Tutorat

Not even 24 hours after my last entry, but I was pleasantly surprised with my day today and wanted to note it. I had signed up for my first "tutorat de français" at our EDUCO center. They have French tutoring session almost every day of the week, usually for people to get help with grammar for papers. I didn't really have much of any paper written, but I had forced myself to sign up for one in hopes of motivating myself to get on these papers. That didn't happen all too much, but I ended up writing down a bunch of little conversation question, mainly things like slang (how to say "i know what you mean" or "really?" or "that makes sense" properly) and differences between 2 french words that have one english equivalent (noir and foncé both mean "dark," etc.). We had some funny/interesting conversations about figuring out the french equivalents of all those little expressions and all the 'meaningless,' casual, and oh-so-necessary words in daily conversation. i.e. "like" "ya know?" "whatev" etc.
In french they say "bon alors" (literally "good then"), "eh bien" or "eh ben" and little things like that over and over...as well as saying"donc" (therefore), "alors," and lots of other little connector words like that a lot.

Anyways, enough with the mini-french lesson. I was taking notes of every little thing she said :-P I've noticed these are the things that are gonna help me transition from stuttering not-at-all fluent french student to somewhat natural. And then the even more helpful part of the session was me asking her on a whim about the structure of the introduction of a french paper. The french system is sooo concerned with this exact structure, whereas I feel like my papers are normally much more relaxed, as long as there's a solid thesis statement and some paragraph organization :P Here they want, as she tells me, a soft "call-in sentence" which doesn't really talk about your specific subject, then you begin to approach it, then you have a "problematique" which is 99% of the time a question, then you specifically and clearly outline your plan by saying what you're going to discuss first, second and third. And you usually say "first...., then......., lastly....." and then you can start writing your paper :P Then the conclusion almost always has to end with some sort of suggestion that this is only one way to think about the subject, at which point you suggest another way to leave the reader intrigued and thinking, haha.

On another note, what is it about Cheerios that is supposed to help kids grow so much?! My box of Cheerios "3 Céréales et Miel" has pictures of little children all over it and repeats like 5 times "Ce produit convient particulièrement aux enfants et adolescents en période de croissance." (This product is particularly fitting for children and growing teens.) Must be all that good "sirop de glucose" -- so the kid has energy at school and then crashes when they get home. Good plan.
I've become completely under the impression that the French have no clue whatsoever when it comes to health. Not that America is oh-so-great, but I think we're becoming more and more health conscious and knowledgeable about it while the french try to trick themselves into believing that chocolatey breakfast cereals(which is all they sell here) and white processed baguettes are health staples. Seriously, one of their chocked with chocolate cereals is called "Fitness."
On the other hand, I had a teary-eyed moment today when I realized how much I'm gonna miss all my food being in french in a couple months. All of the descriptions are just funnier in french!