Can you remember the first French word you had learnt? I can. Let me take a guess about you, was it "Bonjour", "Monsieur", "Mademoiselle", "Au Revoir"? If you say yes, I can safely assume that you were the novel-reading types and you must have read these in a dozen fiction novels where the protagonist travels all over Europe trying to escape from KGB, MI6, CIA or trying to uncover some deadly conspiracy against all odds. I am equally sure that you would have pronounced them in your mind like how you would pronounce an English word. Only later, you would have known that "Mademoiselle" sounds like "memmozee" or "au revoir" sounds like "avva". If you were not the novel-reading types, in the post-cable-tv-pre-Internet era, there was only one way to get your basic French education - Fashion TV. You had to tolerate horrendously dressed zombies to catch a rare episode of Rio Carnival. I need not say that most of...
If it made sense to you, remember, it was actually not meant to!