Parlez-vous Français?

Oui, je parle Français, or at least I'm learning to. Truthfully, I should say "re-learning," because I took French classes in high school and college but as they say, if you don't use it, you lose it, and that's what happened to me. For many years I've been wanting to learn it again, and for the last 15 months or so I've been using all kinds of tools and resources to once again learn French.

The first thing I did, during Thanksgiving week-end in 2007, was to buy the Rosetta Stone language learning software. I've been working my way through it, with periodic breaks, ever since. I'm actually on my third time through the program. When I get to the end I just start over by signing in with a different user name. The entire program is broken down into modules, some as short as 5 minutes, so I can do as much or as little as I want. It's a great way to learn, lots more fun than the "lets conjugate some verbs" way I learned in high school.

There are also a lot of great resources on the internet. One of my favorites is "TV5Monde," which has newscasts entirely in French. They're taped, so I can stop and start as many times as I need to. I'm still not understanding everything, but I'm getting better at it.

Another cool resource on the web is "French In Action," a series of 52 30-minute lessons that were produced by Yale University and a public TV station in Boston back in 1987. Each lesson was filmed in France, with native speakers and no English instruction at all. Since these videos are 22 years old, each one is like a little time capsule of how much our lives have changed. The clothes, cars and hairstyles are all totally "80's", which is pretty funny, but the other thing that's interesting is the complete lack of any reference to computers, e-mail, cell phones, or the internet, all the elements of modern life. There really was a time when we all lived without such things.