Language highlights & struggles 2018

[dmoisan]

Highlights:

- Massive depression and health issues preventing me from deepening more this year

I empathize. I am disabled and my desire to learn French came from a terrible depressive episode I had beforehand. I had to find something to do as a coping mechanism.

I've been studying French since January 2017. My highs and lows for 2018:

High points:

- Twitter. I met a French person who is disabled and autistic, just as I am. Understand that I am very active in Disabled Twitter; it has been a lifeline. In 2017, I participated in French Twitter, and that was, in technical terms, a BLAST! I had the time of my life during the French elections! Not only will I learn new disability terms from my new friend, I will also connect with many other French disabled persons.

- Advancing my reading skill. I can read whatever I want. More or less. I might read like a 10-year-old, but I read. I read native newspapers like Le Monde more or less like I would read in my native language. I read bandés-desinées (French comics), oh boy howdy!

- Starting my French blog and actually continuing it! I have a French blog, http://jedeviensfrancaiseensalem.tumblr.com.

Low points:

- Listening. I am hearing-impaired and I have to use captions to watch in my native language. Unfortunately, this will also be the case for French. Some programs I love, like C'est Pas Sorcier, are not captioned on YouTube. That's a shame. That is one of my favorite shows, and one of the great science shows of the world! It took me over a year to find a TV show that I could use to learn French. Everyone but me has Netflix. I only have YouTube. I'm now watching Lou!, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvYqgo9dGBPVvaa4paVIhwQ, a very funny and sweet animated comedy.
(This is good material for comprehension: Lou! has simple plots and a small ensemble of characters. It also has Julien Neel's great design!)

- Real Life. That's such a surprise!

[tarvos]

I empathize. I am disabled and my desire to learn French came from a terrible depressive episode I had beforehand. I had to find something to do as a coping mechanism.

I'm not disabled, but I *am* autistic (all of you saw that coming though) so I empathize doubly now. But autism and other issues never help with depression, so it was bound to happen that I had an episode or two of depression in the past years. I was going to burn out at some point.

[dustinmacdonald]

I've been attempting to learn French for years, and also want to learn Arabic. Finally decided January 2017 to take French seriously. I finished the Duolingo French tree that I had been putting off.

Highlights:

I'm about a 5 weeks away from finishing a 5000-card French Anki deck
I'm 100 pages away from finishing my first "grown up" book in French

Lowlights:

I moved in April and then for about 4 months did no French. Gah! Took a while to get my confidence back up after that.

[Expugnator]

Highs

- Adjusting my routine to make it less strenuous, less time-consuming and more flexible
- Becoming more strict about how useful a resource is, not rushing to finish it at any expense
- Finally doing my app-learning more consistently, as very limited but useful output

Lows

- Still failing completely to either do language exchanges/classes after a promising start in January
- Failing to write in my TLs as well
- Still stuck at B1 for any opaque language, not knowing how to move forward or unwilling to take any drastic measure to allow for that to happen

[dicentra8]

Highs:
- Focused more on listening and was able to improve it.
- Finished most of the textbooks I started.
- Pass the JLPT N3 with a decent score (I think...)
- Going back to listening again, I was afraid that since I was doing it less for a while I would lose it. But a while ago I went to check the news about the typhoon in Japan and was able to follow and understand what they were saying.

Lows:
- still struggling to do more output/production tasks
- the JLPT listening section felt like being punched in the stomach for 30min...the result was me spending maybe 3~5 months avoiding listening practice. I've been slowly recovering from that and going back to normal.