Whew, I gotta get cracking on this letter now that the Rapture has passed us by. You won't be surprised to learn that there was basically NO talk about the predicted end of the world here in Paris, though it seems like every one of my American-based Facebook friends was into it yesterday. Glad to see that I'll be spending the end times with all of you.
First of all, thank you all so much for your good wishes on the pregnancy! It was so nice to hear from so many of you about it - There was no letter last week because I was SUPPOSED to be in Cannes for the film festival, but then canceled my trip at the last minute because of illness - after my experience in Bologna, where I had the double-whammy of morning sickness and bad-cold sickness, I didn't want to go to another conference/festival in less that perfect health - so, sadly I will have no stories from the red carpet for you guys in this letter. It was hard for me to finally shut the trip down - it took me until 3 hours before my train was to leave to finally cancel - but it was really not the year for it.
I'm recovered from my cold, though still having some morning sickness and the vegetarianism continues - It is so weird for me to be literally repulsed by the thought of meat. Vegetarians I have known, I apologize if I ever behaved insensitively - I understand now.
So what else happened this week? Well, a lot of it was taken up with the end of my course at the Sorbonne, and preparing for the big final exam, which was held yesterday at the GIGANTIC Maison Des Examens (House of Exams) just outside of Paris (see attached picture) - Now, I've taken a lot of standardized tests in my life, but I have never seen an entire building devoted entirely to test-taking. But that's what this is for Paris. Its a huge structure with four separate wings, each with seven floors, and each floor on each wing is just an enormous exam room with 200 desks or so - and this is where all university students in Paris take their exams, and maybe where the Baccalaureat happens, I'm not sure. But its big enough that when we asked the guards at the Sorbonne how we would find the testing centers, they were like "C'est la Maison des Examens!", incredulously, like everyone knew about it and there was no way to miss it. And in fact, there's a whole RER train station that lets out right in front of it, it's that big.
The test went okay .... I think. It was in four parts - grammar, written comprehension, listening comprehension, and an essay - and took about three hours. Really, for me the worst part was the grammar exercises, some of which were still pretty opaque to me. The rest, though, was fine - though when I was studying with my friends from class, I realized both the advantages and disadvantages of being an English speaker in this context.
My best friends in the class are : Laura, from Kazakstan - her native language is Russian; Yae-Ni, from South Korea; Mikko, from Finland, and Bonnie, a lawyer from Canada but who moved to Paris from New York. Its interesting to study with Laura and Yae-ni, because I realize just how important CONTEXT is to me in studying French. There are so many English words that are linked to the French ones that you can really put a lot of things in context - My friend Dave, who was visiting a few weeks ago and doesn't speak French, said he recognized one shop as a tailor because it had a sign outside that said: Retoucherie Vetements" and he thought "Oh yes, that's a place for retouching your vestements - a tailor!" So its' like that - the French word will usually be a slightly more archaic or fancy version of the English, but you can kind of put together a meaning -
Whereas for my friends from Kazakhstan and South Korea, there's no context - there's not even an alphabet in common. They have to memorize everything, and quite often I'm suprised by the things that trip them up. We spent a long time trying to explain the meaning of "vulgaire" to Laura - to me, I know instinctively that this means something similar to "vulgar" in English, but for Laura there was no way of linking it to any word in Russian. Anyway, its interesting - my friend tend to do better on the grammar because they just memorize it, its the only way. I, on the other hand, because I can figure out so much of the meaning from context, tend to not do as well with things that need just to be memorized, because I keep thinking I'll be able to figure it out - but if you've ever studied the French subjunctive (and I don't wish this on any of you) memorization is the only way - Logic and deduction will not do it.
As I think I mentioned before, this class has been great - a really fun mix of people from all over the world, and thankfully not all American and British college students. Sadly, my friend Laura is moving back to Kazakhstan with her family in August, and Yae-ni is going back to South Korea around the same time ... oh well. At least my friend Bonnie will still be here. We both moved here because of our husband's jobs (her husband is a lawyer at a big American firm with an office here), and yet find that both our husbands don't really have to speak French whereas we are slogging through these classes. Bonnie told me her husband now thinks he can speak any language - she said he went to a conference in Germany and came back and told her he spoke German and everyone understood him. She was like "What did you say?" And he said, very proudly, "My namen ist Wesley. Where ist der conference room?".
She was like "They understood you not because you speak German, but because they all speak English ..."
Other news this week - I have a new client that I'm going to be scouting for, Unanimous Entertainment in London. I"m really excited about this as I'll be getting to scout the UK market more, since the company wants to be making movies that can be financed at least in part in the UK. Anyway, I'll be starting in June, and will be doing a bunch of meetings on their behalf when I'm out in the US this summer - its good to start building a network of UK and European companies that I can work for, hopefully this will continue!
Lots of love to all and congrats on surviving the Apocalypse!
Claire
No comments:
Post a Comment