French Me

I’ll be honest. Wednesday, I forgot to post, (head slam!) which happens sometimes because all of my posts are improvised just a couple hours before they go live. In my defense, though, my blogging schedule slipped my mind because I was ferociously studying for the French proficiency exam I need to take in order to acquire citizenship that was coming up Thursday.

So, yesterday, I took the metro into Paris and stumbled around with my little map in one hand and my tactile phone in the other, trying to approximate the blinking dot of my gps app to the narrow, winding streets in front of me. Finally, I managed to find the testing center in time to not be disqualified from the exam.

The first part of the test was fairly straight forward. I had to converse with a French person for five-to-ten minutes. There were some basic questions involved and a part where I had to come up with questions for the instructor based on a theme. The whole thing was recorded so it could be sent to a grading center.

The next part, however, was oral comprehension- given in an old-school listen to a cd/fill in the blank format. We listened to one part of a conversation and then had multiple choices as to what should come next. We listened to a joint conversation and then had to answer a question about what was said. -Same thing with excerpts from news interviews. Seems easy enough, no?

Well, NO.

As it turns out. The French are quite competent when it comes to complicating your run-of-the mill multiple choice until you’re not sure which way’s up. I came to this conclusion a couple years ago, when I was getting my French driver’s permit, so I knew not to sniff at a French multiple-choice test, especially when something important like citizenship is involved. 

First of all, there were 30 questions to be answered in 25 minutes. 

Secondly, when it came to the joint conversations and news excerpts, a lot was said and the questions were sure to be based on a tiny or unimportant detail.

Many of the answers resembled one another or ALL of them were cited in the conversations but we had to decide what was most important.

OR none of the details were cited in the excerpt and we had to decide which one looked even the slightest bit relevant. 

For example:

Michelle says- ‘I took the company car to work early Monday morning. I made sure to ask for a specific model, because I had a business meeting in Brussels later on in the day, and it’s important to have a dependable car with good gas mileage.’

Question:

What color should the sky have been the morning Michelle left for work?

a- Grey
b- Black
c- Blue
d- Violet

*sigh*

In any case, I hope to get back to my regularly scheduled programming next week. I have a few newly-released books I wanted to spotlight but I’d rather include them in next week’s post so they  can get the attention they deserve. What was the hightlight (or lowlight) of your week? Any big plans for the end of September?

Hope you all have a great weekend!

*CQG*