In less than a month, I will experience the most pressurised thirty minutes any Modern Languages student will ever endure. A toe curling, sweat inducing, tongue tied thirty minutes. My mouth will be dry, my mind will be blank and when I eventually do manage a sentence, it will probably come out high pitched, squeaky and grammatically incorrect. I am, of course, talking about the dreaded oral exam.
Once upon a blue moon, when I first returned home from France, all I wanted to do was speak French. It didn’t matter that the people around me couldn’t understand, because I knew that what I was saying was beautiful. I was supremely confident in my abilities: I had just spent seven months in a delightful, but extremely isolated village where not speaking French was just not an option. I improved fast and I came home excited to tell everyone that I was now “almost fluent.” That was nearly two years ago. Since then, I have mused over Baudelaire, enjoyed Tartuffe and laboured through Zola, but my spoken French has slipped steadily into decline. What then, I began to wonder, was the point of a language degree? Whereas in History I was making clear progress, getting better grades and discovering the past with a passion, in French I seemed to be going backwards. The simple truth was I had peaked, aged twenty, and would never again experience the sheer joy that is making a room full of native French speakers laugh with you, not at you (at least I hope that is what they were doing). It was all going to be downhill from here, unless I did something drastic.
Thus, this week, I was a girl on a mission. I wish I could say that I impulsively bought a ticket to Paris and spent a week chatting away in pavement cafes over a café au lait, but that would be bending the truth slightly. What I actually did was I attended a series of Yakety Yak language cafes in Edinburgh. The concept is delighfully simple: for a fee, people who are interested in speaking French can attend hour long sessions with a native speaker in various cafes and bars around Edinburgh. Most people attend once a week, but I took an intensive crash course: by the end of the week, there wasn’t a tutor that didn’t know my name and I had discussed the film Yves Saint Laurent so many times, that although I still haven’t seen it, I’m starting to feel like I don’t need to.
I’ll admit that on Monday I was sceptical about how much use it would be, but in fact the benefits are immeasurable. My French has really improved, I’ve met some lovely people, I’ve discovered new parts of my home city and I’ve reminded myself why I study French. With graduation fast approaching, I had worried that I would loose my ability to converse en français, but ironically it seems that I might end up speaking more and better French than I do right now, which is definitely something to look forward to. Vive le Yakety Yak!
la tarte framboise 