French is hard. It's hard to say, it's hard to hear, there are oodles of rules, and the fact that you can just run all the words together and put gaps pretty much where you like, means you need a multi-pass parser to read the previous sentence spoken to you into your head several times before you get what is being said.
Anyway, this weekend i hit a milestone. Someone (a French someone) asked me where i was from because he couldn't place my accent. That means i'm actually speaking fluently enough to actually have an accent. I bet a South African accent sounds rather weird in French!
Anyway, hooray for me. So far we've bought a TV, a car, and are now starting a business in French. We spent the last Sunday morning entirely with French (non-English-speaking) friends. I reckon another 20 - 30 years and i'll be fluent.
I must say i really like the language, despite its difficulties for an anglophone. It's so polite, everything rhymes, and the guttural R is the coolest sound ever made by a human. C'est vraiment genial!
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