Herself: There’s a school mass on Tuesday at 7.30.
Me: Oh God, we can’t go. Your father’s in Luxembourg for work and you have French conversation class that evening.
Herself: Will I just tell them that I’m too middle class to go?
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Comments
Charlessays
Torn between Mass and conversational french. I think I would take the Mass to be honest. I suffered for 5 years to try and learn french, achieved the requisite O level grade to get into university and I think used it once professionally.
There is a philosophical argument that learning a language is good for you and it does give you a greater insight into the culture and people. There are places where you will never fit in unless you learn the local language, Israel being one of them and I suspect France is another. Belgium on the other hand, particularly the Flemish part, is a country where you could live quite happily and only speak English, I know because I did.
I did learn Afrikaans when in South Africa, try working on a mine and not being able to speak their language. I have to say that there are some wonderfully expressive words and phrases that simply do not translate and their humour was fantastic, much slyer and drier than you might expect.
It’s horses for courses, I suspect that being able to call on the almighty for help is more useful than ordering a meal in french, but that is only my view.
It’s a school mass so likely to be a long one – you should definitely take that into consideration. I learnt a bit of Flemish when I lived in Belgium but I never really made much progress as it was hard to practice when the only people whose English wasn’t better than my Flemish were very young children.
Torn between Mass and conversational french. I think I would take the Mass to be honest. I suffered for 5 years to try and learn french, achieved the requisite O level grade to get into university and I think used it once professionally.
There is a philosophical argument that learning a language is good for you and it does give you a greater insight into the culture and people. There are places where you will never fit in unless you learn the local language, Israel being one of them and I suspect France is another. Belgium on the other hand, particularly the Flemish part, is a country where you could live quite happily and only speak English, I know because I did.
I did learn Afrikaans when in South Africa, try working on a mine and not being able to speak their language. I have to say that there are some wonderfully expressive words and phrases that simply do not translate and their humour was fantastic, much slyer and drier than you might expect.
It’s horses for courses, I suspect that being able to call on the almighty for help is more useful than ordering a meal in french, but that is only my view.
It’s a school mass so likely to be a long one – you should definitely take that into consideration. I learnt a bit of Flemish when I lived in Belgium but I never really made much progress as it was hard to practice when the only people whose English wasn’t better than my Flemish were very young children.