P
R E S S R E V I E W S
The
Globe and Mail
Toronto, Canada
Innocent abroad : learn
a new language and feel more alive
by Michele Landsberg
"... The Institut
de Français,
here on the Côte d'Azur, has a reputation as one of the world's
most intensive year-round schools in spoken French. Friends chortled
knowingly when I told them that I was going to brush up my French
on the Riviera, little did they or I guess that eight hours a day,
in the CÈte d'Azur's worst heat wave in years, we 70 students would
toil in the midst of paradise.
The Institut, uses a
method that, in its inception, was positively Cartesian: language
snoops placed microphones in French subways, offices and stores,
pored over the result, and came up with a "fundamental vocabulary"
of words most in use in everyday conversation. The Institut potboiled
the list to an even more basic 1.200 words. The teachers speak in
this rigorously selective prose, musically, clearly and rapidly.
And almost from the first day, with a strange sensation of having
fallen through the looking glass, you understand perfectly.
I had worried about
my student stamina. But the Institut's varied curriculum made it
easy to stay alert. We whisked from grammar to films to lab to French
songs; and even - sheepish but dutiful - played parlor games during
the sacred postprandial "hour of digestion."
Our teachers were dazzling.
Good-humored, tactful, radiantly clear an gifted with celestial
patience, they could remorselessly insist on le mot juste
and the non nasal or take 10 minutes, if necessary to extract
the correct verb from a floundering student, and yet never deflate
our ever-growing confidence.
A miracle did happen,
after all. Classmates became friends, met and known only in French.
It was as though we had each discovered, exhilaratingly, a fresh
persona. Racing ahead, we forgot the helplessness of the early days.
So much of our sense of self is bound up in language : acquire a
new language and you feel more powerful, more alive. After the exciting
intensity of effort, we felt - and almost were - triumphantly bilingual..."
For
more detailed information: info@institutdefrancais.com
 |
-
23 Avenue Général-Leclerc - 06230 Villefranche-sur-mer
- FRANCE |
Tel: +33
493 01 88 44
- Fax: +33 493 76 92 17
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