It didn’t help that, despite arriving on time, the class was in full swing before I walked in the door. Perhaps the teacher was running on Paris Mean Time rather than Greenwich...

Nevertheless, I was acutely aware that I was not the only one from my age range struggling. My partner for the ‘getting to know you’ exercise had also given up French four years ago at GCSE, and like me was trying desperately to remember the basics. "Comment tu t’appelles?" I asked, satisfied that I was asking the appropriate question, and was overjoyed when I recognised her response "je m’appelle…." A cursory glance around the room however, alarmed me. Older members of the class seemed to be charging ahead through the questionnaire provided. Questions were flying through the air, some I recognised – "qu’est-ce que tu aimes faire?" - and responses I had never heard before – "je suis célibataire." This made me wonder how people who hadn’t spoken French for longer than I had could converse with such confidence.

I was beginning to question whether I had been put in the right class. Our teacher was speaking in more or less uninterrupted French, with the odd interlude of English, at alarming speed. I believe she needs to be introduced to the age-old British approach to speaking to foreigners – slower and louder! But the same question still bugged me: why could the older generation speak better French? Is the press right that education standards are dropping? Or is it that the attitude to learning foreign languages is wrong in English speaking countries? In this increasingly globalised world, where English is the language of business, do we feel that we don’t need to communicate in their language because they speak ours?

I have no concrete answer to this question, but I would be inclined to believe that the majority of people in this country do not see the point in speaking more than their native tongue.

This is not the case in other European countries. An Ukrainian in my French course already speaks English, Russian and German, and while she is probably not an accurate reflection of Ukrainians as a whole, she is a good example of somebody who isn’t English who makes the effort to speak more than their own language. So why don’t we?