Reflection Month: #1

It's been a while since I updated anything about my journey to learning French. Tests have been taken, compositions have been written, and articles have been read. Monsieur has definitely been keeping me on my toes and since today is November 1st, I thought it was about time I updated you on what I have been doing.

Here's a review of what I went through and their outcome for the past two months.

• Oral exam. We had our first oral exam three weeks ago and, I have to say, it wasn't too bad. Monsieur had us choose a poem and memorize it: Le Corbeau et Le Renard and La cigale et la fourmi. Both poems were fun to read, but I chose Le Corbeau et le Renard. I wanted to do both, but let's face it. Life as a college student, you sometimes don't have enough time to do all of the things you want to do in one weekend. Plus my body likes to decide to, on its own accord, to sleep as much as possible because it knows that we are not going to go to sleep during the week. But I did pretty good on my oral. That reminds me, I need to email my professor and ask him what my grade was....Hopefully it was an A....or at least a B+! 

• Composition. Monsieur gave us a prompt to write about the first time Obama ran for President. Needless to say, I got an A. You know, after I gave my first draft to Tutor. I need to buy a gift for him for the all the trouble he's going through reading my "Me Jane....you Tarzon" speech.

• Presentation. We are currently reading Le Dieu du Carnage and my partner and I had to speak about the pages we were assigned on, in French. The presentation wasn't too bad. I just wish I was able to articulate my answers better than: Elle était fâché avec lui (I wonder if that's even grammatically correct. We're currently reviewing personal pronouns and I still get confused). I kind of like this book, plus I always feel proud of myself when I understand what I'm reading.

• Written exam. I did good on my first exam, but I could have done better (got an 80%). The tense worksheet I created really helped. I talked about it in my previous post: Study Habits Improved: # 1. A tip for all you language learners, if you're doing drills on spelling, make sure that you spell it the first time. My mistake was spelling the word wrong the first time in my worksheet and then using that as a template to continue my drills. So when I got the exam, I spelled the words correctly from my worksheet, but because I never noticed that I spelled it wrong, Monsieur, of course, marked them wrong. I lost a lot of points because of that. Struggles, I tell you. My second exam, I did much better (I got an 88%). I studied with one of my classmates and that definitely helped. I think I need to review more on my own before just to make sure I don't forget any material to go over. 

As you can see, Monsieur has given a lot of assignments to enhance our French skills (bless that man).

Au revoir!