"In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French ...

... I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language". - Mark Twain

My French is coming along OK, still, I have to say I am a little dissapointed with my progress. How many people have you met who, for instance, can speak passable German and they wave off their abilities to "having spent a year in Hamburg"? I have been here 7.5 months now and I really am not on my way to fluency. I get around alright and can give directions and talk to the grocer, but once the speed gets ramped up, or the speakers move out of my narrowly defined zone of comfortable vocab my little brain gives up. My biggest impediment is that I am really not immersed. Most of my day is spent at the institute, and although the secretaries prefer francais, I converse with most of my collegues in english.

I have been taking a 2x a week class, which has been a dissapointment. There just seems like no meaningful structure to it. The chapters in our book are organized around things like "The Beach". We spent a whole week learning words about the beach and saying various complicated phrases that are also ostensibley about the beach. Here, the other problem is actually the immersion aspect. The teachers don't speak english with us and even if they did speak it well, they would insist on answering question in french. This is supposed to get us to jump started thinking in french, but it is really counter productive when one is confused about some simple thing and they explain it in rapid fire french ostensibley using much of the very same grammar that you are confused about! It is not their fault though. It is just that the method is poor. The human brain's language center is not organized around "Words and Grammar for the Beach", "Words and Grammar for the Airport" etc. etc.

So I have been looking for a better way. Nicola had mentioned a series of CDs by a guy named Michel Thomas. Although much of it was likely not true, this language teacher to the stars claimed to have had a remarkable life. He was born in Poland, fought with the French resisitance in WWII, was tortured by Klaus Barbie of the SS, etc. etc. and then moved to Beverly Hills and opened up a language institute. He reportedly spoke 10 languages. Nicola raves about his Italian and German CDs, in which he claims to have a special method to "teach you the fundmentals of a language in a few hours." I have been skeptical.

A few weeks back, I was bemoaning my rate of French progress on a ride to a British cycling acquantance and he mentioned Thomas as well. In general I am skeptical of tapes, as I'd been down this route before with Italian tapes. (At one point in my life I was driving every few weeks between LA and the Bay Area. I thought to pass the time by listening to language tapes. Seeing as everyone in the world basically speaks English, I figured I could choose whatever language I wanted. So I picked some random Italian tapes. 180 minutes. 'Good', I thought, 'I will be able to listen to it twice through on the 6 hour trip.' Ten x 6 hour trips later I had made it only through the first 10 minutes of that tortured vile thing. It was horrible and I remember nothing.).

But my cycling friend was singing it's praises. David said, "Very few thing in life, live up to their hype, but this does." Hmmm.... OK still a bit skeptical I bit anyway and ordered the CDs from Amazon.uk and they got here today.

And they are good.

I listed to the first hour. Most language tapes insist of teaching you lists of verb conguagtion or have you parrot long complicated expressions, the components of which are never explained. Unless one divines it oneself, one never understands the structure or comes up with simple rules for translation. Here, Thomas's goal is to give you some intuition as to WHY the sentences are contructed in some way. The goal is simply to get you speaking phrases quickly, so he picks phrases which can be easily translated in structure and form into english. Thomas gives you the logic of WHY the phrases are constructed a certain way. And one of the things he does at least initially, is to use french words that have close english equivalents to get one comfortable with french sentence structure using those, instead of teaching you a lot of new vocab at the same time. I am not sure I agree with him when he reassures us by saying "English is nothing more than French pronounced poorly", but I understand his point. Except for 3 counter examples, every single '-tion' word in english means the same thing in french. All '-al' words in english can have their ending replace by -ique' in french. Etc. etc. This is certainly better than being presented with a list of words and having to figure out such a rule yourself. And the pace is relaxed and hassle free. I am hooked.

Off to Milan(o) this weekend. Report on my return.