• Abbey now answers to Abi (said with a ridiculously exaggerated French accent, of course), and has also taken to wearing a beret (okay, okay — not true).
• We’ve accidentally said merci or pardon to random strangers more times than we can count.
• We speak to one another almost exclusively in French at home, using caveman-like sentences of course, but is that really so different from usual anyway?
• Andy downloaded a Sherlock Holmes audiobook en Francais and now spends more hours a night doing “homework” than I’m sure he ever did in high school or college.
• Alex has traded People for Paris Match. (Well, mostly. Paris March doesn’t cover The Bachelorette.)
• Our idea of a wild night out is the French conversation group at a nearby coffee shop.
• Our Facebook accounts have been set to French long enough that we’ve got the translations for “wall post” and “…is now friends with…” down pat. (Useful stuff, eh?)

Although we of course wish progress would come more quickly (Can’t we just be fluent already?), we’re actually doing pretty well. Our class shrunk to five people at the beginning of this week, so we’re getting more conversation practice than before. And we both have a good enough grasp on the grammar we’ve been taught that we’ve been moving ahead to more difficult stuff on our own. (If only there weren’t still like 1,343 tenses left to learn…)

It’s easy to push ourselves that extra mile when there’s so much at stake.

My motivation: my job depends on it.

Andy’s motivation: the millions that await him when he’s fluent enough to create a universal translator app for the iPhone, à la Star Trek. (Yeah, yeah. I know. But let’s let him have his dream.)