Nil by Mouth

I’m now spending 4 hours

I’m now spending 4 hours a week in a Francais pour les etrangers class. That’s literally, “French for strangers”.. err.. foreigners. It’s kind of a riot. First off, i’ve never taken a class as an adult before. It’s weird. What makes it especially weird is that in this class of adults, we basically all sound like total retards. I can’t help but be reminded of Me Talk Pretty One Day only like every 5 seconds. Today our class tried to spit out the sentence, “He asked me where i was born”. Excruciating. But kind of hilarious. I spend a good deal of energy making sure i don’t start laughing out loud. And mind you i’m certainly not laughing *at* anybody, because i sound just as retarded as the most retarded sounding of my classmates. But the whole thing is just so silly if you think about it. Here’s a room of grown people, most of them gainfully employed, some with children or maybe even grandchildren, pretending to take a poll about favorite foods.

This one woman at the board was totally struggling with some verb conjugations, and rushed back to her seat all flustered before the teacher could stop her. She seemed like you know, one of those loopy old ladies. Turns out she’s a history professor in Brazil who’s published a bunch of articles. Go figure.

We have to do a lot of group work. I’ve always hated group work. Unless the boy i had a crush on was my group, which was always rare. In this case the guy sitting next to me was The Annoying Guy in the class. You know the one who shouts out the answer to every single question. The guy who mutters to himself while the teacher’s talking. Yeah. That one. So we kept having to work together. Ugh. And he kept carefully explaining and re-explaining all the instructions to me, as if not only did i have a shaky grasp of the language but i was also deaf. And to top it all off, his answers were friggin wrong. So we kept disagreeing, but mind you, in french. This made the whole exchange that much more unbearable. I decided to just let him give the wrong answers, but he kept pushing me to wholeheartedly agree with him, and i could fake agree, but not like 5 times.

So i wish i had started this class back in September. Not necessarily because i think my French will improve all that much, but because it’s reassuring to see otherwise normal people in the same communication shithole as myself.

• Mar 11