Hi,

I am entering first year Life Sci. I was thinking about taking French 1A06 as an elective and was just wondering whether it was a challenging course. All my other courses are in the sciences and thus I wanted a course in the humanities and preferably an easy course as an elective. I wanted to know, what is the average for this class?

Thanks

A friend of mine who took french throughout high school found it easy, but I guess it totally depends on how strong you are in french and how well your high school teacher taught you.

I haven't taken the course however.

I took this course a few years ago. You have to put the practice time in between classes. There were 2 mid-terms and 2 finals - no assignments. The first half is pretty easy the second half gets more challenging. The exam questions are all questions from the workbook or CD so the more you practice the better you will do. Good luck.

Read the course review here: http://www.macinsiders.com/showthrea...6.html?t=21016

Hey! =)

I'm in the exact same situation as you.

From reading around, I believe that expectations are much higher in terms of oral communication and writing skills if you've only taken french until grade 12 (non-immersion). If you've already had a lot of experience speaking and have developed a sense of fluency, I believe you won't have a problem. If you're not completely comfortable with your amount of knowledge, I think if you review enough over the summer (try watching some french movies, read a few short french novels from the library) you will make up a lot of the skills you may be lacking.

Someone who's already taken the course can disagree with me freely, because I could be completely wrong, but that's just the impression I get.

If you're from the Hamilton area, though, Central library has a French social circle running in the summer one day a week where you can practice your oral communication. I'll likely be heading out because my spoken French needs a lot of work and this would be a perfect opportunity to improve.

Yes, there is much more emphasis on oral communication in 1A06, and I'm not sure if it depends on the prof, but you get picked on randomly a lot to answer questions. You normally can't speak English at all in this class, and the prof won't speak English at all either. The only time is if the class is having difficulty, and he asks a student to translate a sentence.

Personally I didn't like this class all that much, we had to read two novels and write essays about them (as well as an essay question on the midterm and exam). It really depends on your level of fluency that determines how well you do. I did fairly well but 1K06 was a total breeze compared to it.

I was just about to make a thread about this class!

I was wondering about the amount of written work in this course. One person mentioned there were no assignments then someone else said they had to write essays.

Thanks in advance!

I don't remember writing anything over 700 words. I took it in the 08-09 school year, and we had an essay component of our exam, plus a few short assignments (400-500 words I think?) that we then had to present to the class.

^Do you remember if the presentations were more like speeches or more presenting topic (with visuals)? Or were you presenting your written assignments?

Thanks!

I took this class last year, as I might've mentioned before but I can't remember haha. We had a few essays, probably 4 in all? Usually 2 in each term, one based on the novel we were reading and the other on a topic of the prof's choosing. We had presentations, 2 in fact, one in each term - you wrote 400 words or more and presented it to the class.

it isn't one of those 400 people classes is it cause just the thought of presenting infront of 400 people makes me cringe

Originally Posted by [email protected]

it isn't one of those 400 people classes is it cause just the thought of presenting infront of 400 people makes me cringe

No it's about 30-40 people per class.