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French Is for Girls: Why Men Don’t Learn Languages

What Learning A Female Dominated Language has Taught Me

Ryan Frawley
Language is Life

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Photo by Francais a Londres on Unsplash

I’ve been taking an online French class since the spring, after the dismal failure of my lifetime membership with Rosetta Stone to get me anywhere near understanding what the people around me are saying. For a while, I had it pretty sweet.

The classes are kept deliberately small, giving each of us more instruction time. And dropout rates for online learning being what they are (only around 15% of Open University students graduate with a qualification), they got smaller.

When I started my class, it was me, the teacher, and two American women. We were briefly joined by a German woman living in France who only lasted a couple of weeks. Then, one of the Americans dropped out. Then, for a long time, it was just me and one other student.

It was great. Sometimes, the other student couldn’t make it to class, and so I had a private lesson for the price of a group one. Even when she was around, with only two students, we got plenty of time to learn vocabulary and conjugate verbs and wade through the tangled thickets of the French language, guessing at counterintuitive spelling and trying to wrap our Anglophone lips around words like ‘millefeuille’.

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