So I'm back from my amazing trip to Paris (which was amazing, have I mentioned that it was amazing?), and since I can't talk about the meat of it due to forum rules, I'll just note a few quick items:
1.
This is impossible to watch, and yet it is very necessary to do so. If you're prone to emotion, no shame in breaking it up. Took me three sittings. Possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever - or will ever - hear, in French or otherwise.
2. If you happen to be in Paris between now and July-ish, go see: Vermeer at the Louvre, Picasso Primitif at Quai Branly/Jacques Chirac, everything at Palais de Tokyo, and Tomboctou - Zanzibar at IMA. I had set aside two free days for culture, and I was so enamored with the exhibits I saw that I
forgot to eat lunch two days in a row.
3. The speed with which I can walk into and out of a Fnac EUR 200 lighter is astonishing.
4. AJATT is continuing to work very, very well. After a few completely avoidable hiccups where I was just tired, not paying attention, and/or in brainfreeze mode, I had absolutely no trouble carrying on complex professional conversations for hours and hours on end. In each case, there were entire periods of time where I forgot I was speaking French at all, I was just... talking. I got to meet a lot of the people I watch on TV every day, which was insanely cool, and I got a lot of compliments on my French. I was twice mistaken for an actual French person, which was probably the highlight of my year/life, once after a particularly intense political conversation - the guy was like, "well, it's up to you and your generation to fix things here, you need to participate in XYZ to make that happen", and I was like, ummmm... THAT SAID:
4-a. Don't make the same mistake I did and get frustrated/depressed after one or two hiccups. I wasted hours thinking/consuming social media in English afterwards because I was too upset with my French, which was entirely counterproductive and really dumb.
4-b. Do give yourself a 2-3 minute grace period at the beginning of each conversation to "click" into it. Eventually the need for this will go away, but if you spend the rest of the conversation obsessing over some complex phrase you tried to include in the beginning of your sentence and somehow fumbled, the rest of it won't go so hot, either.
4-c. My Twittering has actually turned out to be super helpful to pick up more informal, but also professional, speech and practice it reflexively. I now feel perfectly comfortable entering into Twitter discussions with random French people, and I even got retweeted by a top campaign activist
and liked by a sitting Cabinet member. I'd highly recommend this as a fun supplementary activity - create an account, follow accounts in your TL related to whatever you like, and start tweeting yourself.