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What five months somewhere does, and what the plus-que-parfait has to do with it
Block A ends here, and it is worth saying what it was for. Alex arrived in Québec able to speak the French of this course and spent five months discovering that it was one variety among several — that the sound system could move without the grammar moving, that the vocabulary differed at the edges, that a word could be standard in one place and comic in another, and that the question of which French is proper French is argued about by the people who speak it rather than settled. There is a grammatical joke buried in the lesson. The plus-que-parfait is the tense for things that had already happened before the moment you are describing, and a departure is made entirely of them: you had said three months, they had warned you, you had packed. Leaving a place is the point at which the whole of your time there becomes anterior. That is also why the tense is so common in narrative and so rare in conversation about the present — if you find yourself reaching for it often, you are telling a story. Practically, the thing to take from Québec into the rest of the year is the listening habit, not the vocabulary. You will not need 'tuque' or 'dépanneur' in Dakar. You will need the thing lesson 55 was really teaching: that an unfamiliar accent is a recognition problem rather than a comprehension problem, that it resolves in about a fortnight of real exposure, and that the resolution is faster if you know which specific shifts to expect. Every block from here does the same exercise with a different set of shifts — and the second time is much easier than the first. One more thing, about the postcard. Keeping in touch across a departure is the subject of lesson 103, and the honest version is that most of these friendships do not survive by themselves. The ones that do are maintained by whichever person is willing to send the message that is about nothing. Marie-Ève keeping a postcard on the fridge is her half of that; Alex's reply — one from every country — is a commitment he will have to actually keep, which is harder than it sounds in an airport at half past five.