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French Classes at CERNSoon after starting my fellowship at CERN, I did two French courses there. Since I'd already started teaching myself some French, I was put in the 'false beginners' class, where they put people who either know a bit of French or speak a closely related language such as Italian or Spanish. So... all that effort teaching myself French and I may as well have been Spanish. Anyway, these courses were excellent... they are taught entirely in French. Here's an extract from my travelogue, in which I ramble about the benefits of such a course.
Don't even bother going to a language class that isn't taught in the language, being taught in the language you're learning is so much better for so many reasons. I'm going to make a list of them here so that I can stop thinking about them.
- For a start, it means we spend the whole lesson thinking in French, instead of just thinking about French. I spent five years learning Japanese at school, and three learning Maori (I chose the languages that were easiest to pronounce and spell) but I don't think I ever really thought in those languages, I almost always had to translate sentences into English before I could understand them. In computer-speak, I am writing a compiler to turn French directly into machine code, rather than feeding them through a French-English interpreter and then compiling them with the English compiler. And everybody knows that interpreted languages are slower (though that doesn't stop me from preferring them.) It is so awesome to spend two hours a week immersed in another language and understand it all without even thinking about it. Of course, just about everyone I've met in Europe can do that, but as a native English speaker I was brought up without the necessity to speak other languages.
- In a similar vein, speaking French in conversation is an everyday thing, not just a dreaded oral exam a few times a year.
- We learn the metalanguage, so that we can, and do, ask questions about the grammar of the language, in the language. That means I can continue to learn French even when there is no French teacher or even anyone who knows English around -- and by directly asking what I want to know about the grammar, which is faster than trial and error. I learnt Japanese for all that time and I don't even know the Japanese word for 'noun'.
- People for whom English is a second language are not at a disadvantage. In fact, many of them have an advantage because French is a lot more similar to their native languages than it is to English.
- Being taught by a native speaker, we always hear the correct pronunciation (even if we can not imitate it very well yet) and we learn many idioms, and the difference between Swiss and French French. If you want to be able to tell people you've eaten escargot but you can't stomach slimy crawly things, eat escargot in Switzerland -- trust me on this.
Two years after the end of my level 2 French course, I asked my new boss if I could do another. He said yes, so I did the placement test and was put in a level 7 course. I guess this means that all the other things I was doing worked.This page has been accessed  times since 2024-07-07 08:13:20 Last updated: 2008-09-14 00:21:45
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