Pas mal, pas mal du tout

I'm feeling mightily accomplished tonight. I just sent my cousin something for her birthday off her Amazon wish list, which may not sound like much to you until I tell you that she failed to mention in her mass email that the entire Amazon site is in French.

Now I took two years of college French and a couple of courses in intermediate French at Alliance Francaise after that, but it's been eight years since then and even though I now work with people from Montreal who chatter away in French half the time, I can't understand anything more complex than "Comment ca va?"

So I'm pretty proud of myself for parsing envies cadeaux ("wish list") within five seconds without having to resort to Babelfish, and guessing sufficiently from the context to punch in all the right credit card information and even opt for an additional EUR2,60 gift tag. I also figured out what addresse de facturation was (though I ran a Babelfish check before clicking on the final Confirmer button, just in case), even though I'm fairly certain facturation was never in any of my textbook vocabulary lists. Yeah, they don't make Amazon-friendly vocabulary lists.

Adventures en francaise aside, I'm also thrilled to have whittled down my stack of unread emails from 20-something to 5. Hurrah!

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