I had my first private French lesson. I liked Monsieur Gilbert. He seems like a good teacher. He's an elderly Frenchman originally from Paris. He was sweet and told me I only looked 30 years old. You know how charming Frenchmen can be!

He spoke only French about 90% of the hour. I understood at least 75% of what he said. That's OK.

My level is kind of odd. In some ways, I'm intermediate, and yet I struggled with a few very elementary things that have become jumbled because of studying other languages over the years. In the very beginning, he had me say the alphabet in French. Most letters I got right, others were either Czech, Spanish, Portuguese, or German, all of which I have studied at least a teeny bit. Sometimes I even mixed word orders because of that. One word that is oddly similar in French and another language is "de". It can mean "of" in French and basically something similar in Mandarin Chinese, but the word orders vary.

I like that M. Gilbert is putting a very strong emphasis on perfect pronunciation and accent reduction. He said that many people come to France trying to speak French but are misunderstood precisely because of such basic issues. I understood completely. When I used to try to speak my lousy Czech to my Czech mother-in-law, she wouldn't understand no matter what. If it wasn't perfect, it was "I don't understand what she's saying!" Czech is a very complicated language. French is like a breeze in comparison.

Today is wild! It's so warm that I put on shorts. At least I shaved my legs a couple of days ago.