Debates in French

Dear Friends,

Once again Jane and I are delighted that the weekend has arrived.  We had another wonderful but intense and tiring week.  We will need to spend part of the weekend doing homework, organizing our notes and studying.  Since the weather should be nice this weekend, we are planning an excursion to Nice for the open air market and the Matisse and Chagall museums as well as some walking.

Thursday evening we went to a birthday celebration of one of the people in our section who was celebrating his 23rd birthday.  It was fun and interesting to go to the birthday party of someone who is 23 who is just a friend not a child or relative.  A lot of generational lines get blurred when everybody is going to school.  It is one of the things that we enjoy a lot about the school.

At the birthday party we were once again reminded what a remarkable group of people we are meeting.  We were talking with a Nigerian woman who has lived in the US for many years and is an MD in oncology (primarily research) who lives in Chicago.  Her husband a Pulmonary MD who did his residency at Mayo was visiting her.  She went back to the US last weekend to attend Michelle Obama's birthday party at the White House.  She worked with Michelle, and they live on the same street in Chicago.  What an experience that must have been.

All the exposes are now done, and our teacher has a new way of making us speak.  The class picked four topics to discuss.  We will discuss one topic a day.  Two students will introduce the topic with a presentation of no more than 10 minutes and will then ask each student a question.  The class will discuss each question.  The total discussion lasts 45 minutes.  The four topics that our class decided upon are (1) the pros and cons of the European Union, (2) the growing disparity of wealth in the world, (3) is there extraterrestrial life and (4) does the private life of public figures impact their competence (President Hollande is having difficulty right now with his private life here).

Today another student and I lead the discussion about the European Union.  I was surprised at how much we could actually discuss about the fiscal policies, trade regulations, etc.  In fact the discussion got quite heated over two issues.  We asked the woman from Russia if Russia should join the EU.  She was emphatic that it should not because it would not do anything for Russia.  The man from Sweden replied that the Russian economy was a disaster and needed a lot of help.  The Russian woman rose to the occasion and defended Russia very well.

The other topic that lead to a heated discussion involved the severe austerity measures imposed by the EU.  Jane and another woman were making the point that it was unfair to not let some countries stimulate their economies to reduce unemployment just because it might increase the debt of those countries.  A couple of the other people took the position that the rich countries were just sending all the money to the poor countries and that the poor countries were trying to claim that they were the victims.  It was clearly the case of the interests of the rich big countries with their rich big corporations benefiting from policies that hurt the workers.  I gave a passionate argument about the unfairness and unreasonableness of the austerity policies.  This discussion was just the warm up for Monday's discussion of wealth disparity.

Hopefully by Tuesday when Jane and another student present the issue of extraterrestrial life, everybody will have calmed down.  Jane will explain her theory that with over 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe, it is completely improbable that there is not life other places than on earth.  Stephen Hawking agrees with her theory.

We do not spend all day drilling on grammar and discussing weighty international issues.  Every day after lunch we have a practical lesson.  Today's lesson was nominally on crêpes.  By this time we all know that any lesson is really just to teach us more about grammar and structure in French.  Since each time a question is answered by a student it gives the teacher an opportunity to discuss some important point of grammar usually about a verb or pronoun or the placement thereof.

Anyway, the session on crêpes was great.  The teacher is very good and funny and at the end we got to eat crêpes.  Here you can see the teacher helping one of the students learn how to properly flip a crêpe.

More later,
Jane and the Unabashed Liberal

The sun has returned

Dear Friends,

As forecasted the sun has returned to the Côte d'Azur.  Unfortunately the heavy rains over the last several days caused significant damage and several deaths.  Weather patterns all over the world are changing, and the weather is causing more and more damage.  It is too bad that politicians refuse to admit that we are causing much of the change and refuse to take any action to change our behavior.

The method that the school uses to teach us involves introducing a new subject without telling us the rules which at first we struggle to discover, then are made clear, then another is added and then more and more examples and exercises.  We are reaching the end of the learning about the passé composé and the imparfait.  First, we had many exercise to learn the passé composé.  Then we had many exercises to learn the imparfait.  Now we are trying to learn when to use the passé composé and when to use the imparfait.  Neither tense corresponds directly to a tense in English and both involve the past.  Even the explanations we get in French are not directly translatable to English.  Anyway suffice it to say that the rules are not particularly clear and there are, of course, exceptions, and there are times when both could be used but a particular teacher might have a preference.

Part of tonight's homework assignment involved choosing between the passé composé and imparfait for each verb in a couple of different stories.  In addition to choosing which tense, we needed to be able to explain why.  Jane and I took awhile to do just this part of the homework.  There was also a movie at school tonight which we skipped.  By the time we went shopping for dinner, got home, did our homework and had dinner it was almost 10:00 pm.  We do not understand how others do it.  But you may recall that the others in our section range from age 22 to 44.  We think that explains it.

Our evening was interrupted when a candidate for Mayor of Villefranche-sur-Mer, knocked on our door.  It was, of course, immediately clear that we were not people who could vote.  Nevertheless, he wanted to chat in English which we were happy to do.  He spoke good English and had been to the United States, including Texas several times.  We are not sure about his politics, but he acknowledged that he had met Rick Perry through a mutual friend.  He disclaimed associating with him politically.  It was a fun encounter and made us feel like we were at home during election season when everybody is door knocking.

A young woman from Russia gave her exposé today.  It was very interesting. She compared Moscow and St. Petersburg.  She obviously loved Russia and both cities.  Jane was particularly struck by her love of Russia since Jane knew from previous conversations with her that she had not been back to Russia in 4 years.  Jane asked her if she planned to return to Russia and she said she had no plans to do so.  She said that there are so many problems and it is so sad that she does not want to return even though her family still lives there.  She said maybe when she is 50 (she is 22 now) she might return but not now.  It was heartbreaking to hear that since she obviously loved her country.

More later,
Jane and the Unabashed Liberal

Être Verbes en Français

Dear Friends,

It has rained all day again today.  We went out for breakfast and a short walk around the old town since it was not raining too hard.  We spent the rest of the day doing our homework and studying.  It truly feels like we are in school again and have a big test tomorrow.

Our course is focusing us on verbs and pronouns and the various placement of participles, pronouns and negatives.  The French love pronouns, and we are suppose to switch to a pronoun immediately after one use of the noun.  We have determined that the favorite sentence of our teacher would be about three lines long with only pronouns, verbs and negatives using all the tenses.

We also are trying to learn which verbs use être and which use avoir for the passé composé.  The passé composé of être uses avoir, e.g. j'ai été.  In case you wanted to know.  In our class our teacher uses the story of La Petite Maison de Pierre to help us learn most of the verbs that use être.  Here are two versions of the story from the internet.

You can certainly see how much fun we are having.  A friend was going to come over tonight before dinner to go over our homework, but we are all done for today.  Not because we know everything or because we are certain that all of our answers are right but because we are DONE for today.  A nice dinner, even if we have to walk to and from in the rain, will get us better prepared for tomorrow.

Tomorrow the rain is suppose to stop mid-day with sun forecast for the next week or more.  We are hoping the forecast is correct.

More later,

Jane and the Unabashed Liberal