{"id":381,"date":"2006-02-07T12:18:00","date_gmt":"2006-02-07T12:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=381"},"modified":"2006-02-07T12:18:00","modified_gmt":"2006-02-07T12:18:00","slug":"pardon-my-french","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2006\/02\/07\/pardon-my-french\/","title":{"rendered":"Pardon my French"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nothing to blog about today. The last and next few hours have been <s>wasted<\/s> invested in cramming for my French exam Tuesday at 8:15. Souhaitez-me bonne chance!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m right on the brink of achieving the levels I need, so depending on the amount of sleep I get Monday night and the relative positions of Venus and Jupiter, it could go either way.<\/p>\n<p>For civil servants in Canada, if your position is deemed bilingual, you have to be retested every five years, unless you get the golden &#8216;exempt&#8217; score. Kind of like the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I myself aspire to a much more lowly intermediate score, or B level. As of today, my job doesn&#8217;t hinge on being able to achieve my levels, but I&#8217;m in a pool of qualified candidates for a promotion and I can&#8217;t lock it in until I confirm my language levels. This is kind of a practice run, but if I succeed I can sock away my results for another five years.<\/p>\n<p>After many years of on-and-off language training, and investing three to four hours a week of in-class training for the past year, I think my proficiency in French is as good as it&#8217;s ever been. I can follow a conversation with relative ease, and even contribute well enough to be understood, if not in a grammatically gorgeous kind of way. I&#8217;m actually quite pleased with my progress in general, but in preparing for the exam I&#8217;ve taken a series of practice tests &#8211; and scored lower on each successive test.<\/p>\n<p>So think a kind thought for me tomorrow as I try to conjugate the subjunctive and identify my <em>si<\/em> clauses and distinguish between direct and indirect objects&#8230; and still have enough brain cells left over to tie my shoes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nothing to blog about today. The last and next few hours have been wasted invested in cramming for my French exam Tuesday at 8:15. Souhaitez-me bonne chance! I&#8217;m right on the brink of achieving the levels I need, so depending on the amount of sleep I get Monday night and the relative positions of Venus &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2006\/02\/07\/pardon-my-french\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Pardon my French&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}