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What Block B was for
Belgium and Switzerland are a strange pair to spend twenty-six lessons on, and it is worth saying what they were doing in a course about French. The obvious answer is the varieties: the numbers of lesson 67, the Belgicismes, the four Swiss languages. That matters, but it is the smaller half. The larger half is that these two countries make visible something that France conceals. In France, French is simply the language — unmarked, unquestioned, coextensive with the state. In Belgium it shares a country with Dutch on a fixed territorial line. In Switzerland it is one of four, a minority language inside its own federation, spoken by people who are entirely confident in it and entirely aware of being a minority. Seeing French from those positions is the only way to understand that its apparent naturalness in Paris is a political achievement rather than a fact of nature — which is the thread that ran from lesson 54's conversation on the plane right through to Laurent's cantons. Grammatically, Block B did the heavy structural work of the year. The subjunctive arrived in Québec and was extended here through purpose, concession and time clauses. The relatives filled out: `dont`, `où`, `lequel` after a preposition. The passive and the causative came in lessons 69 and 70. Reported speech in 74. Participle agreement in 76. And this lesson closes the conditional system that lesson 54 opened. A learner who has those has the whole architecture of written French; what remains in Blocks C and D is register, nuance and range. On Alex's answer to Élise's question, which is the right one: 'compliqué avec le sourire' is close to how Belgians describe their own country, and the self-deprecation is not false modesty but a genuine national register — the same instinct that produces 'le mille-feuille' and 'on râle après'. Arriving somewhere and learning to join in its jokes about itself is a real stage of language learning, and it comes later than vocabulary and earlier than fluency. Block C goes to Dakar, and the ground shifts more than it has so far. In Québec, Belgium and Switzerland, French is a first language for most of the people speaking it to you. In Senegal it generally is not — it is the language of school, administration and the written word, sitting beside Wolof and several others that people actually grew up in. That is the situation of the majority of French speakers alive today, and the course has not touched it yet.