French Immersion

Despite the obvious pleasures of drinking wine and eating pork daily, my primary reason for going to Sancerre was to spend two weeks in a French language immersion program at Coeur de France language school.

The reviews for the school on tripadvisor.com were uniformly positive and while CdF could accommodate families, it seemed that they mainly catered to adult learners. I took an online test that helped determine my level of proficiency (intermediate, no surprise there). And after a bit of emailing back and forth with Gerard, an American who is co-owner of the school with his French wife Marianne, I was able to coordinate my travel schedule with a suitable course schedule.

I was also able to arrange rental of an apartment directly above the school which was quite convenient. Although the apartment was certainly atmospheric and charming, some of the other apartments in the village maintained by the school were nicer. But those will have to wait for the next visit!

The view from my apartment window at dusk.

Literally upon our arrival at the train station in nearby Cosne (pronounce "cone"), we were asked not to speak English during our stay. It was difficult to comply with this 100% of the time because there were people at all proficiency levels attending the school, some of whom had no French at all, so every so often we found ourselves quickly whispering important information to each other in corners.

The school has around 10 instructors, including Marianne. Marianne was the instructor for the two weeks of my class. I was in a class of 5 other adults, with four of them in the same class as me for both weeks: John and May from England, Nennia from the US, and Jean from the US. Being together for two weeks brought a lot of continuity to our learning and our ability to understand each other.

Our group met for four hours each day, alternating mornings and afternoons. I spent an additional four to six hours each day working on homework and readings and grammar exercises (I carefully read three TinTin adventures during the two weeks; they are excellent because they present short sentences, colloquial expressions, multiple verb tenses, and a rather advanced vocabulary, all accompanied by pictures to help with meaning). It sounds like a lot of work and it really was. I’ve never worked so hard on a holiday. But despite being serious business, it was also a lot of fun. 

My first dinner in my tiny kitchen (thank goodness I am completely used to tiny kitchens from living for three years in my hovel in Dhahran): pork chop pan fried with shallots and garlic and salt and served on a bed of greens, crottin du chevre, a bottle of Sancerre blanc, fresh bread.

I discovered too late that I could have also signed up for a couple of hours of one-on-one instruction each day. I think my speaking skills would have improved much more if I had done this. Another useful bit of information for the next visit!

Four hours is a long time to sit in a class and Marianne used a variety of different activities to break things up. One activity that we did each meeting was to have group conversation. Marianne would usually initiate it by asking each of us to speak on a topic (what did you do on the weekend, tell us about your best vacation, describe situations where you’ve experienced French customs different from your own, etc.) then allow the others to ask each speaker questions. This free-form activity often led us into surprising conversational territory which sometimes we had trouble negotiating when our French wasn’t quite up to what we were trying to say.

By the second week, the five of us were getting pretty comfortable with each other and the jokes, made mostly at our own expense, were flying fast and furious. You know you are making progress in another language when you can make a joke and everyone gets it. After our group of five spent the weekend together drinking wine and gossiping, learning a lot about each others' lives outside of France in the process, we started teasing each other in class. Sometimes I think our teasing was maybe a bit too “English” for Marianne (even though it was all in French) but she remained calm when we started acting up.

We even established a few memes in our short time together. Jean watched "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone" five times in one day, all in French of course. So watching or reading something five times became our new standard, a true measure of learning. I created a meme for “rolling the dice” because I was always getting confused about grammatical choices which appear on the surface to be similar and small but which actually affect the meaning in big ways, such as que/qui, tout/tous, le/la, a/de/nothing with infinitive verbs, whether the "c" at the end of parc and porc is pronounced (yes in the first one, no in the second) and so forth. I’d invariably make the wrong choice and be corrected by Marianne so I’d shake my hand and open it like I was throwing out a pair of dice. (I also managed to successfully explain the related 50/50/90 rule to John entirely in French!)*

Freshly made crottins set out on wire racks in a cool room to begin aging.

One of the most interesting group conversations we had was prompted by Marianne asking each of us to select, read, then discuss an article with the class. We could choose the article  in any media or language that we wanted but we had to give our recap of it in French. Jean talked about the recent suicide death of a film director which spiraled off into a discussion of euthanasia and why people might choose suicide. Another woman talked about a study of the incidence of autism. From those two topics we spiraled off into a discussion about Lance Armstrong having his titles stripped from him, doping in sports, and whether immoral people can do truly good deeds or not. After all this serious stuff, I felt a bit bad about presenting the article I had chosen about the new model of Barbie that will come out in December of this year. But I only felt bad for a little while because I had invested a lot of energy into this assignment. What’s special about this particular Barbie? She was created by a transvestite fashion designer (Phillip Blonde) and looks eerily like him. How exactly does one know that a Barbie doll is a transvestite? You can't use the presence or absence of secondary sexual characteristics since Barbie dolls only have breasts. But you can use as evidence her extremely heavily made up face, her wildly spangled gown, and the words of Mattel itself. I used my iPad to show photos of this socially radical doll. And it turns out that there have been other bizarre Barbies: a pregnant one (with suspiciously Latina skin and hair coloring) and a Barbie with an accompanying yellow labrador doll, a pail, a scoop, and little plastic dog poops (crottes du chien). (Marianne commented dryly, <<Évidemment elle n’est pas française>> which nearly dropped us to the floor with laughter; even in a small village like Sancerre, dog shit is everywhere on the streets). Nennia continued the hilarity with her discussion of the naked Prince Harry photos from his Las Vegas excesses.

