Too Much French

My sweet American husband just returned from a five day cinema camp with French students. We were sitting at the table catching up, and the conversation turned to his plans for the day.  He said this, "I am going to proceed to reserve my voyage."  

I just about choked on my tea.  Asked him to repeat this several times throughout the day because it made me giggle every time.   

Poor guy's brain has been Frenchified by Too Much French.  

Pas Mal

I'm currently taking French classes.  I know this begs the question, "Why in the world would a person need language courses after over a dozen years speaking the language?"

Well, this is a perfectly valid question.  I'm not offended, really.  The answer is that I am at heart a lazy person.  Without a class to motivate me, I don't do much reading and writing in French.  Because it is not effortless for me, for the most part, I avoid it.  I try to buy the newspaper as a discipline, but at times I spend more time on the sudoku than on reading the ins and outs of French politics and neighborhood news.

So, I'm a student again.  I go twice a week and work on my own through advanced French grammar exercises.  When I finish my assignments, I check in with a teacher who then evaluates where I am and what I need to work on next.  

Friday I spent most of the afternoon working through exercises on the subjunctive case.  Woo hoo hoo.  Nothing too complicated, but as always, there were helpful reminders and things that were new to me.  After checking my work, which was gloriously error-free, my teacher gave me a short literary passage to work through with a long list of questions and an essay to write.

I worked through the questions and the essay last night and this morning before class.  The essay took hours as I am way too much of a perfectionist and composing something decent in French is just plain hard.

My teacher was extremely thorough in her correcting.  She spent a solid twenty minutes going over mistakes in my answers, covering my pages with red ink.  At earlier times in my life I would have been bothered or embarrassed, but at this point, I'm just happy to be learning something.

Finally, we got to my essay.  I was pretty proud of my little literary effort, so was bursting with pride when she giggled as she read my first paragraph (it was supposed to be funny).  There were a fair amount of red marks throughout the two pages, but when she got to the end, she paused and said, "Pas mal."

In case you don't know, pas mal means not bad.  At least, that's the literal translation.  But, actually, a French teacher saying, "pas mal" is the equivalent of an American teacher saying, "Michelle, that was an excellent essay.  You are a gifted and hardworking student.  Keep up the good work!"  Really.  That's what it means.

She also nailed me.  Said my problem is that when I get stuck in French, I start to think in English and then translate it back to French.  This is true.  And it makes for awkward and long sentences.  So, I tried really hard to keep my brain in French while I worked through the afternoon.  This is easy to do when I'm doing grammar exercises but darn hard when I'm trying to compose.  And so tiring.  It worked though.  If I keep at it, something does come to me eventually in French.  Not necessarily great French, but there's a copious supply of red ink ready to fix everything when I go back Friday.