Crossing Cultures

Fifty years ago, in the early 1960's, two women set off in opposite directions to cross the Atlantic to spend a year living in a foreign country - France and the United States - and mastering a foreign language - French and English. Crossing Cultures in English et en français tells their story in both languages. Lynne Breakstone was one of the first American Junior-Year-Abroad participants while Nicole Jouane served for a year as a teaching assistant and resident native speaker in a college's French House. Although their experiences differed greatly, they both shared in the delight as well as the difficulties of having to decipher behaviors and customs that were at times confusing, strange, and mysterious. Anyone who has spent time in a foreign country having to communicate in a foreign language will find pleasure in these two memoirs of such an experience in the pre-Internet era.