Our classes

It is hard to see the building from this picture, but this is the building in which we have our classes. I was sitting on the front steps of our apartment building when I took the picture. As you can see, we have a very short walk to go to class.
I have the morning class, and Stephen has the afternoon class. We each have six people total in our class. Having a small class size helps with learning. (There are a little over 30 students in the language school and 12 are beginners.)
We have an average of 15 hours per week of class, about 5 hours each of grammar, dialogue, and conversation. On Wednesdays we have one hour of chapel, one hour of small groups (the men and women meet separately), and a one hour Bible Study.
I have class from 8:30-11:30 on Monday, Thursday, and Friday. Tuesday is 8:30-12:30. Wednesday I have class from 10:30-12:30.
We started with phonetics. That part was very hard! We will be working on phonetics/pronunciation all semester. Now we have memorized some basic dialogue. We started on grammar with nouns. Last week we moved into verbs-- conjugating, etc.
Our teacher, Kathleen, is very nice, and incredibly patient. She seems to have a good sense of how to explain things. When someone is having trouble understanding, she always thinks of another way to explain it.
At the beginning she spoke mostly English to us. Now, she will speak mostly in French, but if we really are not understanding, she will use English. She is really good at making sure everyone understands completely before we move on to something else.
The Wednesday morning chapel service is from 8:30-9:30 and is completely in French. All of the students from the one year Bible Institute, the language school, and all of the staff attend. The next hour (9:30-10:30) the women and men of the language school meet separately for small groups. This time is not required, but is nice to get to know the other students.
The Bible study on Wednesday is from 1:30-2:30. That is a time with all of the language school students. We are only required to go to 5 in a semester. We have just have one of those so far, and we went over some of the songs that we sang in chapel. The teacher says everything in French, and then in English to make sure we understand. We go very slow, and things make more sense to me. We also did a short Bible lesson/sermon this week, point by point. It was exciting to be able to understan some of the things from French. I think it gave us an idea of what we are working toward.
Anyway, this is a lot of typing. Next time I will just put some cute pictures of the kids.