Despite many attempts, I had never quite got to grips with French. But by the end of a week-long immersion I learned more than in 15 years of false starts

I realised immediately it wouldn’t have hurt to prepare an opening gambit. As my host opened the door and showered me in French, instead of introducing myself I shuffled shyly in with a smile that my rising panic threatened to turn into a grimace.

This was a sobering moment: I’d arrived in Lyon to do a week-long French immersion course for beginners and my first taste of immersion left me floundering. I cobbled together something that bore little resemblance to what would traditionally be recognised as a sentence: more like a kind of Franglais charades (“Ahhhh, oui!” plus “mon avion”, accompanied by pointing at my watch and gesturing backwards to indicate my plane was late). And the most sobering thing was that, despite barely being able to string a sentence together, I wasn’t a beginner in the language at all.

I first started learning French 15 years ago at secondary school, although I now remember more about the effort I channelled into not falling asleep in our after-lunch classes than I do about the actual lessons. Nevertheless, I came out the other side of standard grade French equipped with a firm grasp of the full spectrum of nouns relating to stationary, and some sentences to describe hobbies – mostly ones that I didn’t have. Then, content with reaching this staggering level of conversational ability, I dropped languages altogether. More.

See: The Guardian

See also: The case for language learning | The Guardian

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