Pardon my French!
I have started preparing for XP Day France. Pascal van Cauwenberghe suggested we may need to speak French there… Right. Almost forgot about that. Minor detail.
How to practice?
I watched a bit of French television, that doesn’t help so far.
We continued our chat in French. That worked. A chat window gives me time to think and I can save difficult phrases.
It was fun, and I could keep it up longer than I expected. Until I tried to explain a problem I’m solving for a run of the Thinking for a Change workshop (possibly tomorrow at XP-NL). After some help from Pascal it ended up as:
“Comment peut-on amener les participants d’un workshop à discuter d’un problème réel et actuel qui peut être resolue avec les outils proposés lors du workshop?”
Pardon my French! In English:
“How can one get the participants of a workshop to discuss a real and actual problem that can be resolved with the tools introduced in the workshop?”
Funny. Looking back at it, the question is now phrased much more clearly than when I started (in Dutch). Rewriting in another language goes into the bag of tricks, so I can juggle my mind when rewriting, and practice languages at the same time 
.
