I had my placement evaluation by telephone and it was very interesting. The evaluator spoke to me exclusively in French and I understood everything she said to me. Granted she already saw my online writing test and knew my French was pretty rough, and probably spoke as simply as possible, but still, that was pretty exciting. I spoke back to her in a melange of French and English and it was clear that my understanding of past tense and my ability to distinguish between etre and avoir were both pretty pathetic. C'est la vie, je va apprendre! On y va!But to my surprise, instead of placing me into level 102 (one step up from the lowest level, 101) instead I was placed into 103. Formidable!
So I immediately signed up for my class, which will be on Mondays from 6:30 to 9:30 PM beginning April 3, a month from today. Tres bon!
Now that I am getting even more serious about studying French, I will have to change a few things - for example, I must give up the idea that it is necessary to both eat cheese and drink wine while I am watching "French in Action" - especially since I mainly drink California wine anyway, which makes it that much more obvious I am just using French as an excuse to drink wine.
I will have to learn more about France now. In addition to Paris, I may focus on the northeast, since that is where my French ancestors on my paternal grandmother's side come from, going all the way back to Andre and Elisabeth Dreyer - my distant cousin did not discover their birth dates, but their son Daniel died in 1740, so it's safe to assume they were both born in the late 1600s.
It should be noted that the part of France they were from, identified as Mittelbronn, Sarrebourg, Moselle, Lorraine, wasn't actually part of France when Daniel and Elisabeth lived there. It was in some weird grey area between sort-of-France and sort-of-Germany.
It looks pretty bucolic to this day.
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| Ancestral homeland right here |
Most of my ancestry is Scots-Irish but it's nice to have this other aspect - and the best-documented too, going back to the late 1600s. No wonder I love wine and cheese so much!