Busy Busy Times: Trying to cross into C1 French while everything I'm juggling has caught fire

[zeugma92]

It has been about a month since I last intended to post here. It’s a pretty typical story. You go on a long trip, and that displaces a long list of responsibilities and tasks that, upon arrival back home, require all your time and energy for quite some time. After months of nearly constant travel on the West Coast, we went to Paris for a couple weeks, then Seattle for a long weekend, and then on the very last day before classes started, I got sick. So from the second Monday in September I flailed daily at my work, trying to do all the new tasks along with an adequate bite of the accumulated neglected tasks. Entire days went into simply figuring out what I had fallen behind on before August, sorting long-ignored emails and nudging stuff around in OmniFocus. Then a couple weeks ago, I had even more travel over a long weekend, and even then was frantically working on my laptop in the airport and at a suburban BART station so that I could focus on the purpose of my trip (which itself was also pretty much for work). Of course, I worked on my trip as well, during my alone time.

In the end, I finally got all caught up this past Friday, just about one month after the fall session started. 

It wasn’t all drudgery, of course, as my subtitle suggests. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do much outside of work, so I decided to prioritize French and make certain I didn’t drop that, despite everything. This seemed all the more important because, after Paris, I felt discouraged about it and kind of tired of the language. But it seemed crucial for me to push through this emotional resistance and sign up for a lot of classes and lessons anyway, because the only way to improve at the level I’m already at is to engage intensively with the language. Ten hours a week at a bare minimum.

I signed up for an advanced literature class through the local Alliance Française, and I committed to six weeks of a free weekly conversation group with a French friend, wherein I would be conversing and performing songs, in French, with my guitar. (That was amazingly rewarding.) And I signed up for one-on-one conversation practice sessions with my two favorite teachers, once a week with one, twice a week with the other. Every hour of appointment time requires at least one hour of preparation, to really benefit from it. I foresee continuing this high level of engagement through my currently-booked hours, which run out during Thanksgiving week. After that, I’m probably going to retreat to study mostly on my own for some months, perhaps having just one or two conversations a week to stay fresh.

My level in French is what is referred to as the B2/C1 threshold. I’ve enjoyed functional fluency for years, which is the B2 level. That’s where you can live in the language just fine without any strain, even if your active vocabulary is sometimes a bit limited and simplistic. (Your active vocabulary consists of the words you actually think of to say in the moment, or habitually use.) You have a large passive vocabulary, so reading current popular books and articles is easy. You can hold conversations about diverse topics and understand almost everything you hear. And what you don’t understand, you’re able to identify and ask about, and understand the explanation.

It’s an excellent place to be, and sensibly enough, it’s where most people stop in active language study even when they are obliged to live in the language, because getting to that next level is not an especially linear process, nor is it especially useful for day-to-day life. And it actually takes an enormous amount of focused work. You have to want to achieve it for some personal reason. At the C1 level you have a much richer and more precise active vocabulary, you are capable of having abstract discussions, and you can express opinions and formulate positions on a wide variety of topics in the news. Essentially, for the average person, it is about assimilating the topics, mindset, and vocabulary of current journalism.

I already speak perfectly good French, but I want to attain that next level just because it’s a fun challenge for me. The French have a cultural habit of truly interrogating topics in the classroom setting, which I find very intellectually stimulating. But I continue with it because any time at all spent using French remains a rewarding pleasure, whether I feel prepared or not.

In my class we’ve been reading and discussing writers such as de Beauvoir, Mohammed Dib, Paul Éluard, René Guy Cadou, Aragon, Jacques Romain, Jacques Prévert, Marguerite Yourcenar, and several more who aren’t coming to mind as I write this. In my conversation practice, recently I’ve been learning to talk about public-relations campaigns, self-driving cars, automatization and robotization, climate change, the migrant crisis in Europe, universal basic income… you get it.

Some days are rough and I feel incapable of expressing anything, but other days I feel quite fluid with my expression and don’t give much weight to my fleeting mistakes. Just about once or twice every conversation, the teacher rephrases what I’m trying to say with my made-up French into actual French, but I feel it’s a mark of my advanced level that one of my teachers tends to give me general advice much more often. When he gets into this mode, he often says “that’s not wrong, it’s correct French, but…” and then goes on to give me the more sophisticated, smarter-sounding, more elegant options. I find this very flattering and immediately put into practice any advice I get of this nature.

Well, there’s so much more I could write about today, but I suspect your patience is exhausted, so I’ll save it for the next post. As I write these last paragraphs I am sitting in a comfortable chair in my bedroom because the rest of the apartment is too cold; it’s raining heavily out and I’m expecting delivery of a new refrigerator in about 10 minutes. The coffee needs a reheat.

But I feel like writing more today, after I send this to you. I’ve been getting better sleep and I want to write about that; I want to write about my swimming, which I just resumed doing this month; I’ve been giving away tons of belongings, because our apartment had gotten over-full, and we’re planning to try again to buy a house in the spring; and I have been laser-focused on my teaching work for a minimum of 30 hours every week. I am feeling creative urges as well, in writing, music, and drawing, and I want to write about all of that as well. So stay tuned.

Comments

[garote]

Also interesting: Discovering that you are at the beginning of a much longer journey than you expected. It must have been hard to leave Paris, where practice with native speakers in interesting locations is trivial to find, and return to the Monolingual States Of America, where practice has to be flushed out of the bushes with a stick. The temptation must have been strong to tie up everything you've got going on here and return to Paris for a much longer stay.

This summer I was there for a chunk of time that was, frankly, too long for what I had in mind, and due to illness and overwork I didn't do half the exploring I thought I would. Paris felt much more like an "alternate universe", separated from the rest of the world and acting by its own rules, than any place I've been, from Torshavn to Melbourne... I'm interested to hear more of your impressions!