I Hope I Don't Want a Sandwich in Paris

Learning a language at age 63 ain't easy!

In preparation for our trip to Paris we bought Rosetta Stone French. I've been trying to work on it each day but, oh, is it frustrating!

The concept of Rosetta Stone is immersion and the use of intuitive clues. They are correct. The picture clues and the organized presentations do make great sense. I feel great about understanding written language so far, but fail miserably at understanding spoken language and speaking. The program has wonderful speech recognition capabilities -- they say something, you repeat, and it gives you a cheerful sound and a check when you reasonably match the correct pronunciation. When you don't match, however, you hear a nasty sound and get a big X. You can even go to four separate graphs which analyze your pitch, accents, and so forth so you can adjust your speech accordingly.

I just gave up after getting about 60 nasty sounds and X's when I tried to say "I want a sandwich". Four lousy words and I couldn't get anything but nasty sounds and big X's! No wonder Jill, my French teacher friend, says that I sound like a Spanish cow when I try to speak French!

Then there's reading and writing. In Spanish, with one exception, every letter is pronounced and every letter is consistently pronounced the same way. Seems that French doesn't pronounce about half of the letters. "Le poisson nage" sounds just like "Les poissons nagent." By the way, I can't wait to impress the Parisians with the above sentences. Wonder how I can casually insert "The fish (singular) swims." and "The fish (plural) swim." into conversations?

On a very basic level, it also doesn't help that the Spanish word "él" meaning "he", sounds just like the French word "elle" meaning "she".

The good news is that I just happened to speak to two people this morning who have recently returned from trips to Paris. In addition to giving me good restaurant tips, both assured me that just about everyone they met spoke Engish and just about everyone they met was very friendly.

I'll keep on plugging so I can get beyond the swimming fish level....but, if I don't master "I want a sandwich", I hope there are other things on the menu when we get to Paris!