Je parle mal, mais je parle.

I had my French language test today. To be honest, I was rather dreading it because I only took a few years of French in college and that was many years ago. However, I had set the bar appropriately low for myself and therefore managed to make my goal.

The State Department uses a rating system of 0 through 5 with 0 being no knowledge of the language and 5 being native, highly educated proficiency. You receive two scores, one for speaking and one for reading. For example, you could be a 2/3 or 4/4. To make the scoring a bit more flexible they have thrown in +’s. This means that you’re slightly better than the score you received, but not enough or consistantly enough to go up to the next level.

I managed to score a 1+/1+ in French. This means basically that if dropped in the streets of Paris I can stagger around and ask for directions to a restaurant, order some wine, drink the wine, stagger back into the streets and speak just poorly enough to start a fight with some protesting youth.

It doesn’t sound like much, but I’m quite happy with it and it helps me out a lot in my bidding because it qualifies me to pursue a lot more posts for my second tour. Best of all, the test is done and I can stop worrying about it.

p.s. If the title of my post is grammatically incorrect, don’t bother to tell me. Afterall, I only scored a 1+.