My three Month French Vocabulary Memrise Challenge (now with added input)....

[mattf789]

Bonjour tous le monde!

My name is Matt and I am learning French. I am starting this challenge because I struggle to hold myself accountable and easily lose motivation. My motivation for learning French is to be able to go on holiday there next year and be comfortable ordering in restaurants, perhaps talking to locals about the area and just generally absorbing some more of the culture than being a typical linguistically challenged English tourist affords.

The only resource I will be using for the next three months (today - 17th August) is Memrise. Specifically, the official Memrise courses 1-7, and "The 450 Most Common French Verbs". These will be my starting point and I will add more as and when I complete these. I have already completed level one prior to starting this challenge. I will update this post every Monday whilst the challenge is active, including how far I've progressed on each course. I will keep reviewing each course daily once complete. I have an alarm set every Monday to remind me to come here and give an update.

Once this challenge is complete I will look for language exchange partners on italki, to begin practising conversation and refining my accent.

My rationale for this challenge is that I feel learning vocabulary is most important to start with, and I really enjoy Memrise. I had some success learning Spanish a while ago with Memrise. My girlfriend and I were able to go on holiday to places where nobody spoke English and "get by". I was acutely aware however, that my listening skills were appalling. So that is what i will focus on once this challenge is complete. I would continue with Spanish because I love Spain and the language, but we have a dog now and it's not practical to take him to Spain or kennel him in our absence. And we want him to come on adventures with us!

Thank you for reading and any comments / tips are very welcome

French 1: Complete
French 2: 307 / 473
The 450 Most Common French Verbs: 44/449

[jeffers]

Welcome to the forum!

I'll be very curious to see how this goes. I've never been able to follow just one method, e.g. when I started French I used any and all courses I could find at the same time, eventually settling down to a few of them. However, there is something to be said for picking one resource and sticking with it to the end before starting something else. So I'll be watching to see how you progress. Bonne chance!

[smallwhite]

HTLAL Member Rob Tickner learned 8,100 Swedish words over 56 days with Anki, after Pimsleur, enjoying the process. He logged his progress and answered people's questions:

Svenska 10000

48 days in and he wrote: "... on the first page of my hardcover copy of Harry Potter och De Vises Sten: out of 272 words, there were 13 which were unfamiliar, though most of their meanings were fairly easy to deduce".

[Miss_French_2020]

Hi Matt! This seems like an interesting challenge - good luck! I'm looking forward to reading your updates as I'm also learning French.

[mattf789]

Welcome to the forum!

I'll be very curious to see how this goes. I've never been able to follow just one method, e.g. when I started French I used any and all courses I could find at the same time, eventually settling down to a few of them. However, there is something to be said for picking one resource and sticking with it to the end before starting something else. So I'll be watching to see how you progress. Bonne chance!

I think I've spread myself too thin in the past and lacked structure, so I hope focusing on one method with simple goals will help with that.

[mattf789]

HTLAL Member Rob Tickner learned 8,100 Swedish words over 56 days with Anki, after Pimsleur, enjoying the process. He logged his progress and answered people's questions:

Svenska 10000

48 days in and he wrote: "... on the first page of my hardcover copy of Harry Potter och De Vises Sten: out of 272 words, there were 13 which were unfamiliar, though most of their meanings were fairly easy to deduce".

Oh wow, that's pretty inspiring. One advantage of Memrise over raw word lists is you pick up grammar organically. But it's good to know someone else has had good results from similar vocab intensive study.

[Cavesa]

Oh wow, that's pretty inspiring. One advantage of Memrise over raw word lists is you pick up grammar organically. But it's good to know someone else has had good results from similar vocab intensive study.

I'm curious, why did you pick the official courses, instead of some higher quality stuff from the user made list?

When I looked at the official French courses, I was horrified somebody was asking money for such poor and sloppy work. Especially the "grammar" you might "organically" pick up is not too ok.

