"Passing" the DELF B1

My big goal for coming to France to study was, of course, to "learn French" but my measurable, tangible goal was to pass the B1 level of the DELF, which is the 3rd of the 6 levels. The test is offered all over the world but is only offered about 4 times per year in each location, so you have to plan well in advance and find a time and place. The test is composed of 4 parts - Oral Comprehension, Written Comprehension, Writing Ability, and Speaking Ability - worth 25 pts each, for a possible total of 100 pts. The French system (in most testing situations) purposely makes tests very hard to really judge how much a student has learned, and no student should get every question right. Therefore, the grading system is very different than the American system, and for my test a "passing" grade was 50pts/100 while a "good" score was 75pts/100. The only restriction was that you had to score at least 5 points in every section.

Luckily, the test was offered during my stay in Tours. Unfortunately, it was only available during my 5th week (preferably I would have taken it after all 8 weeks) and it was in a different town. Luckily, that town was Amboise, which was only a 20 minute train ride away and was a town I'd been to twice before. Unfortunately, the test started at 9am and the trains ran infrequently so on my test day, Friday, September 18, I had to get up at 6am to get ready, collect the things I needed and move them into my "professional-looking" purse, and walk to the train station to catch a 7:07am commuter. On my way out the door I ran through a mental checklist to see if I had my wallet, passport, keys, and phone. At the last moment I remembered to grab the train tickets I had purchased the day before. I pulled them out of the envelope to double check that they said Amboise, then ran out the door.

As usual, I was running late, so I walked/trotted/jogged to the train station as quickly as possible, but in the end I arrived a full nine minutes before the train left so I had plenty of time. As I pulled out my train ticket to stamp it before getting on the train I realized with a wave of disbelief that the ticket to Amboise in my hand was an old ticket, from 2 weeks earlier, and that I had grabbed the wrong train tickets to Amboise. There certainly was not time to go home, and there wasn't even enough time to buy a new one because the lines were too long, so with dread I jumped on the train and in my head began composing my apology to the conductor - "Bonjour Monsieur, je suis vraiment desolé, mais j'ai les billets incorrectes. J'ai acheté mes billets hier, mais j'ètais en ritard ce matin et j'ai pris les billets incorrectes. Je voulais acheter un nouveau billet maintenant, et voilà mon argent. Je suis très desolé."

In the end the ticket collector never made it to my car during the 20 minute trip, so I got off at Amboise without incident.

I searched out the testing center, and then with more than an hour to spare hunted down a cafe to get coffee and a croissant, a surprisingly difficult task at 8am in a tourist town. On the entire main road in front of the castle, full of shops, there was only one open at that hour. Luckily, they had wonderful big booths where I could spread out my materials to do some last minute studying. The waiter was pleasant and the atmosphere comfortable (so I gave them my business for the rest of the day).

At 8:45 am I walked back to the testing center, checked in, and sat in a room with the 6 other students (all Asian). The first part of the test was the Oral Comprehension, which consisted of 3 separate conversations, news reports, or advertisements played from a CD that we had to listen to and answer questions on. The second part was Reading Comprehension, which had two articles that we had to read and answer questions on. The third part was writing, and we were given a 5 or 6 sentence statement on a social issue and asked to write a short essay (160-180 words) giving our opinion for or against the topic. On my test day the topic was on whether we agreed or disagreed with a proposition that it should be obligatory for every person between the ages of 18-30 to do 6 months of "social work" at a wage of 350 euros per month. (I said no.)

The three sections finished at 11am, so I then had four hours to kill before my last section, the speaking ability, at 3pm. I went back to my cafe, sat in my booth, had lunch, and studied again. A little after 2pm I walked back to the test center and hung around watching other people get called in for their speaking tests. Finally it was my turn. There were three parts to the speaking section - 1 minute to introduce yourself, where you came from, why you were studying French, then a 5 minute "role play" between you and the instructor, and then a 3 minute monologue on a short article. I was given 10 minutes to read and prepare some notes (my article was on the inequality between men and women), and then we were off. My introduction of myself went stellar, the role play not so well (I had to pretend to be an angry customer who hadn't received the pizza she had ordered), and the monologue pretty well. After a whirlwind 15 minutes the test was over, and I had an hour and a half to kill before the results were posted. So, I went back to my cafe, for the third time that day.

In the end, I passed with a score of 64/100, not unbelievable but not too shabby either! My scores highlighted my strengths and my weakness - 19/25 on Reading Comprehension, 17/25 on Writing Ability, 19/25 on Speaking Ability (which was very generous of the instructor considering that at one point I had said "I am not the pizza!!" instead of "I don't have the pizza!") but only 9/25 on Oral Comprehension. I knew going in that it would be my weakest section, and that I would be relying on the other sections to make up for it, but at least I know now that it's really what I need to focus on the most.

