Study Abroad / étudier à l'étranger

"Etudier a l'etranger" is how Google Translate tells me to say "study abroad", but how do the French and Francophones really say it?

As I've mentioned, I learned very little Spanish in three years of high school Spanish class. That isn't meant to be an indictment of traditional language methods. It's an indictment of the poor quality of my high school Spanish classes. They expected little and got less. Most of our grade--I swear, this is not hyperbole--was based on our "cultural projects", outside work that was awarded points on some mysterious basis. Eating at a Mexican restaurant earned you quite a few points. So did making a pinata. You could get points for cooking Mexican foods--not as many as the effort required, in my opinion--but you only got full points if you made a big posterboard with pictures of the food you made, and confetti and whatnot. Friendship bracelets. Confetti eggs. You get the idea. A few of the possible activities (we were given a list) did require actual Spanish knowledge or learning, but these, mysteriously, were awarded a very small number of points. I only did them when I needed a few more points to round out my grade. Writing a letter in Spanish (you had to bring it to the teacher with a stamped envelope so the teacher could mail it; the writing alone didn't get you any points, so you had to have someone to write to) earned far less points than eating a chimichanga at La Fiesta. (You had to bring in a receipt signed by the waiter, by the way. Every year angry parents wanted to know why a note from the parent stating that they'd eaten at the restaurant wasn't good enough; they'd eaten at three that semester and now their kid wasn't going to get any points? The Spanish teachers were a suspicious lot.)

Isn't that CRAZY? I could go on for this long enough to make it its own post. You had to do that big poster thing for making Mexican food at home, but you still wouldn't get as many points as you would for having a waiter sign a receipt.

Anyway, my point is: I didn't learn much Spanish. I DID learn to conjugate 24 irregular verbs in the present and maybe preterit tense. I had these memorized for a long time. They gave us a long, long sheet of paper and we had to write them all in. Every semester we had a test in this, and it made up the rest of our grade that didn't consist of cultural projects--again, no hyperbole. (The first semester the test was just which verbs they were and the first person present; we had to do more each semester.) I was very, very sad when I started learning Spanish for real and found out there are more than 24 irregular verbs in Spanish. My Guatemalan teacher was not impressed in the slightest by my ability to list 24 infinitives with irregular conjugations.

So, I flunked the Spanish placement exam in college and elected not to take any Spanish there; I wasn't particularly interested in it anyway. I wanted to learn ancient Greek and Latin, with a vague idea that then I would be able to learn almost any language with some ease.

I basically failed ancient Greek, for various reasons, most involving me being lazy. I loved parts of Greek, but it was not a Greek Appreciation class. THAT I would have aced. I did not admit to laziness, and my professor suggested I start over again but begin with Latin this time, because no one ever started with Greek. They'd all taken Latin in high school, or at least started it in college first. I lasted half a term in Latin. I proclaimed that I didn't think I would ever learn a language unless I was somewhere where I had to speak it all the time. I decided to fulfill my college's strict language requirement by learning more-or-less organically and then "testing out". I went to Italy.

I learned Italian, in Italy; I learned it pretty well, considering how little time I put into it. I was with an American program made up of students from various colleges. It was more rigorous than such programs often are. The program was for art history, primarily, but we spent the first month in intensive Italian classes. We lived with Italian "host families", but central Florence being what it is, almost all of us lived with older ladies or couples who provided us with a room and two meals a day and dinner conversation, but little else. And each of us had an American roommate. My roommate and I hit it off instantly, and we didn't even try to make promises about speaking only Italian to each other. (This promise, and the quick abandoning of it, is a common trope of study abroad novels and narratives.) We went to Italian class together, and of course we did things around town that required us to speak Italian, and we spoke Italian with our "host signora". We learned. Somehow I got to the point where I felt like I could say whatever I wanted in Italian. It really was almost like magic, at least in retrospect. A year later, when I traveled in the south of Italy, several people asked me where in northern Italy I was from after hearing me talk (this is more a reflection on how different southern Italian is from northern Italian than my own fluency). (Or, as I am trying diplomatically NOT to put it, but as my full-of-pride teachers would have said: it just means they speak bad Italian in the south.) Not all of my classmates got there, and at least for many of them, I think it was largely that fear of making mistakes. One of my friends asked me in astonishment once, after I told a story about speaking to a nice elderly man I met in the park, "You feel comfortable enough with your Italian to talk to people?" Another time I went with two classmates to one of those stores that specializes in selling imported American processed foods. I asked for a bagel in Italian, grammatically perfect but strongly accented. The jerk guy who was along said "Listen to you! 'Vor-ay'?" and sneered. Then he asked for his pretzels in English. (There were only six men in our group of thirty students, and though this guy was a jerk, he was good-looking, and--well, it's lucky that I already thought he was a jerk, because as it was, that was almost enough to make me stop speaking Italian for good. What if my accent really was as bad as he said and he was just the only one pointing it out?)

