French is Hard (Featuring lots of Brazilians)

First of all:

French is hard.
Madi and I started our classes today, and we were both placed, after thorough placement tests, in a class called French Communication Intermediate 1. Our school is super old on the outside but super chic and sexy on the inside and there are basically more Brazilian students than anything else. Bring on the Portuguese.

Anyway.

This morning we woke up in the home of our host family in the little room we share (I'll post pictures when I don't have limited WiFi like we do at home) and we met our new sister, the German student who is also living with our host family. Her name is Leah. Now I have two sisters named Leah. We ate nutella toast and bananas for breakfast and she walked to a bus which drove us to a train which dropped us off somewhere where we walked to school for our first day of classes (yesterday was orientation).

Along this ride we also met Marcel, who is, you guessed it, Brazilian, and speaks about four languages fluently (maybe more, we lost count). He's super nice and his host family is in the same neighborhood as ours. There are a lot of exchange students living in our neighborhood, but only one other American! He's a guy from Florida and has a terrible French accent.

So back to my original point: French is hard.
It didn't take us long to realize that all of the students placed in French Communication Intermediate 1 aside from Madi and myself speak very fluent French. Comfortably. They would probably disagree with this observation, but I mean they were joking to each other in French and understanding each other's jokes and laughing hysterically at full speed. We were a little (very much) left in the dust. This was three hours in a classroom easily half the size of any Hawken classroom with the same number of students, in not more, and all we could do was listen and comprehend and pray that we wouldn't be called on the respond rapid-speed to a question.
However, Madi and I both agreed that our comprehension skills sky-rocketed just in one day. There was not a single word of English spoken throughout the entire class. If you asked what a word meant, it was described to you in French. While this is slower and can be more frustrating, we quickly realized that that's how everyone learns their first language. When you're a baby and you don't know what someone says in English you don't have someone to translate it into baby thoughts for you.
I digress.

The second important part of our trip thus far is the new friend we've made! Later I'll post a picture of Amanda, who is our new....wait for it... Brazilian friend! She's attending ILSC to learn English, and while her speech can be pretty broken, we love her! She's not in our classes, and yet we keep running into her. Today we left La Basilique (see tomorrow's blogpost for that stuff), and we happened to see her tying her shoe or something at the bottom of the steps.

Which leads me to my final point. Montreal is huge. Large enough to get extremely lost (see tomorrow's blogpost for that horrific story). However, it's possibly the biggest example of a small world I've ever seen. I'm constantly seeing people I saw a few hours before, or seeing a woman we saw in line at the bank at work at the café that evening. It's bizarre. Maybe we're just crazy, but we also see tons of dopplegangers. We're convinced that for every American there's an identical Canadian....French Canadian.

Everyone hear speaks French. I mean....everyone. A huge portion of the people don't even speak English (i.e. inconveniently, as we learned, the bus drivers....), but it's been great practice. We've ordered so much delicious food in French that we've pretty much got the restaurant environment covered. There's so much to learn, and we've almost never seen a more beautiful city. We're in love. Quelle belle ville!


Well, as I said, we're at home now and we can't upload photos here because of the WiFi limits, but we'll be sure to add them tomorrow when we're at school. Also tomorrow we'll post about the cathedral and how we got disgustingly lost, and if you're lucky, it won't even be in French!

-Claire (and Madi in spirit)