J'apprends le français

How long is it since you learned a language? For most of us, the languages we know were the ones we learned way back in primary school. So if you're like me, you won't even remember how it felt to learn a language. The grammar, the prose, the verbs, the sentence constructions etc are sooo trivial that we don't even notice the way we use it. If you know Hindi, you'd realize like many foreign languages, even our good own Hindi has "gender" for things. Aam ka ped, neend ki goli - ok you get it. Its sooo imbibed in us, we dont realize that its monumental for someone who doesn't know the language.

So, I started learning French out of pure boredom by myself a couple of weeks ago before the brainwave that I could actually "sit through" a French 101 course at school struck me. However I kept at the self-learning and built a cute little vocabulary. Ofcourse anyone who knows French knows that NOTHING is pronounced the way its written or vice versa. The only saving grace is that the sentence construction is pretty similar to English and once you build your vocab collection of verbs, you will be failr good with practice. Ofcourse learning the language and practicing in front of your computer is one thing and speaking it with a native is a whole another thing.

Today was the first French 101 class. The instructor was a Frenchman, a PhD student was a sweet guy who spoke English with the easiest-to-distinguish French accent (sorry to disappoint you - he was NOT cute looking!) And so after a couple of sentences from him, we were all to introduce ourselves in French (if we knew it) or atleast try. When my turn came, I took a deep breath and started out "Je m'apelle Jaya" and so on. And to my own surprise I did fairly well. Except that though I knew my age in French, I was shy to pronounce it! Overall it was a good first class. It gave me that flutter which I hadn't felt in sooo long.. The feeling of knowing absolutely NOTHING while you sit in the first class. That too its a romance language... how bad can it be? With no crediting to worry about, this one should be a breeze. In all my excitement, I bought my first textbook in the US for this class!

On the "downside", I donno how long I expect to stick around here to do justice to this class.. But for what its worth, from the "Je ne comprends pas", its slowly becoming "Je comprends" :-)

Until later, Au revoir!