A new frontier
I'd always done well in my language classes... but I'd never felt like they were the best way to learn French. And I always enjoyed my Pilot studies more. Plus, learning a language independently is actually relatively common, unlike the stats & calculus stuff I'd been doing. There'd be lots of resources out there on how to do it right.
But learning languages, I soon discovered, is very different from studying these other academic subjects. Progress is harder to measure. Acquisition works differently. Knowing something is very different from being able to speak it. Still, I've been improving!
But learning languages, I soon discovered, is very different from studying these other academic subjects. Progress is harder to measure. Acquisition works differently. Knowing something is very different from being able to speak it. Still, I've been improving!
Q1 - a balanced approach
The plan
There's 4 skills involved with learning a language: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. I tried to work on two of these skills a day each day during the week. Studying a language is different in that it requires constant maintenance or it will decay, so there was plenty of tinkering to be done.
Writing with Journaly
I discovered Journaly pretty early on in my study, and what a find!
You can see my profile here. My process was to try to stumble through the posts with what French I had first, then look up the words I wanted to learn & memorize those, in addition to the corrections I got. Better for learning to make an attempt first, then check your understanding. |
Listening with podcasts
For most of quarter 1, I relied on French through Stories to work on my listening skills. I also used The Fable Cottage, which has limited free content, and tried to watch Kaamelot, but mostly was unsuccessful (too advanced for me right now).
Usually, I'd just listen and try to follow along. But I typed out a few transcriptions for French through Stories episodes, trying to capture it word-for-word before looking at the official transcript, then correcting. Here they are: |
Reading with RFI & Readlang
Reading was probably the easiest skill for me, so I made it a challenge by reading Radio France Internationale, an actual French news site, and try to stumble along understanding it.
Most of the time I do pretty well! But lots of specific words get missed, and I need to look them up so that I can memorize them and understand what they're talking about. So I use the Readlang bookmarklet to translate select words & short phrases. There's actually a limit if you don't pay, which is good! It kept me from relying on it too much. |
Speaking with Karen & recordings
Every week I spend 30-40 minutes speaking French with Karen, one of our independent learning advisors. She went to school in France for a while & is pretty fluent, although every now and then there's a word we have to look up. Conversations are definitely the hardest part for me, but I enjoy our little chats.
In addition, I practiced speaking by recording myself on other days. The recordings are terrible and extremely halting, because I've been trying to push myself to speak about new things. They're getting more comfortable with time. I hesitate to even put them on here, because they feel embarrassing, but here's the link. |
Q2 - Focusing on speech
After several months of this 4-way approach, I was getting good practice… but it was clear my speech skills were way below the rest of my understanding. So as quarter 2 progressed, I was spending more and more of my time targeting basic speech—and that meant memorization.
Memorizing whole sentences
I used to approach French memorization like math—learn the basic words and grammar rules, and you can assemble everything else with your own mind. But trying to build every sentence from the ground up slowed my speech to a crawl, and didn't feel at all like the way I thought about English.
So I decided to try memorizing entire common sentences that I could use, modify, and understand—hopefully pushing me closer to thinking in French (which, after this practice, I've caught myself doing from time to time). I grabbed a premade deck from Anki with hundreds of French sentences and their translations (sourced from movie & TV subtitles), sorted by their frequency, and started learning, modifying and correcting them as I went. 1,700+ memorized sentences |
More recordings!
These are still pretty rough, but there's progress. I definitely should be doing more of these; for Q3, I want to do one ≤5 minute recording every day. But here's what I've got! Link to folder. (Oh, and I've still been talking to Karen each week.)
Diagnostic writing--Crime et Punition
I hadn't done much writing work semester 1, so I decided to write something at the end as a diagnostic—to show my advisors where I was at, without help or corrections. (I'm definitely planning to return to Journaly or a similar service!)
I started just writing about my semester, but that wasn't much fun. So I decided to write a plot summary of the beginning of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who I'm studying for World Authors right now. It's one of my favorite books ever, and if hearing the basic premise in amateur French isn't enough to pique your interest, I don't know what will. Crime et punition |
Q3 & Q4 - actually getting good at this
I continued the sentence memorization—I'm up to about 2,500 basic phrases now—but I scaled that back so I could focus on the true path to fluency: sitcoms.
"Le bon endroit"
The best thing I have ever done for language learning, apart from sentence memorization: watching an American sitcom I've already seen, but with a French dub—and sans sous-titres. (Thanks to Fluent Forever for the idea.)
This works. Every day, I watch about half an episode, stopping frequently to note down phrases I can understand, new words or grammar I can't yet, and anything fun I happen to mark along the way. My listening comprehension, pronunciation, and speech comfort have increased dramatically. Even better, it's fun. And it keeps me in a French mindset: I can think in French, though very haltingly, and talk without translating an English sentence in my head. So: huge progress. Q3 notes (from sitcom-watching, plus some creative writing in French!) Q4 notes |
Regular recordings
I'm not even ashamed of these anymore! Sure, they're still faltering and imperfect, but they're far more comfortable, and actually kind of fun. I've kept up talking to Karen, who says I've made quite a bit of progress. And I make these recordings near-daily.
Link to Q3 recordings folder. Link to Q4 recordings folder.
In the final few weeks of school, I recorded some more difficult material, just off the top of my head, to challenge myself. These are more faltering and probably less grammatical then the day to day. That's the point—I wanted to push myself. And they didn't turn out too bad!
Link to "challenge recordings" folder.
Link to Q3 recordings folder. Link to Q4 recordings folder.
In the final few weeks of school, I recorded some more difficult material, just off the top of my head, to challenge myself. These are more faltering and probably less grammatical then the day to day. That's the point—I wanted to push myself. And they didn't turn out too bad!
Link to "challenge recordings" folder.
Ear trainer
I invested $12 in a "minimal pairs" ear trainer from Fluent Forever. You'll hear an audio recording that's similar to two words, and have to pick out which it is. It depends on very subtle pronunciation differences.
I started by practicing these every day, then spaced repetition gradually spaced them out until I eventually deleted them. But I may try to restore them again—they were actually pretty helpful, not just in speaking, but in listening. (And listening has become the hard part.) |
More sentences!
I've been more selective with the sentences I learn, and only go through 5 new ones a day rather than 10 or 20, to make room for my other practices. Nevertheless, it's been quite helpful in my day-to-day speech.
Most of these are still from pre-downloaded decks on AnkiWeb, which I tweak and prune to my specifications. These decks are based on word frequency, so I learn the most useful words first. A minority I wrote myself with vocab I wanted to learn. Over the summer, when I have more time, I'll probably split my new cards so about half are custom and another half are premade. Q3 New French Sentences Q4 New French Sentences |
Notes on grammar
One of the things I'm graded on is my understanding of grammar, and one of the first things my French advisor pointed out about my documentation was that I didn't talk about grammar. (Thanks Adam!) That was an oversight, because I learned a lot of new grammar this year—not by studying grammar textbooks (though those were helpful for me in previous years), but by speaking and listening to common phrases, and having to work out the rules by intuition (followed by looking up some rules to make sure I understood them right.
Though there wasn't as much to learn about grammar as when I was starting out, here are some of the most interesting and useful new pieces of grammar I got this year. Grammar Explainer |