Friday night called for a little bit of celebration. : )

Football, Football, and Rugby

When I'm in the U.S. I am not usually a fan of watching soccer on TV, but it's completely different in Europe and it's always really fun to watch it in a bar in the country that's playing and cheer with the crowd. France is no different, and I've now watched two football games at a bar here although it's mostly a guys' sport and I was one of only two girls in the whole bar. They clear out all the stools and force it to be standing room only, but people pack the bar for the solid 90 minutes, standing, barely moving, eyes riveted to the screen. It's a very serious sport, and big games are treated with great respect (they're playing for the World Cup right now), but it's France, and as soon as I heard the first "Oh la la" I just about lost it into giggles.

The French say "Oh, la la!" when something critical is about to happen, or when a play fails, or when somebody makes a mistake. There are different intonations to describe what happened, and you can just about follow a game without watching, simply by listening to the sounds the French make. The intonation for something critical about to happen is high-pitched and spoken quickly, with excitement - "OH LA LA!!" The intonation for a botched play is a low-pitched murmur full of disdain - "oh, la la" and the intonation for a player who made a mistake is scornful and full of disbelief "OH! la la" with a bit of a tsk-tsk at the end.

I was recently asked why American football players wear helmets and so much padding. So they don't get injured, I responded. My friends told me, but rugby players don't wear padding and it's much more intense than your football. I said no it wasn't because in rugby the play is much more fluid and both teams are moving generally in the same direction so the hits aren't as hard as in American football where the two teams run at each other from opposite directions. We proceeded to get in an argument about whether rugby or American football has harder hits. To be fair to both sides, I haven't watched enough rugby to evaluate conclusively, but my friends haven't watched enough American football to know, so we were left with a stalemate. I was the only one who thought the hits were harder in football. I'm open to input, let me know what you think . . .

In basketball, the great sports moment on local television for me is hearing Tony Parker speak to reporters in French.

3rd weekend - Castle Usse (Sleeping Beauty castle)

My third weekend in castle and wine country we decided to be smart for once and go to bed early on Friday night in order to get an early start on Saturday. After catching a 9am train to Chinon we biked about 8 miles up, down, and through deceptively-easy-looking-but-really-difficult hills, to the town of Rigny-Usse to visit Chateau d'Usse, which is the castle that inspired the story of Sleeping Beauty (supposedly). The legend goes that Charles Perrault visited the castle as a guest, and during his stay came up with the storyline for Sleeping Beauty. It is also the castle that Walt Disney supposedly used as a model for his creations.

The castle was first constructed in wood around the year 1000 by a Viking named Gueldin de Saumur, who used its location on a hill as a fortress. Over the years it passed through many different owners who each built on or reconstructed, so it gained elements of many styles and periods. Right now it is owned by the family of the Duke of Blacas. It was beautiful from the outside, and mostly beautiful from the inside, except for the rooms with bizarre 3/4 size mannequins depicting the characters in the fairy tale. They've turned it into a half-ass Disney display, and it just didn't work for me.

After the castle we biked another 8 miles, through more gentle but paralyzing hills (I swore I could feel the lactic acid building up in my thighs), to the town of Azay-le-Rideau to find some wineries. In the end the wineries were all 3-7 miles outside of town in completely opposite directions, and we were so exhausted from biking so far already that we just stopped into a shop that offered wine tasting, and tried quite a few of the local selections without having to travel there ourselves. We caught a train right from Azay back to Tours, had dinner with our host famlies, and then went and watched France play Romania in football.

Sunday was the big end-of-the-year sale and street festival in Tours, so all the shops on the main street (Rue National) put booths outside and sold most of their items at a big discount. I picked up some gifts for friends and family and got a few small things for myself, and enjoyed the nice weather and warm sunshine.

Town of Chinon.

Gregor carrying our bikes up a steep hill in Chinon before we realized there was an elevator.
Chateau d'Ussy.

The oldest part of the castle.

This staircase used to lead straight into the forest and was used as an escape route in times of war.

The bizarre mannequins.

Sleeping Beauty herself.

Waving from Sleeping Beauty's tower.

Braderie street festival/massive end-of-year sale.

DELF - Diplome D'etudes en Langue Francaise

The country of France has a testing system known as the DELF that uses 6 levels to classify someone's knowledge of a language. A1 means you are a beginner with little or no knowledge of the language. A2 means you've had training, know basic verb conjugations and can converse and describe basic elements in the world around you. B1 means you've got a pretty good grasp on the everyday language and can converse easily on topics encountered in daily life. B2 means you're able to discuss complex topics using a wide variety of sentence structure. C1 means you can discuss abstract thoughts and understand and discuss highly detailed topics like politics, and C2 means you are equivalent to a native speaker.

