MSI Press Blog

  Quebec On our way back home to Pittsburgh from Maine on one visit when the kids were little, we came pretty close to South Hero Island in Vermont. (That story will be told in another volume because there was a story that took place on South Hero Island.) Once on that island, we were intrigued by the chain of islands in Lake Champlain that separated Vermont from New York. The islands felt almost like stepping‑stones laid across the lake—long, low stretches of farmland and shoreline, connected by narrow causeways that skimmed just above the water. Each island had its own quiet personality: a cluster of houses here, a field of grazing cows there, a glimpse of blue water widening on both sides. It was the kind of landscape that pulls you forward without your noticing, island after island, as though the lake itself were guiding you north. That chain, island after island, pulled us straight up to Canada. Once again, we were in Canada, unplanned. The crossing itself was so undrama...

  Later Opportunities for Refreshing Skills From time to time over the years, I have had opportunities to refresh my French, sometimes just a little and casually and other times more formally. French remains a strong language, but reading and writing have emerged as the greater strengths, mainly because of lack of opportunity for communication. When my daughter was taking French in high school (she took 4-5 years of French), I would be able to communicate with her and to help her. She did not consider it helping, however, when I would send notes in French about any absences or other issues to her homeroom teacher, who was also her French teacher. Once, I wrote an excuse in French poetry. Her teacher read it to all the French classes, immensely embarrassing my daughter—but it was fun to have some interaction with French again. Another opportunity arose when I was working on my PhD in Moscow. The university required proficiency in a foreign language. No, Russian did not count; ...

  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...