Don't get me and most men wrong but "Sex and the City" is a top favorite. Yes, even the male species got hooked with this phenomenal television show. There was actually a high viewership of this show among American men for the six seasons it ran in the boob tube. It gave us a strategic peek in the very unfathomable psyche of cosmopolitan women. *Carrie Bradshaw* and the rest of the girls embodied the kind of women most modern-day sons of Adam dream of dating or ending up with. The kinky notoriety of Samantha Jones served as an effective handbook guide we used and still use in dealing with women of her kind. The show was such a hit among the male species that it gave us practical insights on how to handle the complex world of Eve's daughters.



My favorite episode of the show was when Carrie went to Paris with Alexander Petrovski. The hard-core New Yorker dispatched her life in the city that never sleeps to be with her artist lover in the city of romance and sensuality. What I particularly like about that episode was Carrie's hardships in dealing with the language barrier. For those who saw the episode, the scene between Carrie and Alexander's daughter was a nostalgia of my experience with a French lady. Nope, I did not go to Paris and met a lover's daughter. I actually tried my luck and came up to a fair French lady during a month-long break in France a couple of years ago. Trying to be impressive, I spilled out all the customary French phrases I know and attempted on taking her out for a date that same night I met her in the subway. Unfortunately, the fair French lady's English vocabulary was limited to "hi," "hello," and "thank you." I did not bother myself anymore of finding a translator for us and just said "thank you" for her time and sorry for the interruption. The language barrier made a could-have-been-Paris-love story greatly impossible. Anyway, that's past already and I've learned my lesson from it-- learn the French language.

So I did. I studied the tongue-twisting language. I first learned about the language's history and background before taking on French classes. I made my own research and lots of reading about the language and discovered so much about it. French is apparently the mother tongue of about 120 million in different countries. It is the third largest of the Romance languages in terms of after Spanish and Portuguese. As a Romance language, it is an offspring of the Latin language and with much influence from the ancient Greek language. I was so surprised to discover that French is actually an official language of 30 countries. Not only that, French is also an official or administrative language in several communities and international organizations such as the European Union, International Olympic Committee, World Trade Organization, NATO, FINA, FIA, UCI, FIFA, World Anti-Doping Agency, United Nations, and the African Union. Even the International Court of Justice, IHO, International Secretariat for Water, International Political Science Association, International Bureau of Weights and Measures, European Broadcasting Union, ESA, Universal Postal Union, and the Interpol are apparently using French as their official business language.

In France, French is the mandated language to be used in official government publications, public education, legal contracts, and *promotions and advertisements* (foreign translation must also be present though). This is probably the source of a common misunderstanding among Americans and Britons that France prohibits the use of foreign words in websites or in any other private publication. But actually, the French government is not imposing a language policy as stringent as that. The French-speaking nation is actually a staunch advocate of freedom of speech irregardless of the language being used. It's just that in the affairs of the state, the use of the national language is a requirement. Fair enough, since most countries do the same.

After learning its background, I then enrolled myself in a French online language course. I chose the free online course, of course. I took the basic French course offered in www.jump-gate.com. Jacques Leon made the course outline and served as my online teacher. The course started from pronunciation guidelines, proceeding to articles and genders, then pronouns and verbs, followed by sentence structure. As the course was progressing, I got really motivated to learn more French words and phrases so I could incorporate them with the lessons and exercises provided. Now that I already have basic training in the usage of French, I can give dating another French lady a try. If still it won't be enough, then I'd enroll myself on a higher French online language course immediately.