Last week I joined the CERN Women’s Club. Apparently, this club has been around nearly 50 years and provided activities for women at CERN. Judging by the sign up melee, it seems to be run by the Golden Girls, international edition who assume that your husband works at CERN. (Somewhat annoying for my friends who are actually female physicists.) But, for a 25 chf membership fee, I get access to a host of women-only activities including yoga, swarovski crystal jewelry tutorials, German children’s choir, and various language classes. Since I am awful at Yoga, don’t need to pawn off crystal jewelry, do not have a toddler wishing to sing Geman songs, it was French class for me.
I’m at an advantage here in SwitzerFrance because in middle and high school, I took French classes until my senior year. This all would be more helpful if I didn’t decide to learn Japanese in college, thereby pretty much undoing all my natural French hesitations and accent. I’ve found that for me, language is largely binary. That is, I know my home language (English) and something else. That something else for the past several years has been Japanese. Comprehension isn’t really the issues, it’s speaking. Let me tell you that French people look at you very strange when you say “Arigatou” instead of “Merci.” Having to discipline myself to respond in French has been a challenge, so I here I was, signing up for French Intermediate class.
On our first day, we did introductions in French and then had to take a placement test. Everything, even the instructions, was in French. Still, I was cautiously optimistic as I read the reading comprehension questions. A train announcement. An airport report. A phone conversation.
Sweet, I’ve done all this. I’ve traveled on trains, I’ve been in airports. I eavesdrop on people on the tram all the time. I was ready!
The instructor started the CD. Train annoucement: Le train vadcamzedix huinfe a voie day ennsin man twaznimu.
Omg. WHAT?
This is basically how the rest of the listening comprehension went for me. I got bits here an there like “train” and “track D,” but I had no idea what the train number was or what time it was coming.
The airport announcement was worse; I didn’t get a single word. Desperate, I read the answer choices for the questions, hoping to use my deductive reasoning skills.
What happened to the airplane?
- The airplane is delayed
- The airplane is broken and needs to be fixed
- The airplane has been changed
What should the people do?
- They need to retrieve their luggage
- They should go to the new gate
- They need to wait until the flight is ready to board
Test aside, talk about a stressful situation at an airport. All you get is that there is something wrong with the plane. I could imagine myself doing the completely wrong thing. Well, actually, you’d probably be in an airport and watch others around you who did understand what happened and follow their lead, but here, in my french test, no such luck. I mean, I had no idea what had happened to the plane.
The rest of the pre-test was similarly frustrating. I mean, yes, I get my French isn’t the best ever, but I understood the entire passage on a princess crowned in 2003, but could not answer the question “How does the author feel about the princess? How do you know?” I read the passage twice more and realized that the three or four vocabulary words I didn’t know held the key to answering the question. So, I wrote, “If I knew what xxx meant, I probably could tell you.”
I still don’t know how I did on the test, but it couldn’t have been good.
Bonjour!