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One year of french | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kgoedert Diglot Newbie Brazil Joined 4559 days ago 20 posts - 25 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German, French | Message 1 of 4 01 March 2016 at 6:36pm | IP Logged |
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One year ago I decided I would try to learn a language without hiring a teacher or taking a regular course. Why? To prove to myself that it was
possible. Assumptions: - I would dedicate 6h/week. One hour a day. Why 6? Because I need a day a week where I don't have anything scheduled to study. - I would not spend any money. Why? The problem is not that cannot spend the money, the problem is that if I was not able to stick with the schedule, I would have wasted money on material, teachers, courses or whatever. So, I would have to use only things I could find online for free, or that I could borrow from someone or the library. What happened: First problem: how does someone learn a language this way? Most common answer: You can read a lot about techniques people use, but you have to find what works for you. Not very helpful at first, but totally true. I read a book called fluent forever, where the author suggests using anki with pictures and sounds. I picked up a list of words the author had on his site and tried this for a month, creating cards and reviewing them daily. I used forvo and google images. Well, it worked. It is a bit boring creating the cards, but since it helped... now I got my first technique that works for me! And now what? I needed resources... well, I got a harry potter book, in french from a friend, assimil and teach yourself french, and a grammar book from the local library. I found a podcast from radio lingua network. A channel from youtube called learn french with vincent. And I tried to go over all this resources at the same time, using a different one each day. Crazy? Yes and no. Doing this was good in the way that it allowed me to review the same concepts over and over again with different examples and sometimes explanations. It was bad because: the harry potter book was to complicated, I could not understand the grammar and got very frustrated. Try to look things up on the grammar book took time and I had to skip chapters and look for explanations the I would have come across if I was reading the grammar in order, which I was, but with one day a week of grammar, I would take a long time to get to some chapters. So, I dropped the book. I did not like the assimil material, so I dropped it too. And since I decided to drop assimil, I also dropped teach yourself. Now, this was not looking good, I was dropping a lot of things. But I decided to keep the grammar, the podcast and youtube channel. I also kept the anki cards, for new vocabulary and grammar rules. After I finished the podcast unit 2, I dropped it too, because they did not have as many explanations as before, it was on some material you had to buy. It was mainly dialogs, and I thought dialogs I could get in other places. Around month ten, I was feeling the need to do something different. Here on the forums, someone suggested to go over a book like assimil. I decided to go over teach yourself french. Doing the following: one day a listen to the dialogs, read it in the book and then try to transcribe it. On another day, try to translate that to my own language, and on another day I translate from my translation back to french and compare with the book. As of now, I am on unit 5. It seems to be working. I seem to be paying more attention to some grammar rules. Forcing myself to write complete phrases, even the simple ones from the dialogs gave me another perspective of some points. So, I will keep doing that. As of now, I plan to continue with the youtube channel, on the units playlist I am on unit 15 of 20. After this, I will try to go back to harry potter and I will try to watch movies and series on a regular basis. I still have to find someone to talk to. For my own future reference if I ever decide to learn another language - do not start with that many resources - get a grammar, not to extensive - find a youtube channel with the content organized in a playlist and good explanations or a podcast. Do not pick both. - do not try to read a book like harry potter from the beginning you will get frustrated - pick only one book like assimil or teach yourself, not both, and use to listen, transcribe, translate - do the anki cards with images and sounds for vocabulary and grammar points. - review the deck of cards every day - pick a day of the week to do nothing 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| disciplined Diglot Newbie United States Joined 3117 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Studies: Frisian | Message 2 of 4 23 May 2016 at 5:59am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for sharing! This is inspiring.
How long did you use Assimil before you dropped it? I've been doing a lesson every day (okay, no longer every day but I'm saying that to get a point across) and I'm on lesson 100. I don't think it's helped me at all! I don't really like Assimil. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kgoedert Diglot Newbie Brazil Joined 4559 days ago 20 posts - 25 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German, French | Message 3 of 4 23 May 2016 at 12:51pm | IP Logged |
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Glad I could inspire you!
I only used assimil until like week 15 or something like that. It just didn't work for me. I guess this is one of the most important lessons I got from this journey of trying to learn a language by myself. What works for me? So far, this has been the most important and hardest lesson, as I find I am still learning what works for me. And I also have to accept that I can read a lot about of what other people did, but I will have to put the time to try that myself and see if it works. To be completely fair with assimil, after I posted other questions here on the forum, someone suggested I should take the assimil course, because I would have a more structured approach to the language. Well, I decided to give it another shot from this perspective. This person was right. I started the lessons all over again. I am currently on lesson 25, and I can say that even if so far I have not seen any concept that I had already picked up from other resources, it is helping to solidify some things, and clarify others. I am doing one lesson every two days. So far I have watched all the units on the youtube channel I mentioned before. So I decided I would introduce another resource, movies and series. I decided to use netflix, and so far I am enjoying it. The fact that you can turn the subtitles on and off on a bunch of languages is helping a lot to pick up vocabulary, and to listen to dialogues that are more real then the simple ones you see in books. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4441 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 4 of 4 26 May 2016 at 8:06am | IP Logged |
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People tend to find reading much easier than carrying on an actual conversation. In the beginning you read a lot and mostly articles from newspapers & magazines. And you always have a dictionary handy to look up words & phrases you don't understand.
Luca L. the polyglot suggested finding topics of interest on Wikipedia. First you would read the English version and then the equivalent French version. The problem of learning any language is to find some activities that are interesting without having to repeat subject-verb conjugations day after day (je vais, tu vas, il/elle/on va, etc). In my part of the country radio phone-in shows are common. There is a local Chinese radio station you can listen to on different topics and people would call to give their opinions. In the beginning you are not at the conversation level so you need to spend a lot of time with learning the basic words & phrases. Try not to stick to just 1 activity like flashcards for 6 months. You can try watching TV program for children and see how much you understand. There is a PBS program call "Sid the Science Kid" in English. There is a French version of the show "Le Petit Scientifique". 1 person has voted this message useful |
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