French Training

It was a long week for me in Spa. I feel like I made a lot of progress on my French, but I still have a long way to go if I ever want to have real conversations that don't involve me saying "pouvez vous repeter?" (can you repeat?) after every sentence. I have a limited vocabulary and grammatical rules are quite difficult, but as one of the professors always said, "petit a petit" (little by little). Now that I'm back in Lux, it's time to 1) keep studying all the materials they provided me with, and 2) enlist my French-speaking co-workers to join me for lunch so they can be beaten down by my broken French and correct me until I get it right.

I do have one entertaining story from the week that unfortunately sounds very familiar and made me realize that, regardless of the progress I was making, I could not speak French in a stressful situation.

After all of the classes and evening activities (the last of which included drinking beer and watching the France-Ireland futbol match until 11:30ish - it was not a "school-sponsored" event so we might have been speaking English, too) wrapped up on Wednesday night, I ended up back in my hotel room, checking e-mail and surfing the internet. At 1am, I decided go out to my car for something (sound familiar yet?). Knowing full well that the door to the room did not lock without the key, and assuming the sliding glass door at the entrance to the hotel never locked, I left the room with only my car key. As you can imagine, when I tried to re-enter the hotel, I found that the sliding glass door was not always unlocked. (Note: The key in question was a real metal key - not a plastic key-card - so I would never have expected it to open the sliding glass door. It, of course, did.)

Luckily, there was a phone next to the door, but the man on the other end apparently couldn't hear me when I spoke. After I called back 3-4 times to play the "how loud can I scream into the phone" game, he stopped answering. This made me nervous, as I was afraid that he simply turned off his ringer and went back to sleep. As I was beginning to resign myself to the fact that I would be sleeping in my car for a few hours, the man drove up in his truck.

As I mentioned, I still have a hard time speaking French under pressure and the fact that it was after 1am definitely didn't help. Nor did the fact that the guy was not happy to be there and was frustrated that someone called from the phone and then didn't say anything. I got out a few words (not necessary the correct ones, but I seemed to get the point across) and explained that my key was in my room, I didn't know the door would lock, and I actually was talking into the phone, but it didn't work.

If nothing else, this provided an entertaining story for me to tell my private lesson teacher (in French, mind you) on Thursday. She was quite entertained and had me role-play with her so I could learn the things I could/should have said. It was a lot easier with a clear head and a cordial counter-party.