Fluency Update: Month 7

Tatech and Myself

I'm back on the blogosphere! After three and a half months of being locked out of my account I can finally blog about my adventures again! I have toooo many posts to catch up on...

As for a general update, I am now more than half way through my second semester in Bordeaux, France. I no longer live with a French host family but I do live in a pretty great apartment in centre ville. I live with the beautiful Cara from UCLA, my artist landlord, and six cats. Yes, six cats.

Now for the fluency update:

Since one of my main goals in coming to France was to become fluent in the lovely language, I thought it would be a good idea to do this Fluency Update thing to regularly check in on my progress. However, since I hadn't had my blog for the past 4 months, there hasn't been anything to force me to sit down and take time to reflect on this topic. That being said, it's been a long time since I really thought about fluency.

There was a period of time where I was hanging out with a group of French people but after a while, the friendship kind of faded when we realized we didn't share the same interests. There are some other French people I am slowly getting to know, but they all know English. So basically, I've been hanging out only with English speakers and exclusively speaking English. Because of this, classes in French have been overwhelming. Teachers speak so quickly that it is impossible to follow. They seriously slur all those verbs, prepositions, and negations so the importance of the sentence is lost. But, I guess English speakers do the same thing too.

Despite the above, there definitely has been some improvement. I am now able to eavesdrops and understand casual blabber, I can follow most conversations and participate in them, and sometimes my French is automatic and I don't need to do any translation in my head. As it turns out, all those weird sounds I would hear then panic because I thought they were important words were exactly that, weird sounds (the French have a large collection of these). Also, my accent must have improved because shopkeepers and waiters rarely ever respond to me in English anymore.

Since I really don't speak French that much, there have only been three moments worthy of boosting my language ego: two hours of hanging out one-on-one with a French girl, a long group discussion  with some adorable French girls, and my evening of conversation with a moroccan nomad from the Sahara'wi tribe (the interesting story about that to come in a later post!).

My time spent in Morocco actually showed me how much I've improved. Since Morocco is a French colony, everyone speaks French and since Moroccans find Westerners intriguing, everyone wanted to talk to me! I'm pretty sure I used more French there then I had in France the past few months! I feel like moroccan people are much more patient than the French when it comes to listening to a foreigner speak the language so I think that helped a bit.

Anyway, I will try to update on time next month but I will be in Berlin so let's hope I find some wifi!