I don’t have a whole lot to say these days. Not much going on over here unless you’d like me to bore the arse off you with the mind numbing details of Swiss health insurance. I tell you it’s painful. If I did have a lot to say I wish I could say it in French. I have completely abandoned the study and, not surprisingly, my French is shockingly poor for someone who’s been living here for almost 2 years. It’s becoming quite embarrassing.
I just can’t seem to get motivated to hunker down and get on with it. Lazy? Overwhelmed by the difficulty of it? Self-defeating rebellion against study due to years spent in classrooms? Oui, all of that. But mostly it’s likely that I romanticized learning a new language.
See how easy it looks? Watch enough of these sweet videos and you can picture yourself becoming an interpreter at the UN in just 5 easy steps. My plan is to enroll in French class once I get to Switzerland. I need structure, imposed discipline, a teacher who will ask to see my homework and frowns on my husband as translator strategy. AHA!! I knew it. Like always, it’s his fault. If he wasn’t such a smartypants I’d be able to parlez-vous with the best of them.
Oh I’m just kidding. It’s nobody’s fault but my own. I take full responsibility for my inactions. And I accept that I fell prey to the romance of the idea of living in a foreign language. There’s nothing remotely charming about verb conjugation and indefinite article usage and it’s much harder than I expected.
So, it’s your job to make me feel better. Tell me something, anything, that you thought would be easy and wasn’t. You’re not allowed to say marriage or bikini waxing. Tell me something I don’t know.
Knitting, keeping weight off, editing this *$&%$ novel . . .
Being a writer.
I lurk often, comment seldom, but this just killed me. So all I have to do is go to Paris (leave the Hubs home), ask for directions, and a Hottie will want to have dinner with me, etc? Ooo-la-la!
Good luck with the move to Switzerland. Can’t wait to see what happens next…
Hi Bobbi,
I agree it is hard to learn French especially when you’re used to the English language. The grammar is difficult to learn, however it can be done gradually. All I had was approx 6 years of classroom French on how to read a menu and not much else along the lines of conversational French. I worked this past year as an Educational Program Assistant in a French Immersion Primary class with a little boy from Rwanda. I was in the class a couple of hours a day and concentrated on listening to the teacher and repeating the words in French for this student. I got my reward at the end of the year when I was reading in French a primary book and the teacher commented later that the pronunciation was good and he was impressed with how well I did. I was proud as a peacock when I heard that, as you can well imagine, so I can visualize you doing the same with a little extra work. My suggestion would be to start with the simple words and work up from there. You might laugh but Scooby Doo is a great place to start and look at the pictures to help you along! I have faith that if you believe it, you can achieve it! Good Luck!
Judy
Raising someone else’s children. No matter how well we get on, no matter that it’s been 16 years, no matter that they call me their mother, no matter that we consider ourselves at family unit of 4 …… there are always those surprise moments when I’m reminded who I’m not.
Oh, tough one indeed.
Getting old is lots harder than I expected – don’t believe all that crap about ‘aging gracefully’
Everything starts to break down, and I’m not handling it well. My Zen teacher gave me these great words
Make Peace with What Is. I’m trying
Coping with English weather. Yes, it IS raining again, on this the last long weekend of the (hahaha) summer.
I thought English was going to easy… and it was. Oooops, sorry, that’s not what you asked for. Ok, I thought Italian was going to easy, and it wasn’t. there. My mother-tongue. But then, german should really be my mother-tongue. Oh, I know, that’s it:
It thought it would be easy to disentangle my inner nationality. It wasn’t!
‘nother longtime lurker. I moved to France. Everyone thought I was French – I had a French husband. Pillow talk is everything!
I moved to Greece. No problem for me but my husband was English. He was you, to my Neil.
We moved to Texas – I was STILL interpreting… (the whole banaena/banahna thing, never mind tomatoes)
We’re now in Spain. 5 years hubby struggled and then SHAZAM – Memrise! Try it, you’ll like it! My sister recommended it and the Spanish took off. Easier that he’d been hearing it already. I give you…
http://www.memrise.com/welcome/ Go for it!!! Great idea moving to a trilingual country; none of which is English ;) but Switzerland is lovely, if expensive. (Horrendously so for Europeans.)
Looking forward to Sourcing you in Switzerland!
Merci Ursula, I’ll check it out.
I tell myself every tiny action and decision in my life is going to be a major bitch. That way, it’s such a feeling of freedom and accomplishment when I breeze right through it! A pessimist is never disappointed.
Deciding to go into “management” in our current health care system !
Well, for one thing, learning French :) I did well in high school and a couple of university classes, so I thought it would go well when I took an adult ed course. And when I joined a conversational group.
No. No, it did not. And those things were on the “way easy” end of the scale compared to the French you were trying to master.
Other things that did not turn out to be so easy? … Losing weight. Figuring out what colours to repaint our walls. Breaking a lip-biting habit. Getting used to bi-focals (can’t do the graduated lenses, or tri-focals, at ALL).
Finding a new man who gets my jokes
GOLF. You’ll never figure it out. Even Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are still puzzled by it. However they make millions in the process. I’m still waiting to go on tour.
Football!! I still don’t understand it after 10 years of being married to a rabid Bears fan. Why do they say it’s the first down when it’s not the first one at all. They have several of them. And why do they say there are seven minutes left in the game and then play for another hour? Madness!