Learning French with Johan, Pirlouit et Claudette

When someone asks, "What is the hardest thing about living and working in Brussels?" we always say, "learning French".  This is the one thing our entire team agrees on. We are not in an environment where we are totally immersed - you can always find someone who speaks English. A salesperson or receptionist might have to go and search for them for a few minutes.  We don't always ask.  We would prefer to try to converse in French, but they often hear our accent and slow speech and go to find the multilingual people.

I started out with a professional, expensive business school.  I was able to keep up, but I never really completely understood the concepts before we would move into the next part.  The most we ever had in the class was four students - three women and me.  Several units were just me.  They finally decided after a particularly bad final exam that I should not go on.  I felt that they should have realized that closer to the beginning rather than expecting me to repeat the last class when I felt lost for a long time. It would be more economical to do something else. Next I studied with a very good private tutor at our apartment.  She was excellent but also expensive.  Then after that I went to a commune class, kind of like Continuing Education in a local school.  I enjoyed that.  It was a class of twenty-five students and we spent a lot of time conversing rather than just learning grammar and verb conjugations.  I made a lot of progress but I didn't finish because I returned to the States to visit friends and relatives.  Upon returning to Belgium, Elizabeth and "Claudette" (not her real name - if I fail I don't want to embarrass her), decided that I should study with Claudette for a half hour every day.  Claudette lives on the top floor of our building, the sixth.  We live on the second.  I rode the elevator up to find that we would be using a Belgian comic strip book as a text book.  That seemed great until I started to read it to her.  It was incredibly difficult!  It looked like a children's story but it had high school vocabulary!

"Johan et Pirlouit" was written by Payo, who also developed the Smurfs out of this series. In French the Smurfs are called les Schtroumpfs.  Anyways, Johan is a knight in training in the king's court and Pirouette is a short guy who is the Court Jester and rides a nanny goat for a horse.  This, and going over a grade school phonetics book, is working very well.  The difficult words provoke conversations about the definitions and the comic book promotes laughter, so it working quite well and by the time that I am seventy-five I expect that there will be no need to search for the person who is good in English.