It would be done, and it was done

I've succeeded in making my life exciting on paper, which goes to say that if I look at a long list of the things I've done in the past 5 days, I lose my train of thought for a while until I suddenly realize that I forgot to put something else on the list. Faced with the life in New York which has a bedrock foundation in a 9 to 6 job and a studio apartment, I explored all the opportunities that I could potentially find in a "What do I do with my life now?" advice column. Unlike in the past, where friends, dating, and video rentals prevented me from trying any of these well-thought-out ideas, I now have little to stop me from signing myself up, save a budding collection of books that will never be a decent substitute for real people.

Classes that you pay for always get me a little excited because I get to choose the class and maybe, like a few times in the past, I luck out with a fantastic group of students and an uncompromisingly thorough professor. I signed up for a French class at the Alliance Française that meets every Monday night. This means I have the small priviledge of leaving work early. They don't care. They've been having trouble finding things for me to do.

My class pretty much consists of people my parents' age and older. Initially, I saw my dating prospects whither. Then, after mildly considering atraditional romance, I scorned even the bare notion that I would come to class thinking of dating in any form. At the very least, though, I was in a group of people who, because of their ages, couldn't help but to have lives vividly formed through experience. A wine merchant married to a french woman, a few fur-coat wearing ladies with calf-high suede boots, a dark-skinned man who smiles and shakes his head when we bring up the difficult Sunnis, and a half-deaf retired international banker. The French accents are terrible, and I wish that we had a phonetics teacher on hand to help everyone move their mouth and tongue in the proper French way.

This class is worth all the three hundred dollars I paid because there is a real French person teaching the class, which is the policy of the Alliance Française. She gives us expressions that end up being left out of textbooks and teachers' manuals. Also, she can immediately draw a line between common spoken French and written French, something that textbooks have a hard time doing. I think about this and I get excited because when I come back to France I'll have another list of seemingly spontaneous expressions to insert here and there. I won't be surprised, though, if I again get the look from various French people that says, "oh, look at you, you're speaking French."

One of the most important things you can do to learn a foreign language is to converse in it, or at least to try. The Alliance Française offers chat groups, but they have admission fees which turned me off. So I used my handy-dandy Internet Search engine to find the meetup.com system of finding groups which cater to your specific interest. It turned out that the French conversation group was meeting on Tuesday, the day after my French class. Why not, I said? Well, I'll tell you why not, because if I didn't go I would have been hard on myself for chickening out, even if I didn't feel like going just because I like to have some time to myself.

The poor French conversation group. It had so many problems to cope with. As I realized when I looked on their member list and clicked on the individual member descriptions, the group had no French girls. It turned out that there were not only no French girls, but only one French man who had arrived at our conversation group with a completely unacceptable motivation: he was there to practice his English. Because of this I ended up talking to other Americans who were on the same speaking level, more or less, as I was. The whole event was always a bit awkward, as once you sat in a seating section, of which there were three, it seemed unnatural to get up and move to another. After all, no one knew anybody, so why would you go to the other group? Is it because you came not to speak French but rather to try and find a date? My good conscience allowed me to move once so that I ended up next to a nice looking but very awkward female architect, a New York film industry grunt, and a classically tense gay black man. The men really liked Paris and so we talked about the things that Paris had: metros, restaurants, streets, apartments, Chinese. I told them about the time I was attacked in Paris, which then spurred the conversation to New York. We talked about the things that New York had, at which point I had to get some critical information from these lifetime New Yorkers, like whether or not there were other nice parks besides Central Park to visit in the five boroughs. Riverside Park is nice, they said, and in Brooklyn, they said that Prospect Park is nice.

This was not a difficult conversation to tear myself away from. I left with one of my dependable but permissible excuses: I had to go shopping for food.

This was wise enough, because the next morning saw me going over to an Elementary School to volunteer at a program which lets children into the school library early so that they can read before school starts. Parents drop off their kids so that they can get to work on time, the kids become more literate, it's a win-win situation. The work is not so hard, you sit down in a chair that is not big enough for adults and the children find you with a book they want to read or have read to them. We as volunteers must discriminate on reading to children on the basis that if they are 7 or older they should be reading, with some help, by themselves. The youngest children, though, can still bask in the warm sun that is illiteracy while an adult reads to them.

All was well until the child that chose me succeeded in finding a book, one book out of thousands of books, that made noise. We read the book and she flipped the pages pretty fast, like she was looking for a phone number in the yellow pages. Then, at the end, she pushed the red button marked "push this" and this odd melody that had no harmony came out loudly. The book was trying to make sounds which resemble the type of Christmas songs that farm animals themselves would write. In some ways, it worked, because the children really liked the little piece of song, even though it sounded like a cow was licking a synthesizer. In other ways, it wasn't so important what the book played because the children enjoy pushing a button that plays sounds. They could have recorded a car alarm and put it in the book. It would have been a hit.

Went to work after this. Nothing doing there, so after reading everything that interested me, including Ward Churchill's inflammatory rant from 3 years ago which prevented his coming to little Hamilton College this week, I left for the bimonthly German meeting located in one of the few, if not the only, authentic German restaurant in Manhattan.

I expected the people to be old and they were, which was fine. After all, I can be pretty popular with old people because last year I lived an interesting life. Unfortunately, I found that, unlike French, I couldn't actually speak German. Not to any success worth tabulating. Since I had spent time in Berlin last winter speaking some German to friends, I figured that I had some sense of the language. I was not bummed out, though, because I've learned how to roll on despite communication failure. In Chile, France, and Senegal I had many instances and even days of language failure. The best thing to do is to realize what is most critical to successful communication, and then to go for it. For me and German, it's to have lessons with a Native German speaker, which will allow my understanding to be shaped on the most common ways to express oneself.

In the past, I didn't think that it was imperative to use native speakers in order to learn a language. Now I am convinced, and I advise myself and others to start in the beginning with native speakers and to keep working with native speakers when possible. They can help to focus the learning process. Also, they can help with developing a correct accent, which, while it sounds trivial, is essential to clear communication, which is what we're working so hard for to learn a foreign language in the first place!

Tonight or tomorrow I go to Brooklyn to meet someone I had last seen in France. He's from Cincinnati. Pictures to follow this weekend, stay tuned.

posted by Wellsmus @ 10:11 PM