My friend and I have just returned from spending a wonderful week in Nice with Geneviève.
For the last year Dot and I have been meeting once a week for an hour to practice our French. Whilst this has been good we felt we needed a new impetus in order to take a leap forwards.
We found Genevieve online and decided it was exactly what we needed; complete immersion for a week with a native speaker!
Geneviève is the perfect host, from meeting us at the airport even though her car had broken down and she had to enlist her sisters help, to serving us delicious food each day and answering all our touristy questions.
Now to the most important part; Genevieve put us at our ease and we spoke French with her from the moment she met us at the airport to when she dropped us back again a week later. This does not mean Dot and I were speaking wonderful, grammatically correct French all the time (or even most of the time!), but we were able to just have a go and not feel inhibited when we got it wrong – which we did frequently!
Over mealtimes we just chatted the best we could with help from Genevieve when needed. By contrast the morning lessons were more structured; Genevieve asked which areas we wanted to concentrate on for the week and then drew up lessons accordingly.
Afternoon excursions with Genevieve were very relaxed, very interesting and again helped to extend our French vocabulary. In the evenings after supper we would spend some time watching French films so that by the time we collapsed into bed each night we were definitely ‘thinking’ in French!
Most importantly the three of us got on so well and spent a lot of time laughing which made the week so much fun and definitely memorable.
Dot and I came home having had a wonderful trip away in sunny Nice having achieved our objective of taking a confident leap forwards with our French – all thanks to Genevieve.
