Bonne Année!!

 As we start a new year with the Lexington Francophones, I am reflecting on 2023, which saw the group continue to grow and change. We often reached attendance numbers in line with our pre-pandemic attendance. Lexington continues to welcome new arrivals from around the world, if either for a short visit, or a long-range plan, and we have gotten to know many interesting people who share a common bond of an interest in the French language. It is always an adventure and a chance to hear the stories and experiences of those around us! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Resources for Learning a Language or Developing Conversational Skills

I will continue to update this list regularly, so check back for more! Learning a language happens on many levels, and through diverse efforts. Reading, speaking, listening, and writing are all related skills, but we sometimes develop them at different rates. For some of us, the goal is simply to communicate and to connect with speakers from outside our culture or language. Being polite, reading a menu, getting around, and maybe making a few jokes can be a reachable goal. Some of us are writers and therefore need more polish and better grammar. Many of us are professionals and would like to develop clarity and good presentation skills. Others would like to watch a film or a TV show and understand without subtitles, or perhaps read novels or philosophy in the original language. Some of us find the weekly conversations easy, and others are hoping to practice and build their knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension. While a level of fluency can be achieved more quickly, learning a languag...
Read more

Another Late Book Review

Image
  Who says twenty years is too long for talking about a new-to-me book? Actually, Almost French,  Australian journalist Sarah Turnbull's 2004 memoir about the unexpected romance that led her to start a new life in France in the mid-1990s, felt right on time to me. Turnbull's vivid experiences trying to relate to her new boyfriend's friends and associates were among the topics of our Sunday conversation a few weeks ago.  A week later, I was loaned a copy which I read with a bit of nostalgia for a dreamy, now-inaccessible Paris, that was also still (work with me here) a future-dream-Paris-before-I-knew-Paris. Which is to say that I didn't make my first trip to Paris until 2008, four years after the memoir was published, and by then, the internet and cell phones were already changing the landscape, although it was well before sites like AirBnB began to drastically alter the way tourists and locals moved.  I was thrilled to read that Turnbull and her boyfriend, Frédéric/...
Read more