Last Monday was fairly miserable relative to my other days in Paris thus far; the rain, the back-to-back French classes, the continuing frustrations with the bank... what a difference a week makes! Although today's weather wasn't perfect (in fact, it was quite bipolar, going from cloudless to downpour on multiple occasions), today was a much better Monday. I didn't feel nearly as exhausted after my four hours of class in French; in fact, I came home feeling quite energized - perhaps emotionally more than physically. I don't know where this upbeat feeling came from - perhaps I still have endorphins left from my mega run yesterday? It helped that I had a nice start to the day in the form of a breakfast hosted by the law school administration for those of us doing the JD/Master's program. Only two of us ended up going, but it was very nice to spend some time more informally and intimately with the people who send us emails and several of our professors. (Of course, pain au chocolat is also always a good way to start the day.) Given that I'm used to being in schools that place a very high emphasis on community, I really appreciated this small effort to make us feel welcome.
They mentioned one thing this morning which leads me into the main topic for this post: that they'd been more selective this year in terms of the French level of the American students. (This was offered in direct response to my saying "my French really isn't very good; my Spanish is much better.") I really don't think they could have assessed me that thoroughly (after all, all they have to go on are two essays), but this made me feel a bit better nonetheless. Maybe this triggered something in my sub-conscious thought because as I sat through the next two classes, I noticed the tiniest bit of improvement in my understanding and in my writing. I find my fellow French-speaking students the most difficult to understand; sometimes this is an effect of volume more than anything else, but often it's a combination of volume, speed, enunciation, and general level of complexity. Somehow, I understood more of what my classmates said during my first class, even understanding better certain students who have previously been unintelligible to me. I am by no means certain that I will maintain this level of comprehension in the future, but it is very nice to feel a bit of improvement! Likewise, taking notes in class has been a constant reminder of how much French I've forgotten in 10 years - particularly in terms of very small details like spelling. I am constantly putting accents where they don't belong or forgetting them when they do. Setting the language of Word to French helps with this, and today I finally started to feel like I was avoiding some of the mistakes I'd made several times over the last few weeks. I found myself adding accents to the appropriate letters and generally spelling with more accuracy.
I feel really bogged down by these small details. I am a perfectionist in most aspects of life, and it just occurred to me that this has always been the case for me linguistically. As a toddler, at the time when my peers had started saying random words and constantly chattering in gibberish, I remained utterly silent, famously waiting until I was able to utter a complete sentence (asking my dad if he'd enjoyed his sandwich) before I finally began to speak. I think, 26 years later, I'm now doing the same thing in French. I have generally avoided engaging in prolonged conversations in French (with the exception of a couple of nights spent with French people) and have instead limited myself to one-sentence answers or questions whenever possible. While I cannot dispute that I would improve more quickly, at least in speaking, if I were to practice more, I do feel as of today that I have made progress and that perhaps, overall, my somewhat impractical focus on quality over quantity is starting to pay off.
I've spent most of the evening studying French in some capacity. I bought a book over the weekend that seemed like a beach-type read, and I read about 30 pages of it tonight. I don't understand 100% of what I read, but I can get the general idea and a solid number of details as well, and I read pretty quickly. (My pronunciation out loud still sucks, but inside my head the words sound much better and flow easily.) I looked up a few words here and there. (My favorite was "foireux", or "half-assed", as in "I made a half-assed attempt to answer a question about economic policy in French this morning." True story.)
I've also been struggling to think in French rather than Spanish. The foreign language part of my brain has been set so firmly to Spanish for the last 10 years that, even after four weeks of being in Paris, I think of things first in Spanish rather than French about 85% of the time. I then find myself fumbling for the French translation of a Spanish word. I finally had the brilliant idea tonight to make a list of key words in Spanish and write down their French equivalents - basic words that I've needed at some point and have been unable to recall quickly or at all, such as "sometimes" (I've thought of "a veces" about 20 times without being able to come up with the French "parfois.") I really think this list will facilitate faster thinking in French!
Finally, I grabbed my French grammar book (which, much to my chagrin, had accumulated a not insignificant layer of dust whilst it has sat on my desk practically untouched since my arrival) and read through all 12 or 13 chapters on verbs (with the exception of the subjunctive because, let's face it, that requires its own session). It was great to reinforce the structures I already knew and to reacquaint myself with a few irregular verb rules here and there. And this exercise provided me with the one moment of the day that really proved to me that my French is starting to come back, slowly being released from the innermost depths of my long-term memory: for days I've been thinking about how to say "I ran" in French. The verb is courir, and generally the past participles of -ir verbs end with -i, but for some reason I have kept thinking "j'ai couri is not right. It is j'ai couru. But that doesn't make sense; -u is the ending for an -re verb. Courir is a regular verb." I actually squealed when I saw this very thing listed in my grammar book - the past participle of courir is indeed couru. I know that sounds stupid and so minor, but seriously, I've been thinking about this for days (without remembering to check), and the only explanation is that this tiny piece of information that I'd learned over 10 years ago has, like a bubble rising to the surface of water, finally worked its way back into my conscious memory. I feel much more hopeful about my language abilities in the near and long-term future!
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