Etiene learns stuff: II — French
The Part I of this series is about English and can be found here: https://medium.com/etiene/my-language-journey-part-i-1d8c71d51077
After I was good enough with English, I spent some time exploring. By this time I was in university studying Music. I downloaded some material online in German. I got some French textbooks from a friend. Listened to some CDs. Then I started working in tech, got some money, and decided to spend it on a language course.
French was close to Portuguese and German was close to English. I figured French was closer to Portuguese than German was to English, and, with English being a second language, it would take me longer to learn German. I was finding German incredibly difficult and I also had a limited amount of money. How would I get the most out of my buck? I started taking some French classes then, but they were quite slow. Two hours a week makes it for a very long progression, but it was enough to get me very excited.
After some months, I was making a career change, dropping out from Music and start Information Systems university. That meant I would have a gap between the two universities. So I took all the money I had, which at the time could have paid for driving lessons, my license, and a shitty car, and spent on a 2-month trip in Europe. That trip involved one month doing an intensive French course in Lyon, then another month visiting some places. That was the first time I traveled alone and the first time I took a flight to outside of my country. My parents obviously didn’t want me to go, at first, because I could get lost, kidnapped, lose my phone, get ill etc. But after lots of talking they encouraged me a lot, because it was an incredible opportunity, of course. I still don’t know how to drive until today.
This was the first time my progress in a language was officially evaluated. There’s a thing called CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), and most language schools have an assessment for that. By the time I finished my course, they concluded I had finished the A1 level and was at the beginning of A2.
When I got back home and started uni though, we had to take a certain number of optional modules that could be pretty much anything, not necessarily related to my major. It could be some entrepreneurial thing, photography, sports, more math, whatever was available to other majors. I took German. I could’ve taken French II or III right? Yes, but I took German. I’ll leave my road to German to a future post, though.
By this time I applied to a governmental program called Ciência sem Fronteiras that gave fully funded study abroad scholarships for students in exact sciences and research. First I had to pick a country, then apply to universities in that country. Of course, you are also required to speak a certain level of the language of the country or of the language that the course is given. I didn’t want to go to an English speaking country because they were too expensive. Should I have any extra costs not covered by the scholarship, I wouldn’t be able to pay and I would be in a pretty bad situation. The second reason was that I was extremely interested in the culture aspect and in learning one more language too.
Being very frank, my first option would have been Germany. But my very basic level of German would not have been enough. My level of French was very beginner, but maybe, just maybe, if I studied very hard, I could get the minimum required at the exam and count on my CR (the Brazilian equivalent of GPA, which I happened to have at a very high level at the time) to help getting me through. So then I started a self-learning journey of French.
During this time I was broke because I was focusing on uni, so I began by finding free content on the internet. However, I soon realised that the quality of the free content I could find was not very good. At this time, Duolingo and a couple of other free apps already existed, but not only my phone was quite shitty, I also wasn’t getting enough value out of them given I already had some knowledge of French. There were plenty of tools to get it started, but a void of tools for helping me get into the next level.
I bought a textbook, one of those “French in 3 months” kind of thing and worked a little bit everyday in the bus on my way to class. In a couple of months I went through all the book.
Simultaneously, I also tried to find TV shows in French that I could watch. The first barrier that I found was that French content was not readily available as it was for English. While you can find anything in English on the internet, the same is not true for other languages. Although there were a couple of French movies on Netflix, none of the series were French dubbed (Netflix hadn’t launched on France yet) and the movies were extremely difficult to understand, which provided me no value for learning. Fortunately, I came across a French television channel for kids called Gulli. I did have to use a VPN to be able to access the content, but otherwise it was excellent. The thing with kids content is that the level of difficulty of the language is not hard. Secondly, cartoons are quite descriptive of what is going on, a character will point to a mountain and say “Look, a mountain!!”. The style of communication of content directed at kids makes it an excellent resource for language learning and I had a great time rewatching Pokémon.
When the time for the language exam for the exchange program came, I was much better than before, and although I was still quite a beginner, I was able to score the minimum necessary, B1.
Given that and other factors such as my CR, I was qualified for the program and I was sent to a partner engineering university in Brest, France, where I took 2 months of intensive French classes before the courses in Software Engineering started.
