I've lived in France for 11 years, it seems longer. However, you would have thought that by now I would be fluent in French, sadly not.
Over the years languages have always been a struggle for me, English included. "Yes we had noticed Steve, but we didn't want to say anything" !!!
I don't mind admitting that it took me two attempts to pass my English 'O' level. Then working as an engineer in a job where I hardly wrote anything other than fault dockets for 10 years, which were very short form writing, didn't exactly help me!
I did some French classes at school, but I never did get to grasp much of the language then. I didn't visit France until I was in my mid-twenties. I started doing a weekly evening class a couple of years before we moved here in 2010, but it wasn't enough. I would be scared of venturing out on my own at first. Not a problem now.
Alison is a fluent French and German speaker; she ran her own translation company in UK for a number of years. She is a natural when it comes to languages, but the technical stuff she leaves to me, so we make a good couple I suppose!
Alison has tried teaching me, it didn't go well! I have also been to classes here as well. Again not enough really.
Then along came lock down and classes stopped. I did some more daily lessons with Alison. Then I thought I will try a different approach...
I started learning with Duolingo, it's an app, and website with a very good, structured learning approach. Finally, I seem to be making progress. I do about 30-45 minutes each morning sometimes more.
Whilst the app is very good, I still like to jot things down to help cement my learning,
I also remembered some inserts I was given a few years ago.
I don't know who produced them, but they seem to cover 'business French' as well as everyday phrases
I'm using Duolingo at the moment to learn Welsh.
ReplyDeleteWhy? Why not!
I think that if you use a binder to help with language learning, you need to be quite selective. I find that just doing the Duolingo exercises don't help the language to stick, but printing out enough reams of rules and exercises to fill a batch of hefty A4 binders (as I did with German) is equally unhelpful as they never get referred back to. In the end (with German) I used a notebook just to outline those rules that I was having problems with and revised those to pass my B2 exam.
In my experience, though, the best way to learn a language is to use it. I speak fluent Dutch because I used it in a work and social environment for 30 years; but, though I live in Germany, my German remains broken and confused with Dutch because I hardly ever actually use it. I suppose I need to get out more ...
Thanks for this Steve. I've recently semi-retired and have a long list of languages that I want to look at again. But I agree with Graham. You really need to use a language
ReplyDeleteYes indeed, and living in France I'm up against the language every day in one form or another.
DeleteI love these inserts, thank you Steve! I was a French minor in college and spent a month in Paris where I learned a lot very quickly via “immersion” but that was 20 years ago and I’ve been wanting to brush up. I’m printing these out and also plan to check out Duolingo.
ReplyDeleteThank you for inserts Steve - I used to live in France and will need another long visit for it to come back - I was very impressed with the spouses that took immersion classes at Allianz Francaise - they seemed to be "very conversational" in less than 6 months. Unfortunately I was there working....and picked it up as I could.
ReplyDelete