Toronto, Canada
"Innocent abroad
: learn a new language and feel more alive"
by Michele Landsberg
"... The Institut
de Français, here on the Côte d'Azur,
has a reputation as one of the world's most intensive
year-round schools in spoken French. Friends chortled
knowingly when I told them that I was going to brush
up my French on the Riviera, little did they or I
guess that eight hours a day, in the CÈte d'Azur's
worst heat wave in years, we 70 students would toil
in the midst of paradise.
The Institut, uses
a method that, in its inception, was positively Cartesian:
language snoops placed microphones in French subways,
offices and stores, pored over the result, and came
up with a "fundamental vocabulary" of words
most in use in everyday conversation. The Institut
potboiled the list to an even more basic 1.200 words.
The teachers speak in this rigorously selective prose,
musically, clearly and rapidly. And almost from the
first day, with a strange sensation of having fallen
through the looking glass, you understand perfectly.
I had worried about
my student stamina. But the Institut's varied curriculum
made it easy to stay alert. We whisked from grammar
to films to lab to French songs; and even - sheepish
but dutiful - played parlor games during the sacred
postprandial "hour of digestion."
Our teachers were dazzling.
Good-humored, tactful, radiantly clear an gifted with
celestial patience, they could remorselessly insist
on le mot juste and the non nasal or take 10 minutes,
if necessary to extract the correct verb from a floundering
student, and yet never deflate our ever-growing confidence.
A miracle did happen,
after all. Classmates became friends, met and known
only in French. It was as though we had each discovered,
exhilaratingly, a fresh persona. Racing ahead, we
forgot the helplessness of the early days. So much
of our sense of self is bound up in language : acquire
a new language and you feel more powerful, more alive.
After the exciting intensity of effort, we felt -
and almost were - triumphantly bilingual..."
