J’apprends le français (Language Learning Log) Language Learning Forum

J’apprends le français
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emk
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Message 1 of 6

04 October 2009 at 4:17pm | IP Logged

I'm starting this log 2 years in, with probably about 300 hours of study time. I began with Assimil's "New French with Ease". Here's a review of this course which I wrote recently:

Quote:

Approximately 2 years ago, I decided to learn French. Previously, I had tried several mediocre French courses, but I had found them frustrating and unhelpful.

The Assimil "New French with Ease" course, however, proved enormously useful. In roughly half a year, it improved my French to the point that I could begin speaking with my wife and learning from her. This success was largely due, I think, to following the instructions. Here's how I did it:

1. I studied one lesson, every day, without fail.

2. For the first 50 days, I did the listening exercises, the fill-in-the-blank exercises, and the repetition exercises. I would repeat these exercises until the lesson "clicked" (typically 8 to 12 reptitions, requiring a total of 15–25 minutes). After about 15 days, I started hearing French as individual words.

3. Starting on day 50, things got quite a bit harder. I continued spending 15–25 minutes on a new lesson. But I also returned to lesson 1, and started translating the English dialog into French. Again, I would repeat the lesson until I could translate the entire passage. This raised my daily study time to about 45 minutes.

As far as I know, this is the correct way to use the Assimil courses. And it worked very well for me—at the end of this period, I had a speaking vocabulary of a couple thousand words, and I could carry on a simple conversation in French. I could also read children's books. (I was particularly delighted by On a marché sur la Lune.)

So let this be a recommendation from a satisfied user of "New French with Ease": Used diligently and correctly, this course will allow an English speaker to reach a rudimentary conversational level in 6 months, with less than 45 minutes of study per day. I would definitely consider using another Assimil course in the future.

Since then, I've relied on mostly on conversation, with the occasional podcast from "One Thing in a French Day" and some reading. I still study every single day.

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emk
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Message 2 of 6

04 October 2009 at 4:55pm | IP Logged

My current goal: I want to be able to understand popular newspapers and news radio without looking up more than a handful of words.

Currently, I'm experimenting with Mnemosyne (~10 words/day) and I'm listening to RFI Monde. Up until now, I haven't really done many vocabulary drills, which actually worked fine up to a point, because I was using French conversationally and picking up vocabulary as I went. But I was hitting a wall in vocabulary, so I've decided to shake things up a bit.

(Please feel free to post in my journal, if the software allows you.)
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emk
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Message 3 of 6

15 February 2012 at 12:23am | IP Logged

It's been two years since I posted my last update. I spent most of 2010 working on a
startup, and I didn't have much time to study French. And 2011 wasn't much better.

Fortunately, I had two things going for me:

I continued to read Le Monde (or more recently, Le Figaro) every day.
Sometimes I'd read one paragraph; sometimes I'd read an entire article. I almost
gave up on SRS, reviewing only a few cards per day.

My wife speaks French with our kids 99.9+% of the time. This is completely passive
input for me, but it has long since become completely comprehensible.

Weirdly, during these two years, my French actually improved.

In the last few weeks, I've started studying heavily again, trying several new things:

Losts of French podcasts.

The standard "Intermediate French" deck on Anki, which is surprisingly useful.

Trying to speak exclusively in French with my wife for several days at a time. This
is hard work for both of us, but she's game. :-)

Over the last week or so, I've had a number of breakthroughs. When listening to RFI
podcasts, I frequently understand multiple consecutive sentences the first time through
(and not just "français facile"), and I've occasionally caught myself reading simple
French at rapid conversational speeds.

I'm still miserable at la dictée.

My goal is to pass a DELF B1 exam sometime this year. When I flipped through a sample
test today, it looked intimidating. But if you removed the time limits and let me
listen to the audio a few times, I could probably pass it already. So a few months of
immersion at home should put me over the top.

Please feel free to post replies in this thread. :-)
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songlines
Pro Member
Canada
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Message 4 of 6

15 February 2012 at 3:53am | IP Logged

Welcome back, emk! Which podcasts have you found most useful? I have several linked on my log (page 3,
post 22; page 4, post 26 etc.; page 6, post 41; ), - most of them are "the usual suspects" which you probably
already know, but I'm always on the lookout for others.

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emk
Diglot
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United States
Joined 5345 days ago
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Speaks: English*, French^B2
Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian
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Message 5 of 6

19 February 2012 at 9:04pm | IP Logged

Thank you for all the links! I'll add some of those to my playlist.

I enjoy "One Thing in a French Day" and the various RFI podcasts. I especially like to
alternate between the full-speed RFI podcasts and their "français facile". After a week
or so of the harder podcasts, I find that I've made great progress on the easy ones.
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patrickwilken
Senior Member
Germany
radiant-flux.net
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Studies: German

Message 6 of 6

14 January 2014 at 1:48pm | IP Logged

I was trying to find your blog via your profile, but the only link is to this older blog. Just thought I should let you know if you didn't know already. I assume it's some sort of bug in the forum software.

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