Today was a rather grueling day in our weekly French class. In recent weeks we have been getting into some of the trickier grammar areas, like relative pronouns, and when to use l'imparfait instead of le passé composé in dealing with past tenses.
This week, to add insult to injury, we have added a bit more fuel to the past tense fire, in the form of the pluperfect or plus-que-parfait tense. This is described as the tense you use when an action happened in the past but before some other past action. Like: "I blew my brains out in sheer frustration after I had studied the plus-que-parfait" where "had studied" would be in the pluperfect.
Some days, in French class, my frustration level threatens to flow out my eyes with what I see as my own stupidité and inability to "get" certain aspects of the French language. I have now studied French for three full years in high school, three full semesters at university, and for nearly three years at the local language school. That's nine, count them NINE freaking years of French studies. And in between regular classes I have periodically done the French in Action video program and have also read or listened to French material elsewhere as "refreshers". Granted, in high school I took classes 5 days a week (5 hours) and in college it was two days a week (4 hours) and right now I'm only able to take classes for 90 minutes a week... but STILL, you'd think I'd be more fluent by now and able to converse at a comfortable high-intermediate level by now.
What I really want is a miracle. I want to wake up one morning and just "know" how to say it in French, whatever "it" might be on any given day. Will I ever, ever get there?
I can take some small comfort in knowing my classmates are struggling just as much as I am, and they were all in this Intermediate class before I "bumped up" from the Low-Intermediate class (which had low enrollment this year, forcing me to upgrade). In fact, one classmate, "M", told me today after we were all ready to scream from past-tense-itis that she actually graduated college with a minor in French.
It was the best laugh I had all morning. Damn, it's good to find out someone else sucks at something just as badly as you do.
