STUDYING abroad

During this second semester of my year in Paris, I have been taking classes believe it or not. They are all very interesting, and I can't believe I have learned so much during a year when I have only had to buy one book, and that was only because my really cool French business professor wrote it! All of my classes are three or four hours long and completely in French. It sounds long and scary, but they all seem to go by so quickly, even faster than my two-hour classes in English at home!

My first class for the second semester is Langue Francaise, which is a general French language and grammar class. It is helpful for reviewing tenses, talking about current events in France and the world, and learning lots of new vocabulary just from speaking a lot. The only bad part is that I miss my first semester Langue Francaise class with the yoga-doing/lunging professor and all of the people in it who became some of my best friends of this year. Also, no boys learn French. There was one boy in my first semester class and none in this one, which is fine except that I had enough of that for six years at the convent! The professor of this class spoke very little English, so we were sure to speak only French! Sometimes we had to try to explain English words or concepts to her that don't really exist in French, and it was a challenge!

Then I took two French cinema classes. One was all about contemporary French cinema, and the other was about the New Wave of French cinema. They were both taught by a very smart, very French professor who knows more about films than I think I know about anything. He speaks French, English, and more languages than I will probably ever learn too. Unfortunately, one of these classes had only English-speaking students in it. So on the first day of class, the professor said that we were only allowed to speak French in the classroom. We forgot this rule a lot. Then he would come in the room and yell at us very loudly--in English. These classes were four hours long so we had time to watch a whole film each week and discuss it. In the contemporary cinema class, we watched Bienvenue chez les ch'tis, basically the most popular French film OF ALL TIME, and I highly recommend it. In the New Wave (nouvelle vague) class, we watched all of the films ever made by two réalisateurs (one of those words that can't really be translated into English but pretty much means director/filmmaker/creator of everything in a film!). They are Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda (actually a réalisatrice!), who were married but never worked together on films and had very different styles. I have never learned so much about films or been so interested in how and why they are made. And on the last day of the second semester, as I decided to walk a different way home through a very close but very different part of Paris, I walked by a square called Place Jacques Demy!

My fourth and final class of the semester was called Communication Professionnelle. It was taught by a professor who has written lots of textbooks on the subject and though he always looked like he was dressed to go camping, he was pictured in our textbook looking all business-y and professional. I saw his picture fairly early in the semester, and it was funny to see everyone realize that it was him one by one! In this class, we learned how to write professional emails for many situations, make speeches at meetings, and introduce people in professional settings, among many other lessons. The professor even video-taped us speaking sometimes and then we would watch the tape together and discuss what we did well and not so well.  It was intimidating but a good learning experience! We learned how to write many important documents like a CV, which is like a résumé only not. It's what I'll need if I ever want to work in France!

During probably my favorite year of school ever, which felt the least like school of any year of my life, I probably learned the most!