A bunch of my friends called me crazy when I took up French last year. Some still do. I’ve surprised myself by sticking to it through B1 level even though I’m woefully awful at speaking.
However, I’m here not to boast about my resilience 😂 but to share about my experience. Specifically about how it’s helping me realise few feelings which otherwise I would have taken too long to notice. There I am sitting in class when we are talking discussing about a subject and suddenly I have this epiphany.
I still remember this crystal clear when we were discussing about fear in the first month of the B1 (B1 lasts for 6 months). One moment I was listening attentively and in the other moment I was scared because I had noticed wrinkles on my mom’s face the other day. I’ll confess I had never paid attention to her. And suddenly I realized she had aged by 20 years.
Suddenly she was old.
I’m not sure whether it was our discussion that triggered this feeling. Or I would go through it even without this trigger. There sure is no way to find it out anymore but over the course of five to six months I’ve had many such moments.
I’ve been thinking about it – why now and why not earlier!
Here’s what I have come up with – my French class sure is the trigger in some way. It’s forcing me to think about things which I otherwise would miss out in daily hustle. My life, for sure, won’t allow me think about fear for two straight hours. To add to it, it definitely won’t give me a wide range of perspective either. Thanks to the diversity in our class I can have opinions on any subjects even from a fourteen year old kid.
My B1 will soon come to an end and I’m no way near to speaking French fluently. I hope to achieve some level of fluency by B2 but more than that I’m looking forward to these petit moments of reflections.
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