School French Lessons In The 1970S

[hc4361]

I don't know why this suddenly came to mind but it seems to me that most of my 2 years of French lessons involved learning French words for smoking and tobacconists, also no smoking signs and 'open the window'.

Was it just my school?

[shoota]

My mistress taught us 'Chevalier de la table ronde', a popular drinking song.
She was wonderfully unconventional.

[elliemay1]

We learnt that one too!

[shoota]

Were you at Gatton?

[elliemay1]

No, shoota

[Rockrose]

I don’t agree that it was a waste of time I have made vast use of my German and French

[woofgang]

Au Clair de la Lune anyone?

[hc4361]

I learnt to play that on a recorder, although in music class, not French class

[douglas9401]

Longman's Audio-Visual French, stage one. :-)

My first French teacher was a French-Canadian who taught us convesational chat for two years.

No grammar or that other frippery involved in a language.

He wasn't there for the third year.

[hc4361]

That's probably the best way to learn another language, douglas.

[zebo]

I recall Chevalier de la Table Ronde very well, Gouton voir oui oui oui, Gouton voir non non non, Gouton voir si le vin est bon.
I did French and German, I disliked both but found when I lived in Germany that I remembered the structure and could add verbs, nouns etc onto it. When our daughter did German I was astounded that before the Sixth Form they did little of the grammatical structure, they didn't have to learn der, die, das, die etc.

[douglas9401]

It certainly was, hc, sadly not much use for the written exam though. :-(

[237SJ]

I agree with Zebo. When I learned French I learned the structure of the language and when you know that, you can construct the language for yourself. When I tried to learn Spanish several years later I couldn't get on with it because we were just thrown into compiling sentences without knowing the basics of the language. I know that's how children learn but we were not children.

[Jackdaw33]