Just recently, I heard about another podcast from CBC. It’s an excerpt from the program C’est la vie, called Word of the Week. The short piece, mostly in english, discusses the use of a french in francophone culture, including several phrases provided by people being interviewed on the street.

I’ve listened to 5 of the recent episodes and I’m very impressed. The examples make learning new words and phrases very easy and can often be a bit quirky, which is like crazy glue for the mind. Quirky things tend to stick to the brain. Some of the speakers talk very fast or have rough accents, but I’m not opposed to listening a few times to catch everything they have to say. That’s the beauty of educational podcasts; you can rewind if you didn’t catch it the first time.

J'ai été à Nouméa pendant une semaine. J'ai essayé parler beaucoup de français, mais il était trop difficile. Il y avait quelque personnes qui a parlé un peu français seulement. Quand je leurs ai parlé, nous avons utilisé anglais suivant.

Si je vais améliorer, je dois pratiquer plus. Je dois écrire, lire, écouter et parler. Le chose le plus important est parlant.

Je vais partir jeudi pour Nouvelle-Caledonie. Je veux utiliser beaucoup de français avant jeudi. Je comprends assez pour les vacances, je crois. Je doit parler plus, mais je n'inquiète pas.

Je ne pourrais pas m'empêcher...

J'ai regardé un film le dernier soir, Va Savoir. Il y avait des sous-titres anglais, mais j'ai voulu des sous-titres français. Je voudrais rapporter le son avec le mot français. Pas l'anglais.

J'ai aussi Trois Couleurs: Blue. Il est le même chose. Beaucoup des sout-titres anglais, mais pas le français.

I was trying to find french radio stations online over the last few days, and it was harder than I thought. Far too many of the stations out there use Windown Media Player formats, which leaves me out. A good portion of the rest use real player formats, which is slightly more useful.

I did eventually find a few stations that offer mp3 and ogg (yay!) streams. In some cases, however, there is more english content than french content. That is kinda disappointing, but something I will have to live with.

So far, a couple stations have earned more play than the others, mostly because I can name the stream. I hope to expand on this list over time.

• Radio Val de Morteau
• Frequence 3
• RTBF (Belgium)

L'Alliance Française arrange une voyage d'études en Nouvelle-Calédonie. Je voudrais aller et j'essaye trouver le temps. J'ai assez d'argent. Je partirais à le 14 avril et je retournerais à le 21 avril.

J'ai besoin de faire plus de recherche.

Je voudrais écrire en francais. Je n'écrit pas bien, mais je l'essaye. Vous me corrigez, s'il vous plaît.

After 3 private lessons and 6 intensive classes, I think I'm ready for the Intermediate I class. I am registered for the Thursday evening class with Coralee, which was the teacher that I was working with for the private lessons. She holds no illusions about my level of speaking ability. For better or worse.

The intensive classes were a lot of fun. I had come into the class part way in, but I wish I had the time to have gone to all of them. The people in class with me were all really cool, and we formed a really cool little social group, too. Almost everyone from the class made it out to morning tea today.

The classes themselves were fairly rigourous. There was a large emphasis on speaking, and much of the work was done in pairs. We'd take a bit of time for preparation to look up what we wanted to talk about, and then we flailed our vocabulary at each other. Some of the topics were vacation planning, past vacations, sports, films and books. There was more than enough room to learn new ideas, and a fair amount of opportunity to tie in things that we already knew. We all had a lot of fun with it, and I think everyone found the approach very useful. When the instructor asked us of our opinions after we finished up, everyone's comments were very positive. It helps that Catherine was a good teacher. Fun, too.

From here, a few of our class are taking an Intermediate I class with Catherine on Wednesday nights, and a few of us will be taking the same class with Coralee on Thursday nights. I think we all made friends, though. We traded phone numbers, and we'll try to catch up every once in a while. It's like our own little portable french community.

After a relatively short period of procrastination, I called up Alliance Française d'Auckland to see if I could start taking classes with them. I also like the idea of meeting some people to practice speaking with and having access to the library. The lady I spoke to wanted to guage where I would fit into the array of classes they hold, and asked me to stop by the office for a few minutes. Rather than putting it off, I went down there immediately after work today.

When I arrived, I was asked to form a few sentences. Whatever came to mind. Nothing to mind. She asked a few questions and I did my best to answer them in french. She could see that I knew a lot of the grammer at the intermediate level, but that my speaking was very weak, which I knew. However, the class that she wanted to put me in doesn't fit with my schedule at all.

No matter what day it happened to be on, I'm going to have to shuffle things to fit this class in. The least of the problems would be Thursday, or maybe tuesday. That means that I have to be ready for the Intermediate I class by February 1st. I sat down with one of the instructors of that class and went through roughly the same thing as with the first lady I spoke to, and she came to the same conclusion. I am going to need some work to be ready in time.

One on one lessons it will be. We agreed on 3 hours in the next two weeks, and hopefully it will be enough for me to be speaking passably at the proper level.