But anyway, yes, I learned Italian. I easily passed a test for people who had taken two years of college Italian. I've forgotten it fairly thoroughly. I have little occasion to use it, and it's not really worth the effort to keep it up.

So when I decided to learn Spanish for real, it was a no-brainer: I was going to go somewhere Spanish-speaking and learn Spanish by magic just as I'd learned Italian. I chose Guatemala, mecca of Spanish learners. I loved Guatemala. LOVED. I lived with a "real" host family, parents and children (though still just interaction at meals, which was okay with me). I had one-on-one teaching and daily "excursions"--and because I went to the right kind of school, these were all in Spanish, too. Independently I started taking lessons in backstrap weaving, and these were in Spanish. If I had gone by myself instead of with another American, I would have been speaking Spanish 24/7. I learned Spanish. It took more work than magic, but my Spanish was better grammatically than my Italian ever was. My teachers pushed me. I said things in multiple tenses without having to think about it much, after a while. (I relied heavily on the present tense in Italian.)

The person I was with was of a more studious nature than I was, and spent more time on homework and flashcards than I would have on my own; I started doing it too, because I didn't want to be left behind. (Or bored. We had a limited number of English books along, and there wasn't much else to do after dinner.) Also, the tourist who speaks the language the best generally does all the talking and comprehending during travels, so I would have been left WAY behind if I'd been even a little behind. That was my first real experience with flashcards for foreign language, and I found them pretty useful, though I wasn't nearly as systematic about it as my companion.

I discovered the world of free and creative language-learning resources, and language-learning blogs, just last year when I dabbled in learning Portuguese after beginning a brief, sweet romance in Brazil.

Then I decided to learn French. I wanted to learn French "for real", the way I'd learned Italian and Spanish "for real". And to me, this meant going somewhere where people speak French and learning it the same way I learned Italian and Spanish.

So... even though I have all of these great free and inexpensive resources available, and examples of people who learn languages without ever going to the country... I keep finding myself trying to insist that I won't be able to learn French without immersion--actual, physical immersion.

Is it true? I don't know. It doesn't have to be true, it's not like it would be impossible mentally, but the question is whether I will actually be able to make myself do it without going somewhere.

I don't have the luxury I used to have of long stretches of time where I could go to another country. Would two weeks be worth it?

I can't afford France.

I've been spoiled by Guatemala. Language lessons are not as cheap anywhere as they are in Guatemala. And it's hard to imagine going back to a classroom-of-foreigners environment after all that delicious individual tutoring.

Because I still have a great feeling of wistfulness for Latin America, and because I can't afford France, I looked into going to French Guiana. Some of you already know the punchline THERE. (Apparently everything in French Guiana is imported, and it's one of the more expensive places to live in the world. It isn't some French-speaking developing nation, the equivalent of Bolivia:Spain.)

And there's Africa. Africa is expensive to get to. It's the version of French I want to learn, so it makes sense to learn there. I just... do I need to do this? Should I? Is it the best use of my money? I started looking at a school in Senegal. It's much more expensive than my school in Guatemala was. Worth it? Necessary? I just don't know.

Insisting on a foreign-immersion environment is just as stick-in-the-mud "right way to learn a language" as any other "must".

But it's still a question I'll probably revisit often.

Nécessaire? Important? Aucune de ces?

Très étrange

I was startled to discover that French has no single word for seventy (or eighty or ninety). WHY? Seriously, why? It seems really strange, and I'm also surprised that I've gotten through this many years of life without having picked up on that fact. Counting is usually an early lesson (as it was here), but I guess both my childhood French enrichment class and my middle school French class only taught me the numbers as far as... well, I think eleven. (I knew fourteen and fifteen for French-king / art history reasons, though not, oddly, sixteen.)

The part of my mind that eagerly seizes on anything easy to do or think about wants to go off on tangents, like hypotheses about how having no word for seventy/eighty/ninety might affect concepts of numbers in people who speak French as a first language...

I haven't been so surprised since I discovered (sitting in a lanchonette in Sao Paulo, reading the daily specials for the week) that Portuguese has no words for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. (They number those days--Monday is "second day" or "segunda-feira", and so on.) Why, when French and Spanish and Italian all have basically the same words for those days? Wouldn't you think the words would have migrated from Spain to Portugal, or vice versa?

How strange Portuguese-speakers must find it when they learn that English has words for those days that have no relationship to number placement.

