Désolée!

Je ne parle pas français!

Unfortunately, this excuse isn't good enough considering I sat through about 10 lectures of the basic beginner's module and my teacher expects me to be able to speak, write and read the basics rather easily. Little did I realise that we would have tests when I joined these classes 'just for fun'. Damn!

As you may have guessed, I have a test coming up on the 20th. I wouldn't have been overly excited about it but for the fact that I missed the last 4 classes, and as luck would have it, those were the most important classes of this series.

French is not difficult really....as long as you get a hang of it. In other words, its got nothing to do with logic, so those of you commonly known as morons can easily get a high score on the nuances of this foreign language.

Alas me, I am not so lucky. I cannot, for the life of me fathom the grammar.

For one, every goddamned thing in french is either male or female...yeah, including the TV, the room, the cockroach, the treasure, the pen.....right down to George Bush's underwear.

Then you have the innumerable articles - the definite ones, the indefinite ones, the partitive ones, the demonstrative ones and the non demonstrative ones, the list is endless.

Even if you are able to get past the downpour of the terminology, you will invariably be mired in the tenses - the past, the present, the future, the future of the past, the present of the future and god knows what else.

Still amused? Try the verbs. Or rather the conjugations. Each verb has to be conjugated in 8 persons and has thousands of variations in each different tense. Oh, and I haven't started talking about the exceptions or the exception to those exceptions.

And to top it all off, every other word is either spelled the same, pronounced the same or means the same as some other word. At least the written text is comprehensible, but oral? Sigh, you write the word, you eat up the second half of it and pronounce the first half so as to sound like a totally different word altogether!!

Talking of pronounciations, the oi, en, in, au, on sound like someone's suffering from acute constipation.

Despite all these obstacles, I have vowed to study hard for the exam and clear it with flying colours and turn my Je ne parle pas français into Je parle bon français :)