Bonjour mes amis!
For many years, my wife Sheila and I have loved our annual holiday in Normandy.
Alan and Sheila
We stay at a gorgeous house in the tiny village of Tordouet, just 10 km south of Lisieux, an experience that we usually share with our pal, Ken.
Sheila outside our holiday home
Tordouet nestling in the valley
Having just come back from Tordouet, one of our conversations of last week centred around the question of what was the big attraction of holidaying in Normandy. Well for one thing, in this part of France the locals are pretty friendly and try hard to make us Brits feel welcome. I think this is partly to do with our wartime alliance – “Welcome to our British Liberators” reads a sign, alongside a Union Jack emblem, on the front of our favourite brasserie bar in Orbec.
Ken, Sheila and me in Orbec
Another attraction of Normandy is the stark contrast with our life in Britain (vive la différence!). We are constantly delighted and surprised at how such a short hop across the Channel can reveal so many vast contrasts in the climate, the food, the wine, the buildings, the density of road traffic, the style of shops and, oh yes, the language.
Sheila, Ken and I all studied French at school and while I still have a reasonable grasp of the language, Sheila and Ken have forgotten most of what little French they ever learnt. As friendly, sociable people, they are very frustrated at their faltering grasp of French vocabulary and their inability to speak only in the simplest of terms and always expressing themselves in the present tense.
This year we decided to do something about it.
All three of us are fired up by the progress we made in just one week and we all plan to keep going. As the most experienced French speaker of the three of us, I have taken on the teacher role. But I freely admit that I’m no expert linguist. All I can say is that the approach we have used so far (which involved elements of looking for patterns, visualizing, some repetition and, most important, everyone being prepared to give it a real go) has been motivating and effective.
So for the next year, we’ve agreed to continue the lessons via this blog and supported by whatever animated pictures I can put together on YouTube. This is something that I have done professionally for many years in my other life as a mathematics educator for the Open University. I now have the chance to put these skills to work in what is for me a completely new field. Very exciting!
I hope that you will enjoy following our progress over the months ahead and that you will learn some French yourself in the process. Maybe what seemed to work for us will work for you as well.
The next post is about French vocabulary and how to learn it easily–a theme that we'll return to again, no doubt!
Au revoir et bon chance (good luck).
