Resolution

The promise of the new year brings the promise of self improvement.  For me, this year, as in years past, is the hope, the desire, the drive to speak French, the language in which my husband dreams and which my children will need to speak if we are ever to relocate to somewhere more desirable for us outside of the US.  France, silly!   (or some other French speaking country)


We have been down this road before.  When we moved to Barbados, I pronounced that my job would be to take care of the children and to learn French.  My kids are running wild and save my expertise in French wine drinking, French baguettes made from scratch by said husband, French fries, and a little Charlotte et Serge Gainsbourg, I have failed in my job miserably.  I should be fired.


It isn't that I don't speak any French.  I have a basic understanding until someone who actually speaks French talks to me and then I rack my brain for all the basic school supplies, family relations, and foods I know.  Un stylo.  Les copines.  Le fromage.  What are they asking me again?  I desperately want to speak.  I love how it sounds, what it communicates, how it communicates.  I love that we can tell secrets and that Didier might actually listen to me if I speak in his mother tongue.  Very few French speakers I have met have considered that I might at least want to speak with them, save my friend Sophie who recently left Barbados for Switzerland where she can parler away, and Didier's brother François who once heard me say something, who knows what, and decided from that moment forward that not only did I understand, but that he should speak to me and tell jokes and use innuendo as though I'd lived my life in a banlieu of Paris.  What I am saying is, I do not understand too much after the greeting.  But he is as cute as a bouton.


I do not think the French are rude.  They are trying to spare you the indignity of speaking their language incorrectly.  Even my husband, when I speak French to him, answers me in English.  But no more.  I am using the Rosetta Stone.  And this year, it will be mastered.  French speaking will be mine!


I only made room for this and one other resolution this year so that I could concentrate all my efforts into success.  So far, I have had about 2 hours of Rosetta.  I like the technique but had to train myself to care less about getting 100% on each lesson and more about learning how to speak.  Old habits die hard.  The thing with the reading and speech sections is that my voice is so low that it often does not register if I am scratch whispering into the mic trying to avoid waking up the cherubs, that I get the task "wrong" because my voice is not detected.  Curses.


My friend Jack Dillon is relocating to France in less than a month and in weeks completed the entire Rosetta package.  He put a fire under my butt.  I need to get those conjugated verbs into the grey matter immédiatement!  It doesn't matter that Jack swears to me that he doesn't "understand a lick" (He is a Southern sweetie pie, after all), I know that he will arrive in France and with total immersion in the culture be ordering baguettes, wearing his striped jersey t-shirt and beret, smoking rolled cigarettes, and reading Le Monde while having lunch for three hours discussing the finer points of wild mushrooms.  I am jalouse beyond comprehension. 

Thinking positively and looking ahead, whether we go directly to France without collecting $200 or find ourselves somewhere else on the path to our final destination, a new skill, the gift of language, something to share with my family, is a pleasure I will not deny myself.  This time.  Unlike the new gym membership, diet plans, forbidding myself to swear or use curse words (Sheesh, like that is ever going to happen), Rosetta Stone French lessons are going to stick.  That's the plan and I am resolute.


(c)  Copyright 2011.  City Mom in the Jungle.