This semester I was planning on returning to the classroom, the language classroom, to get back into French.  The last time I took a formal french class was my senior year in high school and it was fourth year french (mostly literature from what I remember). In any case, my freshman year in college I frequented Yahoo! Chatrooms to practice my french and I did have a pen-pal for a while. Around 1999 our paths diverged and that was the last time I wrote in french (also the last time I regularly "spoke" it as well).

In any case, I was planning on taking a 300 level french course on composition and stylistics. I attended a few class sessions and the course was challenging, but just at the right level for someone as rusty as I am. Due to work, and the fact that I just can't sit for 90 minutes two times per week I decided to stop auditing the course and attempt a different method.  I figured that there are enough french speakers on the internet to help me out.  I thought I would use this blog (and my club-admiralty blog) to post a series of thematic blog posts, about one per week. At the end of each blog post I will have a link to a Google document with the same content as the blog post where french speakers can correct my errors, make suggestions for alternative wording, and let me know when things just sound off.

I still have the textbooks for the course, which I plan on using, but I would prefer to watch french films, and write blog posts instead of sitting in class :-)  It's a pity too, because the professor for that course was really cool! He insisted on having us speak only in french to him, and he only spoke in french to us. I think that this is the way to go! Next spring there is a course on conversational french, so I think I may attempt to audit that course.  For now, I will rely on the francophone blog community to support me in my learning endeavor (I hope it doesn't fail!)

Sometime this weekend I plan on writing this in French, let's see how far I get (and how off it sounds!)