For my last update, I finished with “I’m going to blog my way through my re-certification process, from low-level beginner back to moderately fluent. Wish me luck…”. Fast-forward 8 months, and not much changed. I pushed for training, and ran into massive administrative inertia as to what I was supposed to do for training. They’ve been working to update the policy, and in the meantime, my training request went nowhere.

I was initially assessed back in August or September and they recommended 52 weeks of training, 6 hours per week of self-study and 3 hours of practice. Not exactly the speed I was looking for. Plus I was supposed to be a priority. Try again, different process, okay, now they say 3 weeks full-time one on one initially, just need the paperwork. Five weeks later, I was still waiting for the paperwork, and when we pushed yet again, they said, “Oh, right, well we don’t do it that way any more, now it has to be a 12 week course.” Pushed again, and they said, “okay, 12 weeks, starting the end of January”, take it or leave it. Four times the cost in salary, plus not what their own assessors told me I needed. Plus, just for giggles, it would start the day we leave for a trip, so I was “out” anyway.

Someone is supposedly looking into other options, but I’m investing where I can — in my own realm, doing things I can control.

• I’ve brought all my French materials from previous study binges into the office, and I’m going to start wading through them;
• I need to register in the online system for some of the WEB-EX practice and sample courses;
• I need to download the French audio materials I have on my own server;
• I have a bunch of vocabulary builders for genres like planning to peruse;
• I’m going to read a couple of La Presse articles every day; and,
• I’m going to start wading through some of the DuoLingo as a kickstarter too.

And for fun, a friend suggested organizing a “wing night” to be done entirely in French for this Thursday!

I’ll be blogging about all of it as it is a way to keep me on track, focus on what I’m learning, and mark my progress. Stay tuned!