A frequent subject of my articles are the events held at the Gazette café, there is such a wide variety of things happening there that I would recommend it to anyone doing a French language stay in Montpellier. There is so much going on in the city that I really love to explore and discover new places and things to do but I always find myself coming back to the Gazette. If I have had a busy week on my language immersion course and haven’t had the time to plan anything for a fun evening at the weekend I know I can just mosey on down with a couple friends from the EasyFrench School and there will be something interesting going on. For my friends who don’t like to play things so casually all of the events are listed on their suave website so we can just take a peak and see what is going on. Although we mainly go for music events, like the jazz evenings they hold regularly, this week I was feeling a touch more adventurous.
I’m due to start the C1 DALF course this week and I am really excited for it, one thing that is great about the language immersion courses at the Easy French School is how they involve current affairs and topical debates into their programme. This makes it more of a dual education process as you are introduced to all sorts of topics whilst all the while learning French. To me this is an incredibly positive approach; if we are working on something that really interests me like environmental protection my French lessons become almost effortless. We were doing a listening exercise on the award-winning documentary Demain a few weeks ago that I wrote about for this blog and it was one of the most engaging lessons of any subject I have ever been a part of. On the flip side if we work on a topic that I’m less gripped by I am still interested in the French and I round out my knowledge in a way I would probably never do if I was working alone. That’s how it is on the intensive immersion course for adults and the DALF is even more orientated towards social debate.
Saved by the Slides During Intense French Immersion
This has lit a fire under me to get into public debate myself, so when I saw that a radio station was doing a conference at the Gazette and one on the things they would be discussing was freedom of the press I was instantly sucked in. On Wednesday, I went on down to the café and it was already fairly busy when we arrived which I took to be a good sign. The conference itself was centred around the 40th anniversary of Radio Clapas a non-commercial radio focusing on culture and citizenship with some great music thrown is as well; particularly jazz. I hadn’t actually listened to the station before I came to the conference but the air of intellectuality was already seeping through and I wondered if I was going to be able to understand anything when it got underway.
When things did get going it certainly was challenging, there were some speakers who were easier to follow then others but there was something that came unexpectedly to my rescue; the slides! Never before had I appreciated these little things more but just having this little bit of a leg up really made a huge difference. Most of the things they discussed that involved vocabulary that I hadn’t encountered before were right there in front of me and I could mostly grasp from the context their meaning or have a cheeky translate on my phone from time to time. The discussion itself was incredibly interesting and they interchanged from discussing the history of the station itself like some of the more successful projects it had had and then switching to the more general discussion of the role of the press today. It touched on topics such as the polarisation of the press today in the United States and the fake news phenomenon as well as censorship in other countries.
It was one of the most interesting things I’ve been a part of since I started learning French in France and I learnt some new things that I’m sure I will be able to put to good use on my DALF preparation course next week at the EasyFrench Immersion School in Montpellier.