Cours de Civilisation Francaise de la Sorbonne

My classes here in Paris are mostly through the Cours de Civilisation Francaise de la Sorbonne. This section of the Sorbonne is for foreign students, so my classes are comprised of students from all over the world. For two hours every morning I have grammar class. What is different about grammar classes here is that we are learning french grammar in french because that is the common language of all the students. There are about twenty students in my class from Brazil, Argentina, South Korea, Japan, and Turkey to name a few.

Every other week I have phonetics for an hour in the mornings. This class is extremely useful and each day I feel like I am improving my accent. We spend half an hour in a classroom diagramming sentences and discussing certain concepts in phonetics. We spend the second half of each class in the phonetics lab where we record ourselves repeating sentences after the professor. We then listen to our sentences in comparison to hers and rerecord. The professor can listen in to each of our recordings and help us if we are stumbling over any words.

The last class I am taking at the Sorbonne is Modern French Art History (17th and 18th Centuries). This is my first art history class, but what better place to start than in Paris! The professor opens each class by playing a piece of classical music to situate us in the time period. He jumps around chronologically and mostly lectures thematically to show for the example the uses of light in French painting throughout this period. We do not take any museum trips because our time is so limited, but he gave us an extensive list of all the museum exhibits in Paris so we can go ourselves.

My last class, Paris Civilization and Culture, is a class with all the American University students in my program through our center here. We meet twice a week, once in the classroom and once at a museums or other location in Paris. So far we have explored Notre Dame, analyzed the Unicorn Tapestries at the Musée Cluny (Middle Ages Museums, and studied 18th Century French Painters in the Louvre. Through the course of the semester we will go to the Panthéon, the Musée d'Orsay, the Opéra Garnier, and go on walking tours through Belleville and the Latin Quarter. Already I am more aware of what is around me in the city and we uncover the layers of history.