I’ve mentioned, ooh, about ten thousand times that I possess a degree in French and Spanish. A Modern Foreign Languages degree course, for an average student-age student, includes a mandatory year abroad in a country where your language is spoken. Or it did in my day, when we were a member of the EU and of the Erasmus exchange scheme.
Small detail: I spent my entire year abroad in French-speaking western Switzerland, which is neither an EU or Erasmus member. I got a small grant from the Swiss government to make up for those lacks of membership. I could have had double the grant but I planned to spend the second semester in Spain before deciding to stay literally at the last minute.
I’ve talked about that year before. I lived in Neuchâtel, the lakeside capital city of the Canton and Republic of Neuchâtel, a canton in north-west Switzerland known for watchmaking, the purest French outside France and buttery-yellow sandstone buildings. When our French professor from the UK came to visit, he said we’d learn good French there and he certainly didn’t mind that we’d come back with Swiss accents, which he likened to the French equivalent of West Country carrot-cruncher accents. I already have one of those. One of our French teachers described Jemma as sounding “just like Lady Diana!” while I sounded “… more… populaire”. That’s Swiss-French for “urchin”. I attended the Institute of French Language and Culture, a French school for the non-French-speaking inhabitants of the rest of Switzerland, although international students outnumbered them twenty to one, a department of the Université de Neuchâtel.
And this is what my life looked like:
Most days I got up between seven and half past. Lessons began at eight but the school is only a five minute walk from the student accommodation tower. I lived on the seventh floor. I guess I called for Jemma, one of my triplets – the three Anglophones in my year the first semester – on the third floor on my way down.
First lesson is grammar. French grammar at 8am. A lot of classes are streamed by ability and the triplets are all in the bottom group for grammar. We have big A4 class books. Not textbooks – you can’t really teach something ever-evolving like language from a textbook. I still have those class books somewhere but can I find them? No, probably not until an hour after this post is scheduled.
Here they are! They turned up 11 days earlier than expected.
This was nearly fifteen years ago so I don’t have my timetable anymore (yeah, but you’ve got your class books??). The morning continues until about 1. We have language-related lessons like orthography, vocabulary and phonetics, which I enjoy. I’m in the top group for orthography, with my triplets in the middle group, and the middle for vocabulary, with my triplets in the bottom group. Yeah, I’m placed higher than them… but they’re the ones who put in the work and may even have finished the year (or at least the resits) with their Certificate of French Study. Spoiler alert: I failed.
Other lessons include Written Expression, which I don’t remember at all, and Spoken Expression, in which we took it in turns to give a twenty minute presentation on the subject of our choice. Roman’s Swiss Farm Statistics is still a tale of legend for sheer tedium. I did caving for my first, I think, and the traditional red London bus for my second. I gabbled the whole thing in around eight minutes and spent most of the subsequent Q&A session repeating it because between nerves, bad French and talking too fast, no one caught a word. Well, you try explaining synchromesh in French. I’m still not 100% sure what it is in English, except the reason the gearbox doesn’t crash when you move up to second gear.
Then there were two literature modules. What I’d learned from my first two years of an MFL degree is that I hate literature and I especially hate French literature. We did explanation – or possibly examination – of texts. I remember dragging out Year 8 “the flowers are a simile and the sleep is a metaphor!” in my final exam.
Then we did Civilisation, more usually known as History. The only thing I learned in a year of history lectures delivered in French is that we covered the Industrial Revolution. I tried “invention of the steam ship?” in my exams. I failed that subject. Well, ultimately I failed most of them.
Lunch was generally two hours. We went home, the three triplets, usually to the third floor. The views aren’t as good – on a really clear day I could make out the Oberland sixty miles away from my seventh floor window – but the third floor was the friendly homey floor while the seventh was the party floor. We ate with Jemma’s floormates. I had a toaster down there to make Swiss cheese toasties. Not as good as they sound – mainland European sliced bread is small and relatively sweet and the cheese in question was usually plastic cheese slices. Sometimes I’d go up the hill to the station, which was virtually above our building, and get a baguette. Then we’d sit in Jemma’s room until it was time to go back. I read The Da Vinci Code in five minute portions that year.
Lessons finished fairly early. We might have language lab in the afternoon – an hour or two of repeating French sounds to a computer. I hate talking to computers but I did learn to hear the difference between é, –ez and –er eventually. One day a week we had translation. I quite liked that. There were only two translation classes because not many were sufficiently skilled in either English or German. You can translate into your second or third language but if you’re learning French and struggling in English, translating between the two is maybe not the class for you.
I remember this one as happening in an attic that almost certainly didn’t exist. I remember sunny afternoons. Our teacher gave us two or three paragraphs from books – often Roald Dahl’s adult short stories. I bought his Kiss Kiss on the strength of those excerpts.
I guess most days we were finished by four-ish and I have a vague idea we had Wednesday afternoons off entirely. Often the triplets went into town. We had a favourite cafe by the lakeside where I’d have chocolate milk, Jemma would have red wine and Angela would have un grand pression – a large tap beer. I may have misgendered that beer – details like grammatical gender sometimes fade in fifteen years. Une grande pression?
Or we’d go to our favourite Mexican bar. I’d have a Coke instead of the milk and Rob Thomas and Madonna’s latest music videos alternated on the TV with Ricky Martin to break it up occasionally.
Or sometimes, if I had the time, I’d go and sightsee. Jemma and Angela rarely joined me. Sometimes they were too busy studying. Sometimes – and I was so oblivious that this had to be formally announced to me – they were busy doing stuff that I really didn’t want or need to see.
Neuchâtel isn’t best placed for exploring Switzerland. I only got down to Graubünden twice and Ticino once – from the north-western corner, some of those southern parts are barely achievable in a day. Afternoon and evening trips tended to be nearby. I once ventured as far as Spiez after school and got caught in most un-Swiss rail chaos. Delayed trains, broken connections, maybe even a bus. It’s the one time the Swiss rail network failed me. I often went and sat on a rock by the side of the lake and watched the water.
Bigger trips were for weekends, although it never occurred to me to stay overnight anywhere, except occasionally at Angela’s apartment halfway down Lake Neuchâtel. I grew very fond of Lausanne and St Gallen and I visited most major towns and sites and events. You can read about those in my Year Abroad tag. I made the most of my time. Well, academically I didn’t. It would have been good for my French to have had non-English-speaking friends. We mostly spoke English outside school so I didn’t quite get the immersion experience the year abroad is supposed to be. But I had good friends and I travelled and I learned a lot in that way.
Then I got cut off the university wifi for downloading the entire run of Father Ted – which I lost in a computer crash before I even watched it. Nothing daunted, I took to travelling down the lake to a cafe in a shopping centre to download Nu Who every week. Season two, I think. Rose and Ten meeting Queen Victoria comes to mind.
When I wasn’t doing that, I sat in my room making a scrapbook. Swiss stations tend to have photo printing machines so I took my memory card up the hill to the station, printed photos and made that book. It’s enormous. As an afterthought, I added samples of work. My best ever translation. Some grammar exercises. The handout for Roman’s Farm Statistics presentation.
Then I was kept awake all night by the parties on my floor before getting up for 8am French grammar all over again.
And that’s what it’s like to be an MFL student on a year studying abroad!