Wednesday, October 5, 2011

CLASSES

I’ve been here for well over a month – which means I’m over a quarter of a way done living in France.  Sad, happy, and straight up weird.  I have had spouts of homesickness but overall I have been extremely happy here.  I feel as if I am taking advantage of what is offered and have had a good mix of traveling yet experiencing what Grenoble has to offer.  I’ve gotten to meet some really cool French people as well as international students and learn a bit about French history and classic literature. 

One of the things I’ve been meaning to write about is my classes here.  I’ve realized that I’ve completely kept you guys in the dark about any school work I am doing, which hasn’t been much so far but will increase dramatically starting this week.  I am studying at CUEF, a branch of the Université de Grenoble.  This is a section for international students who want to learn French.  I unfortunately am not at a high enough level to take classes with other French students just yet.  Most of the students in my class are either like me, here for a semester, or plan to stay here in Grenoble to finish their college degree.  I give credit to those peeps because I’m scared enough trying to learn French here for a semester, I can’t even imagine being at my level and having faith that at the end of the year I would be at a high enough level to study a topic in depth.  Being here has made me miss the enriching classes at Bowdoin.  I am just not at a level of French where I can discuss information at a high level.  I miss that.  It’s annoying to have to work on grammar exercises and have surface level conversation all the time!

I am taking 5 classes – history, literature, translation, politics, and grammar.  My grammar class is 12 hours a week whereas all of the others are 1.5 or 2.  I really lucked out because my grammar teaching is amazing.  I spend a lot of time with her so it’s great that it feels productive; I’ve heard from a lot of the other kids in our program that their teachers aren’t nearly as good.  We do weekly dictées, super short but useful grammar exercises, listening comprehension, repetition exercises, and a lot of class discussion.  I only have one piece of written work a week.  I feel as if in all of my French classes thus far, I’ve never worked in a way that is so well-rounded.  In the past the classes have been made up of a lot of writing and grammar exercises and not enough of the oral comprehension and discussion.  I can write at a much higher level than I can talk or understand.  I’ve also realized that my previous classes presented oral comprehension material at too high a level.  I can understand French just at a slower level with less extreme vocab.   In these classes, we usually watched random, weird movies where the French was spoken way to fast to understand. 

Some of my favorite assignments here have been listening to news stories in French and answering follow-up questions, researching current news and presenting in front of the class (I chose two stories: the first female Prime Minister in Denmark getting elected as well as the women in Saudi Arabia acquiring the ability to vote and run for municipal elections), and watching the L’Auberge Espagnole.  After the movie we did a scenario in class where we sat at two different tables and each pretended to be a group of students choosing a housemate.  We had to come up with questions, ask them to a couple of our classmates, and then choose who we wanted to live with us.  We all had to choose one bizarre question – which ranged from food to sex.  It was pretty hilarious.

In my class there are students from China, Japan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Africa, and Russia.  The accents of all the students are atrocious (including me).  Therefore understanding each other is challenging, especially considering the common language is ONLY French for a lot of the students.  I’ve also noticed a lot of differences in the way Americans learn French and our patterns of mistakes in comparison to other international students.   Americans approach phrases differently and enunciate each word separately, whereas the other students don’t pause between all of the individual words.  They are generally better at keeping the flow of sentences.  They also do weird things with the vowels.  For example, one Korean girl in my class says the e’s at the end of words very strangely.  For example with the word presidence, she adds a random ay sound at the end.  This is a pretty common pattern for a lot of the other Asian students as well.  Perhaps they get the normal e mixed up with the é? 

I’ve also realized I take for granted knowing or at least having a general knowledge of how vowels sound.  Those sounds seem to be much more challenging for non-American students.  In class the different pronunciations of the word linguistique stuck out to me.  The ui sound is very tricky for the foreign students but because it is the same in English, I can easily pronounce the word. 

Our teacher told us a funny story about how she was learning English in school they made the students practice speaking with a sucker in their mouth so they wouldn’t enunciate the sounds as strongly.   No wonder I have such a time enunciating in French!

International school is so interesting!  There is just so much to learn from the other students both in and out of class.  Keep in mind the stereotypes I mentioned may only apply to my class.  All the same, I thought I’d share my observations!

Here’s a great song.  Listen to it.  So good.
part of Universite de Grenoble

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