We had role-playing activities each class meeting as well. One of the more amusing assignments required us to confront our partner who was playing the role of an upstairs neighbor who was having parties every night and making too much noise. Marianne asked us to not script these conversations out but to try to deliver them spontaneously. Much silliness ensued since beyond agreeing on the general outline of our skit, we had no idea what the other was going to say!

Here are some of my favorite vocabulary words: gonflier, to inflate; noyer, to drown; une fourmi, ant (ants produce formic acid, dontcha know!); une chauve-souris, bat ("bald mouse"); il fait loup, it's humid; se balader, to take oneself out for a walk; les draps, sheets, bedding; parier, to bet or gamble; se tromper, to be mistaken (tromper without the reflexive pronoun means to fall)...well, I filled two notebooks with interesting words and grammar bits and I could bore you for quite a while. I'll just leave you with this gem, a very difficult French tongue twister: Les grenouilles fouillent sous les feuilles à Marseilles (the toads rummage under the leaves of Marseilles, which just doesn't have quite the same ring as the French version).

In fact, I would have to say that we spent a good part of each class laughing uproariously. I didn't expect this at all but I think that we got lucky and had a pretty good mix of people. I was quite shocked to find out that the others thought after that first week that I was too serious (maybe even a bit scary serious) so I tried to be more relaxed about everything the second week. I even managed to figure out how to use an idiom with an incredibly obscure meaning (it involved prunes which were entirely metaphorical). And John, May, Jean: I still most firmly maintain that the act of dreaming (rêver) is expressing an emotion, i.e., c'est un verbe de <> donc ce n'est pas suivi de préposition avec un verbe infinitif.

Bottles of Sancerre blanc from the mid-80s stored in a cave. They keep a few bottles from important vintages to see how they age and keep. It is unlikely that this wine is still any good but the bottles looked pretty cool.

The school brings in a decent amount of money to the village and the shopkeepers are certainly aware of this. A two week stay like mine was common; some people even stay for four weeks! During this time, we do a lot of shopping and eating in Sancerre. In fact, we were instructed to tell shop owners and servers in restaurants that we were students at the school. Not only was this a flag that we wanted to try to practice our French but it was also a more subtle communication that we were not fly-by-afternoon tourists.

The woman who ran the charcuterie in particular was most charming to me (she saw me almost every other day), answering my questions about her terrines once I got a bit bolder and more confident that I could understand her.

One evening when I was out for a walk, I ran into Yvette. Imagine a typical little old French woman and you’ve got Yvette: small-floral-print dress, stockings, sturdy shoes. She was walking uphill and I was walking downhill. She stopped to rest on a bench and when I passed, I said “bonsoir, madame” because to pass by without speaking would have been considered quite rude, especially as we were the only people on that road at the time. Well, that was the only opening she needed. Yvette was off, chattering away to me about all sorts of things, only about half of which I understood. But I did get these bits from her: she was turning 85 in September, she has lived in Sancerre all her life, and during the war (the second one) when she was a girl, she was sent away with the other children to farms in the country. She also told me that there was a very large sweet pea vine at the end of a vineyard down the hill that I should be sure to stop at and get some wildflowers (les fleurs sauvages) for my kitchen table. When I told her I was a student at the school, her next question was to ask who my instructor was (I found this was the most often-asked question by the folks in the village). When I told her my instructor was Marianne and added that she was “tres formidable,” Yvette laughed knowingly then told me that Marianne had grown up in Sancerre and that her family was still in the area. It turns out that both Yvette and Marianne are well known throughout the village, each formidable in her own way!

This was a great holiday in many ways. I was kept busy every day learning and thinking and practicing French but I had ample time to enjoy the atmosphere and pleasures one would expect from a holiday in a village in the middle of France. I would recommend the Coeur de France school without hesitation...but you must be prepared to work hard!

Looking towards Chavignol village from the surrounding vineyards.

* The 50/50/90 rules states that given a choice between two equal (or equally likely) things or events, 90% of the time you will chose the wrong one.