To be honest, I couldn’t think of how much I would progressed before I came to Tours. I was crashed by the fact that I couldn’t even speak full sentences when I arrived in the airport. Frustrations grew as my host parents made an obvious effort to understand me as I did to them, yet both attempts failed. Everyday I struggled not to speak in English but people around me always chatted in English. It was so tempting to talk at ease, but I chose to challenge myself to the fullest extent. I would say I talked shamelessly in class: no matter I knew the answer or not, I kept talking (sometimes I didn’t even understand the question). At the beginning, my prof had to stop me from diverting the topics, and I was ashamed by her telling me that “tu n’as pas compris la question.” But I was not discouraged; rather, I was amazed. I perceived the change of me confronting my instincts\/the need of self-respect, and forcefully had my brain work in another way. Therefore, at the end of the sixth week, when I was buying the souvenirs for my friends, I could talk with the shopkeepers for hours, and they commented me that my French was “presque normal” (close to normal). It was a undeserved compliment, but I was immensely proud of the progress I had made during these six weeks. As a Chinese student, it was not easy to learn English either. However, I has learnt it for years, so the challenges are very different. And I never pushed myself to such a limit that I once questioned if I was even in madness. Besides language itself, the six-week experience also gave me a deep appreciation of French gastronomy, culture, and the French way of thinking. It was truly like a dream: I lived in France for six weeks, did everything I dreamed to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To be honest, I couldn’t think of how much I would progressed before I came to Tours. I was crashed by the fact that I couldn’t even speak full sentences when I arrived in the airport. Frustrations grew as my host parents made an obvious effort to understand me as I did to them, yet … Continue reading Post-Program Reflection<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290963],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sla-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/sla2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/sla2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/sla2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/sla2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/sla2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3736"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/sla2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3738,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/sla2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3736\/revisions\/3738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/sla2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/sla2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/sla2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}