Explore Day 16

Day 16. Three weekends gone. It’s a little weird to think that I’ve actually spent more weekends here than I have left. On Tuesday, I’ll be officially half-way through.

I had a great weekend doing some fun things, and I'll blog about that tomorrow (well, hopefully...) Right now, though, I need to rant about French. 

On a positive note, I spent today virtually immersed in French, and it went relatively well. I go to a French-speaking church here, and, while I don’t understand as much of the sermon as I would like, I can read along with the Bible fairly well and sing the songs. After church, I talked to several people and actually had a couple lengthy conversations all in French. The people in the church are lovely, and so eager to help me learn French. One family even invited me over for lunch and then took me on a whirlwind tour of Old Quebec. My ‘tour guide’ didn’t speak much English, but whenever I was unsure of a French word she used, she was great at explaining the meaning.

In short, my spoken French skills are definitely improving, which is what I care about most. There’s still a lot that I don’t know how to say (and it’s so frustrating when I forget basic words like ‘older’ or ‘maybe’) but I can carry on a basic conversation. Whenever I get back to ‘normal life’ on PEI and meet French tourists, I’ll hopefully be able to make them feel welcome.

Negatively, though, I’ll be insanely busy this week, with a little test Tuesday, two oral exams on Thursday, and a grammar exam on Friday. Since my last post I’ve been working away, and the various tenses are starting to make sense, but still… there’s a lot left to learn. When I studied French during homeschooling, we really concentrated on oral skills rather than grammar; French class was watching The Lord of the Rings in French. So, I can talk to a francophone, but I have no idea how to conjugate etre in the infinitif.

I haven’t met anyone else with this problem. In most of my classes people have no difficulty in thinking of an IR verb which ends in U in the passé compose. However, when the prof describes pronominal verbs, they get all confused. I understand pronominals, but I don’t know how to use avoir or etre properly when forming the sentence.

It’s frustrating. I know I’m learning, but there’s so much I don’t know, and likely will never know. The Explore program will not make me bilingual.

At the end of the day, though, it’s okay. It’s okay that I don’t know how to correctly use the infinitive. It’s okay that the course is difficult. It’s okay that I probably won’t get an A on the course. Because I am learning. I’m speaking French, and understanding French, and even learning French grammar, no matter how slowly.  And, frankly, a 60% on a grammar test won’t matter if I’ve learned how to speak the language.

Explore Day 14

Sub-campus tunnels

Day 14. Three weeks remaining.

I’m basically 2/5^th of my way through the Explore program now, with two weeks down and three more to go. This means that I’m pretty settled in, with a great group of friends (who apparently read my blog… so I won’t be saying anything nasty about them) and a reasonable routine. However, it also means that the workload is dramatically increasing. Not that it was much before, with maybe an hour of devoir (homework) a day, but next week I have at least three major tests. So, right now my life is split between impromptu socials (like spending two hours having supper because we chat so much) and headache-causing school (trying to sort out the difference between the imperfect and the passé compose).

Laval's concert hall

I’ve been to a couple cultural activities in the past week. On Monday, my Quebecois friend had a clarinet recital for her CEGEP (the Quebec version of a sort of highschool/college transition) exam. It was lovely to hear my friend, and also to support the other young musicians. I miss the music scene on PEI.

Parliament (with a lovely stained glass
window depicting Samuel de Champlain)

On Wednesday, Explore ran a tour of the Quebec parliament buildings. It was fascinating because the clash of English/French cultures is so evident in parliament, from the architecture of the building to the way they run their government. Since the tour was conducted entirely in French I missed a lot of the details, but the building itself was beautiful and we got to see part of a session.

Salad. :)

This week I had my first “petit test de conjugation” on irregular subjunctive verbs. Since I had over-studied on Monday, I was pleased to find that I got 100% on my test. The mark barely matters, since the test was worth only 2% of my course grade, but it does mean that I understand subjunctives. Unfortunately, we’ve moved on to other tenses, like the imparfait or passé composé, and I find those much more difficult. We did some exercises today in lab, and I failed a bunch of them. Oh, well. I’ve been doing more research today after class, and it’s starting to make sense to me. Hopefully I have a good grasp of these concepts before next Friday…

New outfit, and a smiley on my conjugation test!

At this point, with the weekend finally here, I’m trying to get all my devoir done so I can enjoy some activities. Tonight some friends and I might go to the campus pub, and tomorrow I’ve signed up for hiking at Cap Tourmente. Judging from the information pamphlet, we’ll also be visiting a basilique, which likely means Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, one of the biggest cathedrals in Quebec. I hope I’m not misreading the pamphlet, because that church is on my Quebec bucket list.

And now I should probably get cracking on that homework…