Les cours du soir de français

I've been taking evening French courses for about two months now at a language school in Lyon. They take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, conveniently the same days I teach English. Those are exhausting days, but I come home feeling great.

The teacher, Sandra from Nice, is excellent. She's got all the grammar explanations, can throw up phonetic symbols on the board in a clin d'oeil, and manages to involve everyone in the class. I think back to the days when I taught adults at night in Spain and how much more "off" I was as a teacher. My adult class was sometimes the fifth class I taught in a row, the preceding ones being those of eight year olds and indifferent adolescents or "ados" as the French call them. I never had any energy for my adults and they didn't seem to have any in return. Fueled with bottles of Coca Light, I'd try to make conversation for as long as possible until we had to get to the lesson in the book.

However my adults seemed content to simply converse and tell me about Spain. In my French class, Tuesdays are dedicated to grammar and Thursdays are set aside for conversation.

The class dynamic is similar to that of the first day of class as freshman high school students. Everyone waits en masse outside the door until Sandra arrives, greeting each other politely, then putting their heads down, taking phones out to text or check the time, waiting for the door to be unlocked. This happens every time. Sometimes a group of Spanish speakers form in the corner and clutter away in espangnol. At one point, there were two Hungarians who conversed quietly while we waited.

Mostly people don't say much because the class changes every week. People come and go and with each new face, one is never certain how much French anyone can really speak, therefore it's just easier to remain silent. With all the different nationalities, languages, cultural backgrounds, it seems easier and more interesting to watch from a distance.

During class, I sometimes have trouble understanding my classmates. Because a lot of words in Spanish are the same in French, the Spanish speakers will sometimes just pronounce the words in Spanish, a constant 'sssssssss' punctuating their paroles. The Vietnamese girl speaks very choppily like she's cutting each word with an axe. The Dutch girl speaks French with an American accent. The Iranian girl has an accent I've never heard before, and the English woman speaks in a rhythm as though her words floating from cloud to cloud. Up and down, up and down.

This is not to say, I speak perfectly, because obviously I don't. It's allowed me to see the difficulties French speakers have understanding foreigners. There are so many nasal sounds that at first, sound exactly the same, but can mean two completely different things.

I've been told I can write very well in French (thanks college education for all those French essays on Voltaire) but I have difficulty with grammar when I speak. It makes me think what it would be like if college professors focused more on "oral expression" in French. Something useful so that years down the road when we actually want to go to a French speaking country, we don't have to teach ourselves how to speak...