One-year anniversary
I have always enjoyed speaking french. When I was a child we enjoyed many holidays over here and I certainly seemed to have a natural aptitude for the language. Lisa too had learned french at school and so we both had a basic level of language when we arrived.
But nothing I learned at school, nor in Lisa’s adult education classes, prepared us for the shear stress of having to hold conversations with people day-in-day-out. From the moment we arrived it was clear that my schoolboy french (“Where is the post-office?”…”"Do you have any brothers or sisters?” etc) was going to be no use to me at all. Suddenly we were thrust into the realms of speaking about getting oil deliveries for the heating, arranging telephone and internet services, enrolling children at school, opening bank accounts and arranging for the bins to be emptied.
For the first few months we both stumbled through these encounters with a dazzling array of pigeon-french, gesticulations and blind panic. But we made it through all this without too many mishaps due to mis-translations, and gradually began to grow in confidence.
We can now hold decent conversations with people without breaking out in hot sweats, and actually feel comfortable initiating a chat, which is major progress. Some folks still flummox us with their speed or heavy accent however, and in these situations there is still a lot of shrugs, nods and “Bah oui, c’est bien”s. Especially from me! 
While our progress has been steady over the last year, the children have progressed at an incredible pace. I will focus more on their story in another post, but suffice it to say now that our three are now extremely comfortable in french comapny and can hold far better conversations than us in most cases!
Lisa has struck up a great friendship with Nathalie, a teacher at the local school, and they email each other pretty much every day in their non-mother tongue. This has been a great experience for them both and is certainly starting to make a difference to Lisa’s written French.
My task for the next year is to find ways to improve my spoken french, as it is now me who is starting to lag behind. I have no real exposure to much french conversation on a day-to-day basis, so I have to make myself get out and do more things in the village. There is a badminton club on a Monday night which may be a good option for me, although it goes against all my beliefs to do any form of exercise voluntarily, obviously
I think we are all very proud of how much our french has improved over the last 12 months, but we know there is still a long way to go before we can say we are fluent. But hopefully we now have a good solid foundation upon which to build in the year ahead.
