I am going to learn how to read French. Fluently. In seven weeks. Really. And I do not like the University of Minnesota's web site.
Tonight, five of us whipped through grammar basics in the first session — two classes per week on the UMN East Bank campus, extending through early July. The point of the class is to learn how to read French in the arts and sciences. My particular interests are both literary and academic: in literature, I would like to know what Tolstoy's and Dostoyevsky's characters are saying, and perhaps to read Camus in the original; in academics, I am particularly interested in religious studies / sociology, which is a fertile and often un-translated field of study in the French language.