announced at work. I don’t know if that took the focus off the fact that I was out, but it really seems to be a non-issue. I am so tired of the lameness of work.

Speaking French is hard. I know we are making progress. If we ever get to a point where we claim fluency I want to remember that it was hard. We heard that it would be easy for kids to pick up the language. It may be easier for them, but never easy. According to our French friends CK speaks like a French child (I speak like a Spaniard) so the fluency for children may be more apparent in the accent, but understanding and speaking are hard. The class we are in uses the European standard for evaluating proficiency. There are 6 levels. A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C3. Our teaching told us it takes a year to pass A2, and then another year to pass just B1. Of course I want to turn this into a math problem (study x hours learn y number of words means z proficiency). We go to class 6 hours per week for a total of 80 hours. According to some you need 75 hours to pass A1 and 225 to pass A2. I asked Antoine if he could remember any missionary being mistaken for a native speaker. He said that there were none. He said the best they could do would be confused with someone from Belgium.

I want to write more on language acquisition as I am in the middle of it. All I can say is that Kim and I are trying to speak more at home and the kids don’t seem to mind, because they understand the utility of what we are doing. This is one advantage to being here. It focuses you more on the task. Of course Dakota will look us straight in the face and say, “I don’t understand French” Even after we say something she should know. We are not ready for a French film and good news Harry Potter will have two showings in VO (English) so we are going Saturday night. Yahoo!

Kids went out playing in the snow before school.

We decided to walk the kids to school. It was cold and slippery.

Later we went into town to check out the Christmas market. Overpriced and not very interesting. The only thing interesting was the way people (especially kids) dress. Dang they all make us feel like vagabonds. The French may spend way too much on clothes, but they do look fabulous. We just learned that there are government regulated sale days in Jan and July. We are going to have to catch those.

We caught a kebab later. Very popular here. From Turkey.

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