Friday, July 4, 2008

Week one down!!

Well...I made it. Week one is over and I survived.

Today was a half day, we started at 9 and were done at 1pm. I'm so glad too. The afternoons are mostly conversation and I just feel like my time would be better spent trying to learn the main irregular verbs and the present tense. We are having a "petite exam" on Monday on the present, future proche, future simple and imperfect tenses. Yeah...sure. I am not even sure I can tell you when you use the imperfect. At least I have Cyr here to help me with the millions of questions I have.

After class I was all stressed out and ready for a small meal and a large beer. Some of the girls asked if I wanted to go out to lunch with them so I said yes. Apparently I don't even understand English now, because they were going to the cafeteria. Hullo...je booz-wa un grande bier! When they started to walk in I said about as much, they looked very sad and I excused myself to walk to the train station to head over to O's house for an afternoon of chatting and a secondary lesson. The more I thought about the last hour of class the more I got upset. I needed to just clear my mind. I saw a cafe that was filled with people all over the age of 65 and headed to the bar. I ordered a beer, he got out the 25cl glass and I told him, "Non Monsieur, s’il vous plaît." He totally got it. I had my huge 50cl beer and sat there dazed for about 20 or 30 minutes. I pretended to read the paper and just looked at the pictures, I pretended to conjugate verbs and wrote whatever. I tried to name all the new teams in the Tour de France this year without looking at the paper. I did everything but study and think about that last dreaded hour when apparently (as I learned from O) I was learning to use pro-nouns in the past tense. I had no idea...I was just following the pattern of the example sentences. No clue. Really? Passe compose?? Wow, I rock. I didn't know I could do that.

After chatting with O about life in general I felt like I could tackle the French language once more. We worked for a little over an hour and I feel like I really learned some of the concepts. I think I might no do so bad on Monday when we have our little verb tense test. I might not do super well, but I bet I do a heck of a lot better than I did last Monday. Life isn't so bad after all. It was a hard day, but it ended great, and I have a new friend.

And hey - thanks to all of you that have posted comments, you have no idea how good it makes me feel to read the little notes you leave me!!

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!!! They sure don't do much here for the 4th....

3 comments:

Ksam said...

It's the little victories in life my dear!

Justin said...

oh susan we would get along just fine... I am firm believer that every French lesson should end with a 50cl beer!

for the imperfect remember it is for when you was/were doing something.

ex: yesterday I was cooking (imperfect) dinner when I dropped (passée composé) the spoon.

Anonymous said...

Don't feel guilty about taking little decompression pitstops, you need those to keep going!