French - Rosetta Stone Style

When I was convincing myself that quitting my legit job in Washington DC to move across the world to take care of kids was a good idea, I told myself I had to learn French. It was a selling point. I need another language to go to GradSchool. I should just speak a second language and since Spanish classes went so well (7 years and I can bearly form sentences) I decided to start anew.

French. It is spoken around the world. I can do this. It will help me for life.

I convinced the host family to let me get Rosetta Stone instead of taking private lessons. Since Zurich is part of the German speaking portion of Switzerland, they teach French in German.  Learning a language you don't understand..nearly impossibly..at least for me. Private lessons are expensive!

Rosetta Stone means I can go at my own pace. It is interactive. I will learn to speak, write, listen, etc.

What have I learned so far?

1. It is difficult to motivate myself to just do it. 
2. Once I am working with the program it actually usually enjoyable...except when
3. I cannot make my mouth make the right sounds. I have literally tried to say car (luckily you can also just say "auto") which is voiture.  When it is broken down to 'voi' and 'ture', I get it right every time. No problems there. Then I combine the syllables and I fail miserably. 
4. The French don't pronounce 50% of the letters in every word. 
5. Words are masculine and feminine. Now, this is not new. While my Spanish isn't all that great (Meredith will tell you!), I do know the basics. The difference is that you change the adjective to match the word you are describing. Example: Les fluers sont petite. (The flowers are small.)  or Le chien son petit. (The dog is small.)  Not extremely complicated but there are 2 problems that arise with this:
1. Petit and Petite sound EXACTLY the same (I confirmed this information with the Mama C whose first language is French so I am not crazy)
2. Often times there is no real reason why a word is masculine or feminine.  Voiture (car) is feminine. So if you were looking at a car you would say "She is yellow." (Elle son jaune). 
3. This is fine and all but there is no reason why we shouldn't invent the work "it" inanimate objects.

Rosetta Stone does seem like a pretty good program. If you aren't saying a work properly you can listen to it slowly and say it your way and have them play both back for you. There is no translation involved which is key.  So I didn't learn that un chien is a dog because they told me it was a dog but because they said the word, showed it to me all with the picture of a dog. You have to discover what things are through pictures.  I think this is key to learning a language.  

With Spanish, the most intimidating this was speaking it because I knew my accent was awful (and I couldn't quite conjugate very well but that I blame 2 years of bad Spanish teachers for).  So I need to start speaking it at the house a bit soon and I have a few friends here who speak French so hopefully this will work! 

*** If you speak French please note that the above statements may often be wrong... I am just beginning!

Baby Watch 2010: Still no baby. We are getting very impatient.  By "we" I do mean everyone but Mama C looks like she is ready to pop now and is tired often.  She is sooooo done being pregnant so maybe Baby Gaga will realize this tonight and join us already!