Saturday, April 16, 2022

My linguistic autobiography: Learning French as a teenager in the US

My linguistic autobiography continues with French, which I began learning at twelve in seventh grade. For six years, I had French class for four or five days a week, but I have few memories of the classes themselves or the methods used. In college, I stopped taking or even using French, but while studying Comparative Literature in graduate school, I took it up again, first in a course on 20th-century French novels, later in reading Marguerite Duras for my dissertation. Then, in the late nineties, my wife Andrea lived in France for four years, and my spoken French got good enough that I was once asked if I was from Québec. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 16 April 2022)


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