Hi Malcolm & Val
As somone who is not a natural linguist I would like to comment on the debate about people learning to speak French later in life. We all have different learning styles and for me it had to be a methodical approach, which began with learning a few verbs and some simple grammar. I will never forget the first Christmas party that I organised for 15 of my french neighbours. I had to listen so hard to what was being said and probably missed 50% of it but then we ladies found some common ground - baking! We talked about favourite cakes and each lady left with a recipe for lemon polenta cake. When we go to dinner with french neighbours it is amazing how often we end up talking about food - they tell us how to get a licence to have eau de vie made from surplus fruit, how to find truffles and so on. I have fairly recently discovered the magazine Bien Dire, which contains fascinating articles at varying levels of difficulty, with some vocabulary attached to help with understanding. When going to the doctors or going to Leclerc to discuss the fact that they have delivered a table to me with no legs, I still look up some potentially useful vocab in advance. I will never forget how my ability to communicate over the telephone improved so much once I had learned the basic skill of pronouncing letters properly when spelling words - like my name! I still feel much more comfortable reading a book in french than speaking the language but it is so satisfying when I do manage to make myself understood. My neighbours are unfailingly kind and generally manage to hide their amusement at my English accent.
I do hope that Val is making good progress.
Much love to you both - and see you for Butterfly, Moya xx
comments to taglines82@gmail.com