(I remember being very, very young and deciding that "Tuesday" must be called that because it is the second day, twos-day; but logically, then, Thursday ought to come next, thirds-day, though Friday made a certain kind of sense, five-day.)

I wonder what other surprises French will have for me. During one summer in Italy I had an friend who was bilingual in English and French (American ex-pat family), with Spanish as a third language. He was irritated, and at first disbelieving, about the words "pomodoro", "cibo", and "birra" in Italian, which, he said, did not make any sense.

Je sais comment il se sentait.

Ma Première Leçon

My first lesson was an exercise in frustration. I have to remind myself that in some ways it is ALWAYS this way.

When I started taking Italian, I was with a group of other American college students. All of us who didn't speak any Italian at all were put into an evaluation lesson, though they didn't tell us that was what it was at the time. We spent a couple of hours starting to learn Italian, and then the next day were separated into smaller groups. I was interested and excited to begin, but the teacher thought I was an idiot because when she told us that people usually used "babbo" for "dad" instead of "papa", she asked if anyone knew what "papa" meant. Well, I knew some Spanish. "Potato?" I asked.

My Italian teacher did not know Spanish. She looked at me witheringly and with astonishment that I could be so stupid. "Pope," she said. My classmates, who apparently also did not know Spanish, burst out laughing.

I was put into the "slow learners" class. My roommate, who was practically a linguistic genius and already spoke fluent German, didn't say a word during the intro class (preferring to wait until she knew something to speak, perhaps to avoid withering looks), was also put into the slow learners class. We quickly became the stars of our class, which didn't seem odd to us, but when we were informed by a classmate who had been placed into the "fast learners" class that ours was for "slow" people, we were furious. No one was going to call US slow learners, plus we didn't want to be held back in Italian. We went to our teacher and asked if it was true. "Nina, Wendy," he said calmly, very suave and Milanese, "are you happy with your test score?" We had both just scored 100% on the second weekly test. "Yes," we said, "but-" "The other class took the same test, and no one scored better than either of you."

Well, we loved our Italian teacher anyway, so we shut up after that. After a month when our Italian lessons changed to three days a week and half a day--the rest of the time we spent in art history classes--Nina fought to be moved into the intermediate class with the people who came to Florence already knowing some Italian, and did well there. I wasn't so ambitious (or so talented) and stayed contentedly in the beginner's class, where, to the scorn of the classmate who told us we were slow, all the beginners were mixed together again.

When I went to my first Spanish class in Guatemala (one-on-one, five hours daily), I felt like I would be all right; I'd studied Spanish for three years in high school, and even though the placement test I took in college still had me at the very basic level, that had to be good for something, right? What I found was what most people find when they begin a third language: whenever I tried to speak in Spanish, it came out in Italian. I hadn't even been to Italy for six years, but the words seemed lodged in my brain. I liked my teacher, but I was frustrated at her refusal to speak any English. I'd always heard about that as a language-teaching method, but never experienced it, and it seemed as silly as I'd always thought. "Why talk when you know I can't understand?" I wondered.

We switched Spanish teachers every week, and frustrations were ongoing; they wouldn't let me look at my notes, they spent time on things I didn't care about, they made me write paragraphs when I didn't care anything about being able to write in Spanish. But I had to admit that I was learning Spanish. I got used to their method.

Which brings me to French class yesterday. I can tell that Roosevelt, although he is well-educated and has several other French students, is not as accustomed to teaching a foreign language as the other teachers I've had. In all situations, including my public school experiences, we started out with certain things. Interrogatives. Basic classroom needs ("repeat, please"). Phonics. Roosevelt was a bit scattered, starting an irregular verb, then moving over to vocabulary, then members of the family, and so on. He taught me the forms to answer some questions (Do you have ____? Yes, I have ____.) and seemed surprised when I didn't have the vocabulary to answer the question, even when I had the format down. And I had to ask him how to say "I don't know what you're saying" and "Repeat, please" and "How do you say ___?". (Which was a little slapsticky. "How do I say 'I don't understand'?" I asked. "You don't understand?" he asked, and then he repeated the sentence he'd just said in French. "No, I want to know how to tell you I don't understand." He repeated the sentence again...)

I think things will get a lot better when I know more, but I'm going to go ahead and do some independent study on these phrases that I know I need. (I always say "I don't understand" a LOT.) For the first time I get why so many bloggers are anti-formal instruction. But I do think these lessons are the right choice for me. I can already read a certain amount of French, and primarily using computer resources would probably--because of my natural dislike for anything difficult--just let me keep reading French, and maybe understanding better, but not really speaking.

Je vais persévérer! (Tiens, j'ai appris "je vais" à ma première leçon.)