I've been through big honking pooploads of language classes since arriving in Madrid nine years ago. Far, far more than it ever occurred to me I'd find myself wading through, both intensive studies (4 hours daily) and evening classes (1-1/2 or 2 hours, 2-3 nights a week). At four different schools, each one providing a distinctly different experience.
(Why so many? I wanted to learn the language and knew I wouldn't without the structure, information and push that classes provide. Did it add up to a pile o' shekels? Yes, and I consider it cash well tossed about. I wouldn't speak Spanish as decently as I do without all that classwork and class time. I wouldn't have met a lot of great and/or interesting people without all that. And I sure as hell would not have passed, much less signed up to take, the DELE exam.
I'm not sure when it was that I decided that learning to speak some French would be a good thing. Maybe after passing through Paris and Montreal a few times. Maybe after hearing how amazing French sounds when spoken by representatives of the female gender. Maybe after spending a weekend in a place where almost no one spoke either of the two languages I can babble. Somewhere in there. I'd love to be versed in a bunch of languages, and maybe if I'd discovered that desire early on I might now have that capability. My life might have taken a whole different direction, getting international a whole lot earlier than it did. 'Cause something I've discovered during the last few years is that multilingual people are heroes to me. Not that I want to be a hero. More like I want to be able to spend more time around women who sound wildly sensuous, and I want to understand what the hell they're saying.
So. Classes.
When I was here (meaning Montreal) in June, I posted a Craig's List ad, trawling for people to hang with, to explore the city with (platonic only, thank you very much). One of the individuals who responded was a woman who was at that time doing intensive French classes at a local language school. I checked out their webpage, it seemed all right. The woman liked the classes, and in researching other schools, none of them looked to have any advantages over this one. When I returned to the city three weeks ago, I hopped the Metro, found the place, signed myself up.
Total beginners -- like me -- can only start classes on the very first day of one of the school's four-week sessions. Which meant, in my case, Monday of last week. The day arrived, I crawled out of bed real damn early, was at the school by 8:30 -- because that first day they force everyone to go through placement testing. Didn't matter that I let them know I had no experience in French, couldn't speak it, that the test would be one big freakin' waste of time. Everyone has to do it.
Did it, answering maybe three out of nearly forty questions. Handed it in. Waited, along with thirty or more others wanting to begin classes but being forced to sit around. Once the tests had been collected and looked through, they came and dragged us out one by one. Because we all had to go through an oral exam. Didn't matter that I assured them I had no experience with French, couldn't speak it, blah-de blah-de. They sat me down with a 30ish architect from Turkey who also couldn't speak it, we both told the nice woman who talked to us in French that we didn't know what she was saying, couldn't answer her questions. She eventually gave in and switched to English. Which is when we found out there would be no classes on that first day of classes. We'd have to go away for a couple of hours, entertain ourselves, then come back for a group Q&A with the director of the school and a walking tour. All of that could have been taken care of with printed material.
Which meant: Day 1 of classes = a wash.
[continued in next entry]
España, te echo de menos
rws 6:45 PM [+]
Comments:
The sound you mean is part of Castillan (Castellano) Spanish, and yep, I do. For some reason, it's always sounded and felt more natural to me than, say, the Mexican version. Go figure.
Post a Comment