It’s been more than a year since I’ve been in a classroom, and nearly seven years since French class.

But every Wednesday, for the past three Wednesdays and the coming nine, I have been and will be taking a 45-minute bus trip to the Nova Scotia Community College to for French I.

I took French through high school, learning our second-official language every day for half of each year. I learned how to conjugate verbs, how to have contrived conversation that never mimicked the real world. I did OK, with high enough marks and a good teacher, Mme. Schmidt. She’d make us watch Disney movies, dubbed in French, like Beauty and the Beast with the hope that we’d pick up the language through osmosis. I’d fall asleep sometimes, especially during the movies, a trend that hit me in my Grade 12 year of picking up extra shifts at work and what became a general anxiousness to escape the walls of James Fowler High School.

But I took French in the late 90s, and I could read it better than I could speak it, though I could never do either very well. And anything that I could do at all has been long forgotten.

So now I’m in French I.

So far it’s been the basics: numbers, alphabet, names, nationalities, professions, telephone numbers, and so on. Now we’re starting to conjugate verbs. It’s all verbal, with written-French handed out only to help you understand what we’re saying and hearing. The teacher talks, we repeat, and then stage brief exchanges between the group of unlikely classmates: a mix of students — mostly far older than I –with either a general interest in learning another language or an employer forcing them to be there, every once and awhile complaning that if they miss two classes, they won’t be able to take the certificate to show their boss.

In a few hours, I’ll hope on that bus, clipboard in hand, and today we’re reviewing how to say what we do for a living.

Moi? Je suis journaliste.

À plus tard . . .