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I pride myself on being a good student and a mature grown-up with 45 years of perspective to bring to my learning experience, but it would appear that I haven’t changed an awful lot since I was about fourteen years old and almost decided to ‘bunk off’ my language class today! Things started to go […]

In my last Spanish class, we started to learn the alphabet. I was somewhat perturbed by the fact that there were so many letters to learn (26 is quite enough thank you!) but in fact it was actually fairly painless to remember the letters – especially when we recited them in order, as a class. […]

I haven’t been to my Spanish class for over a month, but I’ve got a good excuse. I’ve moved to France for a sabbatical to improve my French and (hopefully) to write a grammar book! Surrounded by ‘le French’, I haven’t even opened my Spanish folder since I last wrote. Well I promised to share […]

Don’t like verbs, can’t learn verbs, fingers in my ears I’m not listening la la la… goes my subconscious when asked to learn the endings of regular AR verbs in Spanish.. It’s a bit like mastering fractions, breathing during the front crawl, or remembering capital cities – I have a deeply ingrained awareness that I […]

This week I decided to learn 10 regular AR verbs. I felt about as excited and motivated as if facing my tax return on 30th January. I reluctantly searched for a list of regular AR verbs on the net, and decided to look for really easy ones. The web site that I found http://www.spanish2go.com/ had […]

Learning at home alone is simply not for me. It’s not just the lack of motivation, or social interaction – it’s above all the fact that I can’t ask questions or get feedback that finally send me searching in desperation for a teacher. Two problems; being on a sabbatical in France I have no spare […]

As some of you know, I’m fairly ‘gourmande’ (fond of food), so long as I don’t have to cook it and I have just had a culinary experience which ‘a mis en fête mes papilles’ (tickled my taste-buds). It all started on the Eurostar.  As I was trying to manoeuvre a highly embarrassing number of suitcases on to […]

My daughter is preparing her ‘brevet blanc’ (mock GCSEs the French take at 15). With just two days to go, we desperately try to ‘déchiffrer’ (decipher) the ‘Théorème de Thalès’, the ‘passé simple’ (past historic) and the finer points of ‘la citoyenneté française’ (French citizenship) with the frenzy of WWII ‘décodeurs de code’ (code breakers). The impending exam has prompted […]

When our teachers get their ‘propre’ (own) facebook page, I always ask them to be ‘politiquement correct’ (PC), not to publish ‘des photos compromettantes’ (embarrassing pictures) of themselves doing a ‘défi du seau d’eau glacée’ (ice-bucket challenge) in (tight shorts) ‘caleçon moulant’ … ‘et ainsi de suite’ (and so on). But the week’s events here […]

The ‘raison d’être’ (purpose) of Le Métro et moi, is that despite years of learning and teaching French, I’m still frequently ‘déconcertée’ (stumped) by French words, phrases and sometimes ‘comportement’ (behaviour).  Written with ‘un soupcon’ (a dash) of ‘humour anglais’ (English sense of humour) I offer ‘un aperçu’ (an insight) in to my nearly Parisian experience, as I discover life in the ‘banlieu Parisienne’ (Parisian suburbs).