Pepe le pew

I've been with my Mrs for over 10 years now, and have visited France with her, ooh, around 30 times, and of course I have two bilingual children. My french language skills, however, haven't developed much in that time.

I actually understand quite a lot - lest you think you can speak french in front of me and I won't. But the main problem with my wife's friends and relatives is that they mumble away with strong regional accents, and use vague catch-all words like "le truc" and "les gosses" a lot.

Still, running through the BBC web site's language gauge, I scored a respectable 11/12. So that's me, 11/12 for understanding/reading, 1/10 for speaking/writing.

So I thought, given my 210 minutes per day in the car, I'll get some language CDs and start to brush up. I'm sick of my music collection anyway.

So I've started doing that. I'll let you know how I get on. My main issue so far is that everyone in france, according to the CDs, is either an architect, or living with an architect.

It's the alphabet, really, what trips me up. G is pronounced J and J is pronounced G. How am I supposed to be able to cope with that? Someone spelling something with a J or a G, I get stuck on figuring out which was which and miss the rest of the word. Also, W is "double V" and Y is "E-greque", except it's not an E, because E is pronounced "Eh" (as in, "Eh?"), and I is pronounced E. "Ee before eh, except after say." As they don't say in France.

Also numbers. How can a civilisation not learn to count past 69? Or, indeed, 16? "Soixant-quinze?" What's that about? "Quatre vingt dix-neuf"? Eh? I still can't pronounce Kronenbourg 1664 properly.