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And on the eighth day, God created Alliance Francaise.

Coming to the world's largest and best known French school is like dying and waking up in heaven, if you're a single guy.

Hundreds of women of every age, nationality and physical description are gathered under one roof, merrily butchering the French language. And they all go to the same place for lunch — le caféteria.

Even before I left Sydney to live in Paris, I knew I was going to struggle — I couldn't say 'water' in French, let alone beer, so it was naked desperation that saw me slapping down A$1100 for a month of classes.

Immerse yourself in ... ahem ... your studies

Signing up for an immersion course on the famous school's Paris campus is no small commitment; you have to put in four hours a day, five days a week, for a month, but it's like going into linguistic battle and all these cute foreign girls suddenly become your war buddies.

United nations

In my classes we had students from Siberia, Kazakhstan, Poland, Argentina, America, Japan, Spain, Pakistan, Iran, Mexico and this loud mouthed, handsome fella from Sydney, Australie.

One very cool guy who sat next to me owned five sneaker stores in Rio de Janeiro, while the girl on the other side was a micro-paleontologist from Shanghai. Beside her was a Syrian Catholic priest and one over was a modern art curator from Milan.

Try meeting that crew at your local in Australia.

First day jitters

First day of school, the hair on the back of my neck was standing up in anticipation: just being in a classroom with a bunch of bizarrely disparate people, all with the common goal of wrangling and breaking the amazing beast called the French language, was electrifying.

Our teacher, Anne, was a theatrical Parisienne who refused point blank to speak in any language but French.

On day two she had us all sing our national anthems and it was a humbling privilege to hear such exotic hymns and see the expressions on peoples' faces as they sang.

Three days later, I watched those same faces absorb the news of the London terrorist bombings and it was a blazing, instant lesson in world geopolitics.

The next month, enrolling in the second tranche of my courses, that lesson grew even more profound when one our new classmates revealed that her fiancé was one of over 50 people killed in the attacks.

Therein lies the incredible gift of studying somewhere like Alliance Française.

Aside from the astounding experience of feeling your brain tear and grow and rewire itself as you learn, you meet people you'd never have otherwise — the faces on the train you wonder "what is your life like?"

And then there's my new girlfriend — the French language.

Speaking in tongues

It's a tongue, like women, that has rules for everything and just when you think you understand them, it expects you to do exactly the opposite.

Where once I used to be able to recite the first try-scorers in rugby league grand finals, I now have a different music in my heart.

It goes thus: je suis; tu es; il/elle/on est; nous sommes; vous êtes; ils/elles sont.

It's certainly not going to chart on JJJ, but the above conjugation of the verb être (to be) is the foundation stone upon which any meaningful relationship with la langue Française is based.

Problem is, the textbooks you get at Alliance Française are written completely in French, so trying to do your homework, especially when you've been partying non-stop with your Spanish classmates, makes for some serious miscommunication.

Like the drunk guy at the bar, it's all too easy to make a fool of yourself with this lady language, even with something as simple as an introduction.

Studying a new tongue is akin to tearing off your old skin and exposing what's beneath to all that matters: the way other people, from another time and place, have seen and see their world: it's the most unbelievable sensation.

Unfortunately, it had to finish.

Graduation

I was truly sad to see my friends scatter back to their corners of the globe and even sadder I still couldn't pronounce words like 'crôitre'.

You see, I now know just enough French to sound like an absolute moron at a Parisian dinner table and I'm not really sure if that's a step up from being Monolingual Aussie Guy.

My teacher says it takes about three months of intensive study to really start to speak la langue, so school's actually only just begun for me. I hope my liver survives.

Ahhh, the recess bell. A bientôt

Have you taken an immersion class in a foreign language? To meet chicks?! Tell us about it.

More information

A one month intensive course at Alliance Francaise in Paris costs just under $A1100 for 72 hours of tuition.
Visit http://www.alliancefr.org/.