Last year when I started my job with company x they paid for two weeks of intensive one on one French classes in Paris for me. The classes were good and I learned plenty but the problem with an anglophone trying to learn French in Paris is that so many people speak English it’s difficult to apply what one has learned outside of the classroom. Or maybe I should say that it’s easy to not apply what one has learned if she chooses to. So after those two weeks my comprehension improved tremendously and I was able to understand when my colleagues spoke in French but I continued to respond to them in English.

As dysfunctional as that system sounds it worked for a while and I was a happy worker bee. During this past spring I started toying with the idea of taking a two week holiday to the south of France and enrolling in another 2-3 week intensive French course. My plan was to sneak away without telling anyone where exactly I was going and to return speaking more French than I had previously. Around the same time, my colleagues that are in charge of external training and development told me that there was still training budget left over for the year and it could be used to some additional French classes if I felt so inclined.

That’s when the wheels really started turning. I put it out there that I was intending to take some French courses anyway on my own using my vacation days and if company x was so inclined I’d be more than welcome to have them absorb the costs of my holiday training course especially since communicating more in French is listed as one of my objectives for the year. To my surprise they agreed and so at the end of October I will find myself enrolled in the Instituit du Français in Villefranche-sur-Mer just east of Nice. Sounds lovely doesn’t it?

Well, not so fast.

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