Sorbonne Taught Her to Be a Figure of Speech

In the buoyant days of high school and college, when mortality is still an abstraction and the decades that stretch ahead sparkle with the wealth of possibility--it’s easy to postpone learning the French subjunctive.

In fact, I like to tell myself, it’s easy to have the kind of experience with languages I had: That of a dabbler, a bit of a faker, a dreamy sort of linguistic dilettante who subscribed to the misguided belief that speaking in another tongue is a simple matter of verbal algebra. This word in English equals that word in Latin. Pas de probleme. What’s to study?

With that attitude, three years of high school Spanish taught me enough to read the subway ads. Two years of college Greek left me equipped to decipher fraternity sweat shirts. Then a sprinkling of college French pinched me awake--and made me see that mastering that language, or any other, would take some honest work.

So, last summer--one post-college decade after this insight--I decided to act. Paris was the obvious location, and a four-week course at the Sorbonne, the most rigorous program I could think of for immersing myself in French.

At a time of life when studying a language most often means sandwiching a one-day-a-week adult-education class in some stressful interval between home and work, taking off for an extended learning vacation at the Sorbonne was a refreshingly serious alternative.

And with one of the most romantic cities on Earth serving as a 24-hour-a-day language lab, the setting was supreme. Even in the hot, tourist-heavy month of August, Paris didn’t wilt.

The Sorbonne, planted in the lively Latin Quarter on the Left Bank, offers courses of different durations for students at various levels in its Cours de Civilisation Francaise. I was an intermediate-level student, not an advanced one. But I was happy enough to get the meat-and-potatoes of a fundamental, thorough and extremely well-presented grammar course.

Although school administrators tell prospective students that they must take a grammar test upon arrival, there really are two tests that must be taken. The first is registering for the course.

In dutiful compliance with the guidelines I was given by phone before I left for Paris, I arrived four days before the course began and went to the appointed room (Bureau 9 in a hall called Galerie Richelieu) to register. I was surprised to discover that the college officials there did not take this blathering American by the arm and walk her through the process. Instead, they spoke in the same machine-gun-fire French they used among themselves, asking me questions and tapping their pencils until I formed a response.

It was at that moment that the idea sprouted in my American head that no one was going to speak English to me for a month. And neither my woeful accent nor my abundant mistakes were to be considered charming by the inhabitants of the proud republic on whose soil I was presently perspiring. A bit shaken, I went to a brasserie and sharpened my nerves further with a little cafe au lait, then returned to the Sorbonne for le test.

It wasn’t bad. I recommend bringing along a pencil with eraser as the chosen recording instrument. Half the test is fill-in-the-blank and the other half involves taking down a pretty paragraph that is dictated three times by one of the test-givers. My limited facility with the language was duly registered, and the following Monday, at 8:30 a.m., I found myself in Brigitte Bourseau’s class.

We were a mixed group. All but four in the class of 20 were women. Nearly half the class was Japanese and a large handful was Spanish. Of the remainder, there was another American, a Turk, a Palestinian, a German, a Brazilian and an Australian. When we opened our mouths to speak French, the sounds we emitted were disparate and curious.

But then Brigitte would speak. With her even tone, perfect diction and graceful liaisons, she made spoken French sound like an aria--with one exception: I could understand it. Somehow she managed to make herself perfectly clear without being condescendingly simple. She seemed, with her winged voice, to hover above our Tower of Babel like a demigod.

Some in the class were there for the cerebral sport, as I was, but many others had a pressing need to learn French. The Palestinian was desperate for a visa and needed to prove her facility with the language. The Turk was finishing medical school in Paris and was actually taking classes (in French), while learning the language. And, in a similarly daring move, the Brazilian, whose Portuguese accent was so powerful that not even the sensitive-eared Brigitte could decipher the woman’s French, was about to marry a Frenchman. Oo, la, la. I was rooting for us all.

There was nothing radical about Brigitte’s approach. She spoke only in French, made prodigious use of the blackboard, asked questions, demanded responses and encouraged questions from us. She didn’t follow a text, but presented the rules systematically. She averaged one new lesson per class, or every other class. We met for two hours every morning during the four-week course.

In the last two weeks, a language lab was tacked on for an additional hour a day. Brigitte did not supervise this. Instead, it was taught by a phonetics teacher who would spend half an hour correcting us individually as we spoke into tape recorders, then the other half-hour giving us problematic sentences and having us repeat them en masse.

Perhaps I entered the Sorbonne with low expectations, because at the end of four weeks I was surprised at how much I had learned. When I arrived in Paris I could ask directions and make a simple request of a storekeeper. I left equipped to carry on a rudimentary conversation and read most articles in Le Monde. Although I was still far from fluent, I could finally see that goal glistening on the horizon.

GUIDEBOOK

Studying French at the Sorbonne

Tuition: About $400 for a four-week course that meets two hours a day, $575 for an intensive course (beginners only) that meets five hours a day. Lodging and meals not included.

Accommodations: The Sorbonne has dorm rooms available for a modest cost at the Cite Universitaire on the edge of Paris. The Sorbonne will help find other accommodations as well. Write to the Sorbonne at: Service d’Accueil des Cours de Civilisation Francaise, 6 Rue du Fouarre, 75005 Paris.

Course schedule: Four-week courses: July 4-31 (all levels) and Aug. 5-30 (all levels). Eight-week course: July 4 to Aug. 28 (all levels). Eleven-week course: July 4 to Sept. 24 (all levels). Intensive five-week course: Sept. 2 to Oct. 4 (not open to beginners). The Sorbonne also has three courses during the academic year.

To register: Prospective students do not need to apply in advance for the short courses, but to ensure a place you may preregister by mail for any of the courses. Registration generally is open for three days before each session.

For more information: Contact Secretariat des Cours de Civilisation Francaise, 47 Rue des Ecoles, 75005 Paris, telephone 011-33-1-40-46-22-11.