Jonathan WENG JC: Raffles Institution Exchange Programs: -2012: Paris -2014: Rambouillet -2015: Lycée Janson de Sailly Tertiary Education: Considers a Scientific Preparatory Class at Lycée Henri IV (Paris) and an Ingénieur Polytechnique Engineering Programme at the École Polytechnique (Paris).
Jonathan Weng
Our Guest of Honour, Ms Cindy Khoo, Your Excellencies, ladies, gentlemen, language students like me, good afternoon.
I am glad to be here before you today, and I would like to congratulate everyone here, in particular my classmates.
It is good to see that we have all progressed so much.
In truth, when I was in Sec 1, Sec 2 or even in Sec 3, I did not at all imagine being where I am now.
In fact, at the time, I did not even know that there were prizes to win
and after I became aware of the fact, prize winners seemed to me like brilliant, faraway stars.
In the beginning, just like many of us, I was a young student coming out of primary school who wanted to choose his third language.
Having been interested in Latin and Greek roots for a long time, I ended up choosing French.
At the time, French was not much to me: it was just an interesting subject.
For the first two years, everything was going well. My results were good enough, but nothing very spectacular.
Then, I entered Sec 3. My teacher was pleasant and people cracked jokes in class, but bit by bit, French became harder and harder.
I barely understood how the language worked anymore, and I was getting tired of all the vocabulary lists.
Worse still, right in the middle of the year, I suffered a head injury.
As a consequence, I missed classes and I was really behind on my studies.
I ended that year with a score of 56%. The future of my French studies seemed truly quite bleak.
But as people often say, every cloud has a silver lining.
I was still quite fortunate despite the fact that I had missed the deadline because of my injury.
The head of the French department, Mdm Pang, allowed me to go for the interview for the 2012 immersion programme.
And, to my great surprise, I made it through. So, at the end of 2012, I went to France for the very first time.
In France, I saw French as a beautiful, living language, an everyday means of exchange.
One evening, part of the group, including me, was lost while visiting the Eiffel Tower, that great symbol of France.
During this time when we were lost, I did my best to communicate in French
and, perhaps because of the stress and being exposed to the language for so many days, the fog cleared in my mind.
That evening, my host family joked, He went up the Eiffel Tower, and came back down speaking better French!
Of course, this wasn t a miracle that suddenly allowed me to speak perfect French.
As you can see, I was still scratching out mistakes as I wrote the speech for the farewell party.
But thanks to this immersion programme, I tasted inspiration.
From then on, I worked away at improving my French.
With the help of a few free resources online and a selflearning French course, I was able to expand my knowledge.
With the maxim That which is not clear is not French in my mind, I compelled myself to express myself in an ever more accurate manner.
By working, still motivated by the inspiration I had found in France, I managed to place second in my cohort in Sec 4.
At the end of the year, I came to a decision to continue to study French in Junior College at the H2 level.
Thanks to a scholarship from the Ministry of Education, I had the chance to go back to France in 2014 with 4 other students for another immersion programme.
For two weeks, I stayed with a very warm and friendly host family and shared their life.
It was a good opportunity to discover French culture and gastronomy.
During my stay, they told me, You re not learning French anymore, you speak it!
It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard.
During my final year of French at the Ministry of Education Language Centre
I decided to go further and challenge myself by sitting the exam for the Diplôme approfondi de langue française (Advanced French Language Diploma) C2.
After signing up for my first class at the Alliance Française in order to prepare for the test
I finally obtained the diploma in June 2015 with, thankfully, good marks.
Through these six years, I was able to experience many things, but there is still so much to discover:
French science and history, French literature and all its poets, its writers
while passing through the marvels of Middle French and even of Old French
And to think that all this started with the Ministry of Education giving me the opportunity to learn a foreign language
an opportunity which I am very grateful for, and which opened my eyes to the francophone world.
Now, I would like to thank several people.
Firstly, I would like to thank Mme Tse and Mlle Fournier, my teachers in Sec 1 and Sec 2, for giving me a good foundation in French.
Thank you also to my teachers in Sec 4 and H2 JC1, Mme Nguyen and Mlle Cassagne
for all their efforts and for accompanying me on this journey
and to M. Kou for the stay at Rambouillet in 2014.
I would also like to particularly thank M. Quenot for the marvellous programme in Paris, where everything changed
and for being such a nice and funny teacher in Sec 3 and in my last year of H2.
I would like to thank my teacher at the Alliance Française, M. Guillaume Hamelin, as well for his invaluable advice about the C2
and for letting me discover the beauty of French literature through, among other works
an extract from Molière s «Le médecin malgré lui».
I would like to thank my classmates for being truly extraordinary.
And finally, I would like specially to thank Mme Pang for believing in me, despite my poor marks and the injury I had
because that gave me the chance to see French in all its splendour.
At the end, I would like to say a little something to each of the students, not just those who are here..
but also and most importantly to those who are struggling.
It is something I told myself before the preliminary exams last year.
If it ever seems that it s too hard, that you are never going to get there Take heart.
Don t throw in the towel, don t stop fighting! It s not over, and if you just try, things are not going to just turn out that way.
Remember, as Napoléon said, "Impossible" is not French! Thank you for your attention.