MSI Press Blog

  Army French I may never have taken another French class at Penn State, but it was not my last French instruction. In my early 20s, when my oldest daughter was still a toddler, I joined the US Army. How that happened is a bit of a long—and somewhat ironic—story, having to do with being recruited by SFC Robin Hood (seriously) while providing moral support for my husband, but it is an important one, since the Army and the Defense Language Institute played a significant role in my language-learning life. Ultimately, I was sent to the Defense Language Institute for Russian language training. Since I had already studied Russian, I found the course unchallenging. Enjoyable, fun, but not demanding. During the final 2-3 months, a fellow student, Maurice, who was also not feeling challenged by the Russian course, took advantage of the opportunity to study French in the afternoon, while continuing with Russian in the morning. The French course was also not challenging, but it was refreshing...

    My Pen-Pal In addition to the rich milieu I grew up, frequent correspondence with a pen-pal, Yves, from France enhanced my French-learning endeavors. I gained an understanding of another French-speaking culture, other idioms, and a country with a deep history. Yves, with whom the Youth of All Nations pen-pal organization connected me, shared his lived experience as he lived it, sending papers and pictures that allowed me to vicariously share in that experience. Of course, it gave me a lot of opportunity to use expressive language where it mattered whether I got it right. Often—and I still smile about it—Yves would send my letters back with errors corrected! After college, I lost contact with Yves, but he somehow managed to contact me when I was living in Montana in my early 20s. Just married and with one kid. He was visiting New York City and wanted to come see me. However, he did not realize the vastness of the territory of the United States; he did not have enough money ...

  My Walks to School In my last two years of high school, I used to walk to school with my best friend, D. I would meet her at her house. While she finished getting her things together, I would talk to her mother, a native speaker of French with pretty darn good English. A lovely lady. Our morning conversations, however brief, were among the highlights of my day, every day. Upon occasion, I would ask her for help with my French homework, if there was something I did not understand or know. One of her “explanations” has stayed with me for decades. I could not remember the gender of one of the nouns in the assignment. “Is the article le or la ?” I asked her. She did not know. “Just say it fast,” she advised. So, l’ it became! In so many conversations in the future with all kinds of people, even in college classrooms, I would just say it fast—and I nearly never got caught! Which makes sense because a lot of expressions in French are “just said fast.” Whole sentences get contra...

  The Textile Mill During high school, I worked summers in a textile mill in Gonic, NH. I started out as a burler (pulling knots out of freshly woven wool fabric) in the sewing room, where my grandmother and aunt were sewers (filling in the holes that the burlers made). My grandmother, aunt, and I were the only native speakers of English in that sewing room of 21 workers. The conversations during the day were lively, helping the time to pass more interestingly while mechanically sewing up holes practical reinforcement—and in a mixture of mostly New England French, some English (essentially any unbroken and continuous English mainly between my grandmother and aunt whose sewing positions were side by side), and a fair about of French-English blend typical of what happens in areas where two languages dominate. The comment that has stayed with me for more than 60 years now is that made by the women sitting in the position on my life, who was complaining that things were falling a...

  High School French My high school French courses were probably like no other. I started out in French 1 at Sanford High School (Maine), where French was pretty ubiquitous and most of the students—heck, all of the other students—in the class had already had eight years of French in elementary school and spoke it at home. The teacher that year was new. He did not know the background of his class because he had moved to Maine from Canada in order to take the job. He was young. He was handsome. He was cocky. And he did not know us! After we all sat down for the first class, he grinned, looked around, and found a pretty girl in the front seat in one of the rows. Thinking no one would understand, he jokingly asked, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” [Do you want to sleep with me?]—not something acceptable in this day and age but back then would be taken as a joke.) For him, the joke was that he had said something fresh, but immediately the joke was on him. Our classmate looked him up and ...