French class

I (Jim) decided to take a french course here in Paris to continue my education. Of course I picked L'Alliance Française because all of my education in the U.S. was with them. So far I am really enjoying the class. It is mostly a review for me but I was expecting that. And the review is necessary....my grammaire is quite rusty.

The other students are quite interesting and really nice. There are 12 of us in the class: 2 Russians, 2 Italians, 1 Brazilian, 2 Brits, 1 Chinese, 1 Canadian, 1 Syrian, 1 Columbian and myself. Very cool. The conversations are amazing but my reaction is a little bit like the technical conference last year in Paris: everybody is alike. I always expect people to more exotic. In the end we mostly see things the same. What is challenging is the accents. It's hard enough to understand an american accent. Try understanding an italian accent in French!!! Surprisingly, the easiest accent to understand is Russian. Perhaps it's probably the most similar language in terms of sounds.

The teacher related an interesting perspective yesterday. She's been teaching for many years and she said she has really seen a change in how prevalent english has become. Fifteen years ago all of the students in our class would have needed to speak to each other in French because it was the only common language. Now, all of the students speak English. Some of them actually learn French by translating to English instead of their mother tongue (even, she said, speakers of other latin languages).