Sunday, June 27, 2009

I'm resuming blogging again, taking up from where I left off last year. I'm getting ready to leave, just one more week to go, and I have things more or less in order, which may or may not mean anything, since nothing really even goes as planned. But at least I know what didn't work last time, and I'm trying to not make the same mistakes. I will get a cell phone right away, for example, rather than try to get my iphone to work. And I'll bring cash. I've also got my contacts set up - eric, cissy, JB, and people from the national university.

My goals this trip are to get a letter of invitation in preparation for my fulbright application, and to make some research contacts, at least with AVEGA, but with other people and places as well, depending on the time available.

My big accopmplishment to date, is spending a month in the Berlitz french immersion course. This was an ordeal; everything that could go wrong did. They placed me at too high a level, since I managed to convince people that I understood more of what they were saying than I did. (An ability I developed from being a clinical psychologist). And the materials weren't completely right. Berlitz had just changed their pedagogy, and I had the new materials before the instructors did.

But the real problem was that the learning method wasn't right for me. I had real trouble hearing and understanding spoken french, and all of the instruction was oral, not written. There was a lot of vocabulary to learn, and I had trouble remembering it all. They taught grammar by the discovery method; they gave you the sentences and you had to get the principles by figuring them out. Not a great idea - they could have just told me, and I spent too much time doing deduction and induction.

The real issue though was the teacher. Her name was Marina Elana and she was Romanian. Romanian's are not big on positive reinforcement. Elana would tell me what I was doing wrong, but if I got something right she said nothing. "If it is wrong, I'll let you know," she said. There is no Romanian translation for "unconditional positive regard." The closest is a Romanian phrase which translates as: "if you need that much stroking you're not going to survive." (That's a joke).

I'm just not used to not being able to get things, which was my basic experience through a lot of the teaching. Marina would say something in french, and I just didn't understand. I'd stare at her blankly, hoping for who knows what. She just kept at it, and somehow eventually I managed to say something. It reminded me of what used to happen when I taught statistics (I guess it is another language), a subject which I never had trouble with but students did. Well it is good for the soul, I guess, to be taken down a notch or two or three or one thousand.

Despite this, I really came to like Marina, and did learn some french. My real accomplishment was getting the accent better. I can now approximate the nasals, and the liasons. At the end of the course, Marian told me she was proud of me - I think for surviving her and keeping going - and actually smiled when she told me that I wouldn't have her there to torture me any more.

I plan to keep up my french. I'll continue studying it, but not at berlitz.