Je viens de finir ma première année d’apprentissage du français! I’ve been using Duo Lingo, which I will tell you is fun to use and helpful. Progress has been slow: I knew enough to know how to write that I’ve just done something, that finir ma première année is better than terminer mon première an, because I plan to continue to year two, and that you have to say du français instead of de français. But while I had learned apprendre, I hadn’t yet learned apprentissage, so I had to look it up. The program does a good job of building up vocabulary, though some of the choices are strange (why was it important to learn chouette and gui so soon?). You learn the grammar by doing. One thing that is interesting to me is to see how much of the basic structure of English is like the basic structure of French. We say, “I am going to learn French,” and they say, “Je vais apprendre l’anglais.” We say “I have studied French,” they say, “J’ai étudié l’anglais.” Of course, they also say, “Je suis venu,” but I suppose in old-fashioned English, you might say, “I am come.” Also, there just has to be a deep connection between German and French, even though they come from different branches of the language tree: “Ich habe studiert,” but “Ich bin gekommen.” I’m sure all this is trivial to those of you with more than two languages, and you should feel free to remind me about proto-Indo-European or whatever. But it’s still fun to experience.

Speaking and listening are harder for me than reading and writing. Maybe the hardest part is the pronunciation. I think I have got the gutteral r sound pretty decently, but the vowels are wicked hard. It’s curious that when foreigners come to America we delight in their accents when they speak English but that some foreigners seem not to delight in our accents when we travel and try to speak the local language. So I am working on it, but I am more or less resigned to thinking that when I try out some French “in the field,” I will sound like what I am.