I surprised myself this morning when doing my Declaration. I started reading all the stuff that goes with it in French but speed translating as I went into English. I then tried reading it all in French and, apart from only a couple of words (misread rather than misunderstood because of the tiny writing) didn’t have to look anything up. And, although this is a different thread, well pleased with myself for doing it for yet another year. 
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What is the approximate price?
Not everyone’s cup of tea but I’m doing the ‘Baptism of fire’ method of learning French. I was offered the opportunity of a job and am learning French that way. Certainly helped my listening and ability to use the phone and of course speaking but not much grammar, that I’ll have to do myself.
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For verb drills, you might like Linguno (I do).
Thank I’ll have a look at that. I bought the full course of learn French with Alexa but haven’t started it yet 
Happily I wasn’t paying (!) but I’m assuming in the range of €3500-5000 per week, given quality of accommodation, facilities, low staff to participant ratio etc.It’s probably comparable to the standard corporate conference centre type fees, plus quite a bit…
I think we are the last generation that needs to learn another language. the rate at which AI is developing. 
I agree about belonging to a club - mine’s for photography - but it’s only a couple of hours a week.
As a translator at a European institution who’s probably going to be pensioned off soon because the departments are now feeding their documents into DeepL and -at best - having the translations read over by semi-literate English secretaries, I would agree with you, Sue.
There is an upside, however. Everywhere I travel now, I find that almost everyone under 40 speaks excellent, idiomatic English. So you can have proper, genuinely interesting conversations with locals about their lives and what’s happening in their country. Rather than just dredging up the few expressions you’ve retained from, say, a year’s worth of Italian evening classes. Maybe enough to order a double espresso.
There’s a deep irony to the fact that English is the modern world’s Lingua Franca
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I must say while I’ve subscribed since it surfaced, I don’t find it great. It takes some tuning of even simple messages to get them correct. I wouldn’t dream of using it “blind”, as in for a language I don’t understand. The chances of miscommunication are high I think. I’m surprised it’s being used officially.
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Hi John
Machine translation is being widely used now by all the international organisations and all the big private companies, e.g. Mercedes. Sometimes with a quick read-over by a human. Who is now classified as a “post-editor” rather than a translator and so can be paid peanuts.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Luddite. DeepL can be very useful for internal communication. Many of the documents we produce are formulaic and lend themselves nicely to machine translation. Meeting agendas and minutes, for example.
The problem arises when it’s used for important documents that are intended for external consumption. Quite apart from actual errors, stylistically, some of the English is frankly embarrassing. Yet few people other than the professional linguists in the organisation care. Or even notice. The standard of written English, including among people who are supposed to be native speakers, is appalling. My old English teachers back in Belfast must be turning in their graves.
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…which is itself a phrase in the world’s previous lingua franca, Latin. 
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You learned Old English in Belfast?
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Ha, ha!
They always SEEMED really old. They were probably about 40.
Thanks…Not.
Yeah but even scarier is, that all the non-native speakers all understand and are able to converse in this completely non-existent English.,… that a lot of English people back home would struggle to understand .
It’s kind of a crptocurrency language.
Certainly here in Strasbourg you hear English everywhere now. It’s of a pretty high standard, too. Last night I was standing behind a German couple, waiting to have my fruit weighed, and the young French guy doing the weighing asked them if they realised the veg they had chosen was “organic”.
I nearly dropped my bananas. Not even the Brits living here remember, when speaking English among themselves, that the correct term is “organic”. We’ve all been polluted and say “bio”.
Come to think of it, the fact that the young French guy spoke English to a German couple is itself a sign of how much things have changed. When we came here nearly 30 years ago all the locals spoke good German.
David, if it’s any consolation I reckon my spoken French was better when I was doing my O-levels.
It’s atrocious now. But I’ve given up fretting about it. I have a circle of friends here and if we speak English, so be it.
Husband loathes French and speaks it even worse than I do so I was impressed to hear about all the complicated political conversations (he’s Russian so there’s plenty of scope) he claimed to be having with the people at his aikido club. Curious, I went along to the club one night. To discover of course he’d got them all speaking - and swearing profusely in - English.
It is, I have come to realise it is age related, worse memory makes speaking slower and poor hearing and concentration make understanding slower and therefore a real drawback in conversation.
To a lessor extent I have the same problem with English and often when in full flow, here for instance, come to a full stop because I know exactly the word I want to use, but can’t remember it.
I do my best in the bars over coffee but, whereas my English aquaintances joke that I am a chatterbox I have heard my French ones remarking how little I say. 