at the Alliance Française

My class, to my surprise, has only one American in it -- me. There is a Brazilian, a Portuguese, a Swiss, a Russian, two Vietnamese, and the rest are Chinese. And here I thought I was going to miss Berkeley classes. Communication between the students is interesting -- some of us can communicate more easily in English than in French, and we sometimes do so covertly. But the Chinese students don't seem to know any English at all, so we're in the curious position of speaking recreational French. It's much more difficult than talking to a French person, because neither of our vocabularies are that good, nor our accents, and also, I think that they know fewer English words than the average French person. The word "internet" drew a total blank.

This also affects the conduct of the class. As far as I remember, my textbooks in high school had English in them. The Alliance's do not, which makes sense, but I have to believe there is some inefficiency there. When I have to look up the words used to give a grammatical rule, I'm not learning that rule as easily as I might have. The teacher's job is way harder as well. When teaching people who speak English, i.e., me, the preferred technique is to start listing synonyms until either I know one of them or I know a cognate. French-Chinese cognates are not so easy to find.

It is nice to see all of us with our different-language dictionaries out, though. The Chinese students have little electronic dictionaries, but the rest of us can be seen frantically thumbing through our dictionaries at random times while the teacher goes on.

And more xkcd

Damn you, MyBrain!