Refreshing French in less than six months! Goal B1 B2.

[cemsity]

Hello All,

Lets start at the fact that I already learned French about 4 years ago in the US Army at the Famous DLI. I did alright 3.0 overall gpa and 2/3/1+ in Listening Reading and Speaking respectively with put me in the top third of my class. ( 6 months to learn french is no joke.) After that i went to study french in France for about 6 weeks. but since then I have done nothing else besides a little studying hear and there and a little tv and music here and there. But now I really have to buckle down and refresh everything, because this summer I will be studying abroad in Lyon, France through a study abroad program offered through my university. The program includes a Intensive language course but it is based off the American university methodology. However, having taken three semesters of Spanish using this method, i can confirm that the way they do it is trash. (the only goal is to bootstrap you so you can read literature, and not be a speaker.) Any ways, Here is a list of materials that I will be hopefully using.

Assimil:
This one is a no brainer. I used it a lot in DLI, and was recommended by one of the native speaking professors there. I will use the NEW with Ease, and start at lesson 14 ( complete for the day but way to simple. O well, good listing practice.) In addition i will be using Learn With Texts to store and select words that i did not know or understand.

CLE Progressive (both grammar and vocab ) :
starting with the intermediate grammar and the beginners vocab plan on doing 2-3 section a day.

Alter ego Plus:
Yes the new alter ego. Starting with the a1 book and going on from there. The new editions Teachers Guide actually has a time line for the exercise order, so no second guessing my self. Using both textbook and workbook, and plan on a lesson everyday about 1hr.

lingvist.io:
Just a online SRS to teach and learn vocabulary. Pros: all words are given sentences and they have both reading material and listening material that are scored to how many words you now ( in percentages) Con: the vocab is English -> French, so while you have a french sentence you also have the English word on the card.

Duolingo: My GF is currently learning french and she loves this. I have been doing it off and on for a while (more off than on) reset and started playing and competing with my GF. I do it waiting for class to start on my phone.

French In action:
Now I dont know if I have too much planed ( the answer is yes, yes I do.) But I love the French in action videos, and I use the audio work outs in my car. The workbook is decent to if a little dated as well. If i were to do the whole lesson it would take me 2 - 3 hours. but ill see what ill do.

So yeah that is an overview of my French review. I look forward to blogging about it. your comments and advice are welcomed.

[Tomás]

You may want to have a look at Assimil "French without Toil". It is easily found via google. One nice thing about it is that it teaches grammar in French as the book progresses, so more immersion so to speak. I have found the Spanish "without toil" to be far richer than the "with ease" course. I am doing them both concurrently. Being 50 lessons ahead in SWT makes SWE very easy, more like a review.

[tomgosse]

I, and others I'm sure, would be interested in hearing more about your experiences at the DLI language school. Did you have a chance to use your French while in the Army?

I have the CLE Grammaire Progressive and Vocabulaire Progressive books. I took a couple of French courses at the Marlborough, MA Public Library, and those were the books our instructor used. Because they are all in French I found them quite intense, but I did learn a lot from them.

Right now I'm concentrating on pronunciation using these YouTube videos:

• French Sounds
• Ultimate Guide to Studying French Pronunciation Online
• Language Resource Center - University of Michigan

Best of luck in your studies and keep us posted,
Tom

[Cavesa]

Welcome! Good luck with your studies, your plan looks awesome!

[cemsity]

Thanks tomgosse, Tomas and Cavesa for your responses. To tomgosse: DLI was fairly brutal, I took a semester of French in college and we covered that with in 3 weeks. In the morning we had three one hour sessions split by a ten minute break, then a 30 min lunch, then in the afternoon another 3 one hour sessions, and if you failed any portion of the last test or your gpa was below a 2.5 then you had and extra hour of class. This is also on top of other military duties, PT, Monthly trainings, and the like. Most of the tests were functional tests, IE reading comprehension and Listening comprehension were the big tests, we also had a few grammar tests in the beginning but they were not weighted that much.
When I get home I could look for a few weekly calendars from DLI, they are not really detailed on what exactly we did but they do give you an Idea.

The good News was that most of the professors were native speakers, and not just from France. We had 3 from France One from Quebec, one from Niger, one of Haitian Origin ( i cant remember where she was from, exactly), and a Moroccan. The sole american was earned his PHD in France.


Alright, my biweekly report,
Finish Dossier 1 of 9 in alter ego plus a1, very easy a bit boring but lots of audio and practice. My week has been hectic with the first week of school ( my University is on the quarter schedule), so i did not get a chance for any of the progressives. I am on lecon 17 in Assimil NFWE. And i have a total of 1100 words on Lingvist ( I did their little level test and marked off a lot of that.) I am doing about 50 new words a day plus reviews which havent been numerous. Included I do the Read and Listen on the site 1 day that are over 90 percent. at that level the other ten become easy to understand, with few exceptions. (grognon = grumpy).

So far it comes back pretty quickly. Not too surprised but i like to have everything, from basics to advance, gone over before i leave.

Write you all next week.