My school CLE loosely follows these guidelines when dividing students up into classes. When we arrived the first day and took the placement exam I was put into the A2 group. The problem was that my class had several students who were beginner A2s (namely the English with Alzheimers who couldn't follow along and the Lebanese woman who couldn't read and would just guess at words until the teacher filled them in for her) and several (like me) who were in between A2 and B1. During the first two weeks I got very frustrated because the beginner A2s slowed the whole class down so we weren't learning as much as quickly as I would have liked. (I eventually spoke to the director halfway through week 2 and she said she'd see what she could do). It was no fault of our teacher, Elise, because she was outstanding. Young, thin, tall, and energetic, she had short, brown hair, dark rimmed glasses, a face and personality like a cartoon character and arms that stretched from one side of the room to the other that she used like charades to help us understand the words. She spoke clearly and eloquently and would bounce from one end of the table to the other, never seeming to slow down, tire, or lose patience if we didn't understand.

Luckily, at the beginning of the third week the classes changed a lot. At the end of the second week close to 12 students went home but we got 8 new students, so after placement exams I got moved up into a B1 class with just 3 other students - Astrid, a Swiss German, Mariene, from Holland, and Jenny, an American in her 60s. (This little group is fantastic because we're all on the same level and we feed off each other and help each other out.) Unfortunately, Elise also went home because she was hired only for summer to fill in for a regular professor who was on vacation. Our new professor, Gaelle, is the complete opposite. Middle-aged, petite, and hawkish with wiry brown hair, she sends fear through our hearts every time she steps in the room. During the first 5 minutes with her my eyes visibly widened at how much she spit the r's out of her mouth and how grating her voice sounded, which she took to mean I thought she was talking too fast. She proceeded to spend the next 3 days speaking one word at a time, which didn't help our comprehension at all because we just couldn't understand anything she said whether spoken slow or fast. She puts the blame on us for not understanding and makes us feel about the size of an ant, whereas a teacher like Elise would take the blame on herself for not explaining properly. The first few days with Gaelle I was more agitated than I've been in the last month and for the first time yet did not look forward to going to class.

As much as I despise her, Gaelle does have an uncanny way of picking up on exactly what we are doing wrong, breaking us down, and building us back up. Half the time I think she doesn't prepare for class and just waits for us to say something wrong, then jumps (or pounces, really) on that grammar topic and directs her whole lesson around it. I go back and forth between wanting to strangle her in a brutal fight to the death and tolerating her because I think I will learn a lot. The result has yet to be decided.

More Castles, More Wine

My second weekend in Tours we said goodbye to Barbara, Yuichiro, and Volker, so there were lots of going away drinks to attend to Friday night before heading out to more castles on Saturday. My "real" hosts, Annick and Johny, also returned on Friday night in time for dinner so I finally got to meet them (briefly) before heading out. I don't think Yuichiro had many (or any) friends, so I invited him out with us for his last night. For the first time since I'd lived with him, he actually spoke, and actually seemed like he didn't mind talking. Of course, he never volunteered conversation, but when asked a question he responded in complete sentences. Although there is some diversity in Tours, it is still a mostly Caucasian, western European, homogenous town. At one point in the night a French guy at the table next to us, white as can be with fashion forward scruffy hair, beard, and hat that screamed "look at me" turned around, tapped Yuichiro on the shoulder, and began speaking to him in Japanese. The rest of us looked at each other with gaping mouths and nothing to say.

Saturday Karin, Gregor and I headed out on the train again, bikes in tow, to visit chateaus Chaumont and Blois. I didn't know much about either one because once again I didn't do the planning, but in the end I was blown away by Chaumont and could take or leave Blois. Chaumont looked like it was straight out of a fairy tale, with big round towers, pretty green grass, and a cute little drawbridge just slightly too big to jump over. The inside was quaint, with typical "castley" things like knights' armor, big wooden tables, tapestries, and a 10-lock trunk (straight out of Harry Potter).

After Chaumont we biked to Blois and toured its castle, but after such a beautiful one earlier in the day it didn't impress quite as much. In the late afternoon we sat in the sun at an outdoor cafe and drank wine with castle Blois in the background and chatted about topics from all parts of our lives. Gregor told me about his service in Afghanistan and the friends he'd lost, and I talked about the recent changes in my work and private life and what the future holds.

Late in the evening we wobbled to the train station with our bikes, fell onto a train, and barely made it back to our houses in Tours before sleep came.

Sunday was another train ride with the bikes (by this time we were pros at popping them on and off the train in under 30 seconds) back to Amboise, to finally see the castle, and to buy more chocolates. It was definitely a neat castle, built into a hill, that looked more like a fortress armed for defense than any of the others. It's also where Leonardo da Vinci is buried, a fact that is not publicized nearly as much as I expected it would be.

On that beautiful sunny day the town of Amboise itself was enormously cute, the views amazing and the chocolate out of this world, while the castle loomed sternly in the background.

Sunday concluded with an early night in to study and do homework before class bright and early Monday morning.

Modern art exhibit in the garden.

Blois.

Real cannonballs!!

Start of Sunday - Amboise

Gargoyle: Bloody hell! Get me down from here!