The problem when I first arrived there, was that I realised my French was very very poor. I had a paper saying my French was “B1” but I couldn’t understand anyone. Especially the folks from the deep Brittany who had a thicker accent. I was scared shitless for the beginning of the semester because the lectures would be in French. On my first week of class I didn’t know if I couldn’t understand anything of Advanced Partial Differential Equations because of Calculus or because of French.
Luckily everyone there was super friendly, and although I didn’t have many friends in university apart from other Brazilian exchange students, I had many friends outside of uni and, later, a boyfriend, who were local. With a heavy contact with people who spoke only French and the lectures being in French, I was speaking very well in about 6 months. Being immersed does a big difference not only in the social aspect outside, but on online content too. While I was there, Netflix had finally launched in France and I could easily access their French archive. This was very useful for watching series that I’d want to see anyway, with the audio dubbed in French (Jessica Jones), and other that were originally already in French (Marseille). By this time I was finally at the level of enjoying French cinema in the original language, and with the help of some friends I got access to some true classics.
I ended up finishing my studies there and not going back to Brazil. With this additional time and all the workload like writing emails and reports in French, I was fluent way before the end. I even ended up writing two chapters for a technical book, which was a massive challenge but extremely rewarding. I felt I reached boss level.
Being in France was the first time I was truly living abroad in a different culture and language. During this time I observed two main things about their language:
- It is very elitist, the difference between intellectual French and street French is abysmal. This difference exists in other languages I know too, but I was impressed at how people code switch and how large this difference is in French. Registry is very very important. It is so important to society that people try to impress others through language usage. For example, a man could use more pompous language to try to impress a woman. In Brazilian Portuguese that would just sound ridiculous. You would normally want to approach the language of the other person and toot your horn with something else such as talking about a successful career, for example. In France, you also must address professors with “vous”, instead of “tu”. While this was understandable, it was very different from my own culture, where we send hugs at the end of emails to everyone.
- Speaking French is not really speaking Portuguese with French words and grammar. There is a French way of thinking and phrasing that is very different than what I had seen in Portuguese and English. To me, it sounded very negative, sometimes sad, with a tendency to unnecessarily embellish sentences in a non-objective way. For example, it is way more frequent to say that something is not bad than to say something is nice. Some expressions don’t even have a common non-negative form. You say something is not expensive (pas cher), instead of saying it is cheap (bon marché/économique). Because of this, some expressions can be extremely confusing, such as “ce n’est pas terrible”. Firstly because “terrible” is already a contronym, it means terrible and terrific at the same time depending on usage, and then you have a common expression which is the negation of that. For the curious, the meaning of “pas terrible” is something like “not that great”, but commonly used to express “very bad”.
Resources and tips:
- (Advanced) France24 live news channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL0sEdVJs3U
- (Intermediary) Arte Junior, news for kids with short videos every day: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXV7LUI7G1MaKRN18yQ5y7Q
Arte is a very interesting TV channel with some very nice content and you can find lots of their videos on youtube in either French or German.
- (Beginner~Advanced) TV5 also has lots of nice content for plenty of different levels of the language: http://apprendre.tv5monde.com/
- (Beginner) Language apps such as Duolingo, Memrise, Busuu, etc.
- (Intermediary) Norman fait des vidéos is a comedy youtube channel that I find quite funny and many of the videos are subtitled in English: https://www.youtube.com/user/NormanFaitDesVideos
- (Intermediary) One thing that I found quite useful was to try to learn new things that were not the language, but do it in the target language. So if I was looking up a make up tutorial or cooking recipe on youtube, I would look it up in French and battle my way through it.
- (Intermediary) Another good resource for facilitated reading are comic books. Some recommendations are: Poulet aux prunes, Astérix, Tintin, Gaston, Marsupilami. Also if you didn’t know already, The Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs) are originally from Belgium, so the originals are also in French.
- (Beginner~Intermediary) One thing that you can’t miss if you’re studying French is reading The Little Prince also in its original, in French.
- (Advanced+) Or, if your level is very advanced, one good way to get really expert is reading some of the classics on philosophy such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Foucault and others. The list is big and there is no shortage of content in this area. You can also find many speeches and debates on youtube, one of my favorites is this debate between Foucault and Chomsky. While Chomsky speaks English, Foucault argues in French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
- (Advanced+) If philosophy is not your genre, you can also read other classics such The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Les Misérables, Journey to the Center of the Earth and many others in the original. Many of these have versions for kids, which is great if your level is not advanced yet. Here is a list of french classics: http://www.laculturegenerale.com/classiques-litterature-francaise/
