le premier jour des cours

16/2
Today was a long day filled with French! It started off with my 10 am literature class on poesie et theatre. We were a little late because the bus was insanely crowded and the door temporarily broke because people kept prying it open to get on. That class lasted for 2 hours. It was pretty interesting; today we talked about the origins of the French language. Some of the texts he referenced I had already read, so that was good. This was my first taste of French class and I’ve got to say I’m not really sure how it’s all going to turn out. There was no syllabus or grade break down or full calendar or exam date given. There’s no text book so everything is in handout form, so I’m not really sure whether we’re supposed to be reading things outside of class that are given to us or not… in addition, the entire grade of the class is based on the final exam. Former students have said that they didn’t feel it was necessary to go to class (attendance isn’t mandatory), but I can’t really see how you can miss it, since everything is basically based on being in class. Also he explained that our exam would be analyzing a French text we had never seen before, for 2 ½ hours. Um, that doesn’t exactly sound easy! The entire class was practically UMD students. After that we had an hour break, and then it was on the grammaire descriptive. This professor had the funniest way of talking! He sounded like he could be a TV/radio announcer; he was very expressive with his intonation and his voice. The class is just like a pretty intense grammar class, which is cool with me, so I think I will like it. Directly after that was phonetique, which I felt was the most interesting class of the day. One of my French classes at McGill had phonetics in it and I thought it was really useful to know how certain sounds were correctly pronounced and learn the International Phonetic Alphabet. Having done it before should make it a little easier this time around too. Right after phonetics was linguistique with the same prof, in the same room. This class, however, was not so great. She went off on horribly long tangents about colors and other random things from her main topic of how language creates peoples identities and shapes the way they see the world. This class dragged by. Hopefully next week will be better. That concluded the 5 hours of class I had at the fac that day, but then I had less than an hour to get home and get my book for our two hour class at the rd’s apartment. It was an interesting discussion as always, but I was so done with class by the time 7 rolled around.