See the original post Ouí Ouí! for explanations. I'm writing a few notes on the stay of our exchange student, Mssr. Robinson Beraud (Yes, his first name is Robinson).
Previous notes:
Notes Part Un
It remains a pleasure to have him with us, quite fun to get into the nitty gritty of language and its effects. Last night was another lesson in the intricacies of language, as we watched Spider-Man 2 and Robinson professed to some difficulties...
Misunderstandings & Language: The French, or at least Robinson, have significantly more of an accent than I had assumed (from listening to french language tapes). The accent is strong enough, for example, that we had trouble talking about the city of "Lyon" or "lee-own" as we pronounced it and "lghee-un" or thereabouts as Robinson pronounced it.
Even simple things are difficult in speech but easy to read. Speaking of which, we even got his name wrong. It's "whroo-bun-sün," not "Rob-in-son."
Nice cars, Big Places: Several of the French teenagers were discussing our mode of transportation. They felt we had "nice cars" after a drive to the BBQ produced an unlikely collection of cars on the road, including an H2, a couple of Porsches, a yellow Corvette, and a dozen SUVs. All big, all nice. Not necessarily typical I tried to explain.
The first store we hit was Target (see previous entry on Luggage not Arriving). Super Target, to be exact. Yaaaa, that's pretty big. So's the mall. The roads are wide. The houses are massive...
I tried to explain that Colorado wasn't geographically much smaller than France, but France has 60+ Million people to Colorado's 4.5 Million. So, despite all the farming, there's still a lot of s - p - a - c - e around here for everyone. Paris, by comparison, is all apartments Robinson said.
21st Century Communication: It's LUV baby! What my old business partner Mike and I knew from the early '90s with our first Internet company, this was going to be BIG!. Cell phones from home—while expensive—are available and working. E-mail? But of course!
In fact, Robinson has been able to email freely to his mom, and we've been able to send pictures back to her. Great stuff, really makes travel that much better.
Posted by BilFish at July 13, 2004 08:11 AM