Can 3 Average Guys Learn French In One Working Week?
(to be) and then to the modal verbs. I love modal verbs. If you can conjugate can and must and might and have a few basic infinitives under your belt, you can start forming fairly complex sentences very quickly. After thirty minutes I could conjugate pouvoir, devoir and vouloir in the present tense. With my remaining thirty minutes I learned about twenty common verbs. I then made inane, schizophrenic conversation with myself while I got ready for work:
Me 1: “Oui oui, je peux parler français."
Me 2: “Ah, très bien, je veux apprendre le français aussi."
Me 1: “C’est bien, mais tu dois beaucoup étudier."
Me 2: “Oui oui, c’est vrai."
Conversational in one week? Bah! I was conversational in one morning!
Day 3 - Wednesday:
Alberto: “I have to admit I was struggling at this point. Work had turned out to be more stressful than I’d expected, and I only had time to study on my phone before work and a little during my lunch break. I was so exhausted when I got home that I couldn’t bring myself to open my mouth, let alone a book. I also felt like I couldn’t really disconnect mentally from work in order to fully connect to my stu
dies. I was living for the weekend."
Can 3 Average Guys Learn French In One Working Week?
Day 5 - Friday:
Alberto: “The last few days of the week were less intense, which afforded me the time to really get stuck into the courses and topics I was interested in. I studied a lot of the food-related vocabulary I would need for the dinner. I even got a little carried away, and now consider myself something of an expert in French words for herbs. I feel better prepared for the weekend’s intensive course now."
Ed: “Thursday was something of an impromptu break for me, but I was well and truly back on it today. I went for lunch with a French friend from my university days and we spoke pretty much the whole time in French. It was hard work — by the end my brain was as cooked as the gallettes we ate — but it was great to see how impressed she was. It was also a little strange to communicate with her in French having only communicated in English since we met six years ago. I have to admit that it’s these kind of moments which really spur me on. Bring on the weekend!"
Day 6 - Saturday
Stefano: “I’m not sure the word weekend is wholly appropriate; in many ways this felt like the beginning. We had to consolidate everything we’d learned and really begin to use it. Each of us had a classroom adjacent to one of the others. If you were quiet you could hear the French murmurs in thick English and Spanish accents. We revised much of what I’d studied and Laure, my teacher, adapted the class to my preferred learning style, so there was a lot of talking and laughing and colorful cue cards."
Alberto: “My mind blanked a little when I first entered the classroom. I felt as if I’d started learning minutes before. Marion, my teacher, had also prepared the class with my needs and desires in mind, and we started embellishing the cooking vocabulary with the key verbs in past, present and future so that I’d be able to describe what we were making at dinner. I find starting with these more concrete, tangible areas of language makes things much simpler than if you begin with abstract concepts (that’s Ed’s approach)."
Day 7 - Sunday
Ed: “Yesterday was really fun. We’d started around eleven, and it was a huge relief to know that we didn’t have to mould our studies around our working hours anymore. Today was a little different. There was definitely an awareness of time pressure, as well as the concern that we were all about to make fools of ourselves at dinner. This concern was quickly allayed by the easy manner of my teacher, Anne, and by the fact that I was speaking quite fluidly, if not fluently. We went a bit further than I’d expected, venturing into the area of giving opinions. For me, this is when actually speaking the new language becomes interesting; when you can confidently say that you’re expressing yourself in a foreign language. By the time the dinner came round, I was more worried about preparing the chocolate mousse than I was about speaking French."
Can 3 Average Guys Learn French In One Working Week?
Stefano: “I was an Italian in a German supermarket pretending to be French. After we’d bought all the food, we headed over to Ed’s place for dinner. He and Anne were already chatting in French and whipping up a mousse when we arrived. Once Laure and I had prepared the quiche, we took a bit of time out and played a guessing game. It was funny to see how each of our approaches had equipped us with different advantages merely within the context of the game; Alberto knew all the food-related vocab we were being tested on, while Ed was rocking the descriptions. I fell somewhere between the two, but was much more adept at releasing the odd colloquial expression every time I guessed right."
Alberto: “When we sat down to eat, I think all of us quickly realized it wasn’t going to be easy to enter into conversation. It’d been fine in the classroom when the conversation had been one-to-one, but trying to edge a sentence in with three native speakers at the table after a week was very difficult. All three of us listened attentively and we all professed to understand the large majority of what we heard. That was an achievement in itself, but not the holy grail we’d sought. We offered plenty of wine, exchanged lots of platitudes and complimented the chefs, but fell short of debating the merits of laicism. Next week perhaps."
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