Your project sounds great, and I know you are quite far into it, but perhaps learning from a high quality list would avoid you trouble in future. Yes, the best courses on Memrise (such as +French by Eunoia, but not only) are "raw words". That's what Memrise is the best for, not phrases with not exactly right (or at least not explained and universally right) grammar.

[jeffers]

Oh wow, that's pretty inspiring. One advantage of Memrise over raw word lists is you pick up grammar organically. But it's good to know someone else has had good results from similar vocab intensive study.

I'm curious, why did you pick the official courses, instead of some higher quality stuff from the user made list?

When I looked at the official French courses, I was horrified somebody was asking money for such poor and sloppy work. Especially the "grammar" you might "organically" pick up is not too ok.

Your project sounds great, and I know you are quite far into it, but perhaps learning from a high quality list would avoid you trouble in future. Yes, the best courses on Memrise (such as +French by Eunoia, but not only) are "raw words". That's what Memrise is the best for, not phrases with not exactly right (or at least not explained and universally right) grammar.

I've done the first of the official French courses, and I think it's quite good for what it aims to be. Essentially it teaches phrasebook French, things like ordering food, going out, etc, which seems to be exactly what mattf789 is looking for. It also has a nice feature called "learning with locals" which has small video clips of real French people saying the phrases at normal speeds and pronunciation (e.g. it sounds nothing like what a beginner expects!) Learning with Locals is a part of the free version of the course, but if you pay for a subscription you can have a lot more of it.

[mattf789]

I'm curious, why did you pick the official courses, instead of some higher quality stuff from the user made list?

When I looked at the official French courses, I was horrified somebody was asking money for such poor and sloppy work. Especially the "grammar" you might "organically" pick up is not too ok.

Your project sounds great, and I know you are quite far into it, but perhaps learning from a high quality list would avoid you trouble in future. Yes, the best courses on Memrise (such as +French by Eunoia, but not only) are "raw words". That's what Memrise is the best for, not phrases with not exactly right (or at least not explained and universally right) grammar.

Good question. The Spanish courses I used were the old memrise A1 and A2 courses. They were packed with useful phrases and vocabulary, practical to beginners. I could tell straight away the new French course isn't the same. Too many phrases that a tourist wouldn't use like "to tell somebody off" and "he has a bit of a beer belly", for example. I'd prefer to start with extremely basic sentence construction and slowly build up. The thing I do like is the simplicity of there just being seven courses that are there to do in order, just to use as a basic if imperfect foundation. I know the grammar won't be perfect, I think a native speaker could find mistakes in every course made, but it makes me feel like I'm learning a language rather than just words in a language (if that makes sense). I'll certainly look at adding +French to my schedule once I've done more of 1-7 or finished the 450 verb one.

[mattf789]

Oh wow, that's pretty inspiring. One advantage of Memrise over raw word lists is you pick up grammar organically. But it's good to know someone else has had good results from similar vocab intensive study.

I'm curious, why did you pick the official courses, instead of some higher quality stuff from the user made list?

When I looked at the official French courses, I was horrified somebody was asking money for such poor and sloppy work. Especially the "grammar" you might "organically" pick up is not too ok.

Your project sounds great, and I know you are quite far into it, but perhaps learning from a high quality list would avoid you trouble in future. Yes, the best courses on Memrise (such as +French by Eunoia, but not only) are "raw words". That's what Memrise is the best for, not phrases with not exactly right (or at least not explained and universally right) grammar.

I've done the first of the official French courses, and I think it's quite good for what it aims to be. Essentially it teaches phrasebook French, things like ordering food, going out, etc, which seems to be exactly what mattf789 is looking for. It also has a nice feature called "learning with locals" which has small video clips of real French people saying the phrases at normal speeds and pronunciation (e.g. it sounds nothing like what a beginner expects!) Learning with Locals is a part of the free version of the course, but if you pay for a subscription you can have a lot more of it.

I do like the learning with locals feature. I listen to them over and over for longer sentences, because as you say, a native speaking a sentence is very different to what I hear when I'm reading it