French & Spanish, by liam_aussie

[liam_aussie]

G'day everyone,

My name's Liam, and yes I am from Australia. I'm a university student studying in my hometown of Sydney, just doing an Arts degree. I would probably be among the youngest of the users on this blog. I was on the 'old' how-to-learn-any-language blog, however I've now moved to this blog. I wasn't active on HTLAL for well over half a year before moving to this 'new' forum, and this post here represents my first footprint on this site. I hope to 'reconnect' with a few of the language learners from the old blog who really inspired me and encouraged me in my language-learning endeavors, many of whom were from Team Français.

Till the next post outlining my plans for 2016, cya later,
Liam

p.s - my username from HTLAL was liam.pike1, if anyone recognises this name.

[tomgosse]

Welcome Liam,

There is a new French team here, Les Voyageurs. Please check us out.

Looking forward to reading your log.
Tom

[Jimjam]

Good to see you back! I followed your log back on HTLAL and am keen to see how your French has progressed.
I believe there are a few people our age on the forum so you're not alone!

[liam_aussie]

wow, ok my original post was over a month ago... how time flies!
(warning, long post... but there's a whole 10 months to catch up on after all haha)

Well, thanks for all the encouragement everyone, and it's nice to see that people recognise me from the old forum. The reason I changed my username is simply because my old one was stupid. I made it liam.pike1 because that was the username automatically given to me by the Department of Education back in high school, and when I saw this blog I thought, 'oh, I might use it like once and then never use it again', so therefore I didn't put much thought into creating a username. Well, I was definitely wrong, because as I discovered, the old language learning blog (as well as this one, which I've permanently moved to) is fantastic! Any questions I had about language learning and related areas I could ask, and I'd always get an answer.
The 'aussie' part is significant, because us Aussies are known for being some of the worst people at learning languages. All English-speaking people in general are known for being the worst at language-learning, but us Aussies in particular would probably be right near the bottom of the list, so to speak. So the fact that I am an Australian makes me, I believe, quite unique in my fairly recent passion, along with the fact that I'm only quite young. I certainly hope that my efforts inspire more Australians around me to learn a language: so far, quite a few people around me have taken an interest in learning another language

So now, what are my plans for 2016?

Well, in the last few days, I've decided that it's better that I just concentrate on French and Spanish, rather than try and add another language. In saying this, until yesterday, I thought I'd be doing a unit of Italian at university, just to fill in my units. However, now I know that I won't, in fact, be doing Italian at uni, since my application to do Italian got rejected. This is mostly a bad thing for me, however on the bright side it means that I can put all my language-learning energy into French and Spanish.

In a couple of weeks I'll commence my application for doing a uni exchange. I plan to go to France. Currently I believe Lyon will be top of my list, then... well, I still need to work this out. However, I don't even think I'll be able to go on a uni exchange, because I didn't do very well in my first year of uni. If I can't go, well, I'll be very upset to say the least, and the evening/night of the day I find out that my application has been rejected I'll probably blow $100 right there on a certain type of drink to 'drown' my sadness, but anyway haha... fingers crossed...

So, for the next month or so I want to continue working, pretty much exclusively, on my Spanish. Spanish was the first langauge I had a go at learning, using Duolingo.com. That was between May and August of 2014. Then, last year, in July, I had a month of revisiting my Spanish. I mainly read kid's books: I was interested to see whether or not reading a lot would somehow translate to me feeling as though I can actively use the language, even if only in a very basic way. From my little 'experiment' I found that this method - although great in a later stage of learning the language when one can already basically communicate in it - is not all that efficient. Given that month again, I would've focused more on writing and speaking, along with listening.

Around 2 and a half months ago I really got back into my Spanish again. I studied it for a few weeks and then my French friend Sara arrived in Australia, and my family went on holiday. Consequently, because I had my French friend here, I went back to French during the few weeks that she was here, talking with her every now and then in French (particularly when I wanted to talk about people behind their backs, especially on public transport... which by the way is so awesome!), making vocabulary lists of words relevant for the situations and places we were going to (we were on the coast, so lots of words with a 'nautical' theme), and also listening to some French radio a little bit before I went to sleep each night (when I had wifi, which was really only when I was at home). Sara also gave me a few little French lessons, mainly on pronunciation, which was awesome.

Soon after she left, towards the end of January (so not all that long ago) I went back to Spanish. And I'm loving it, just as much as when I first started learning Spanish. One thing I've learnt from my French studies is that the listening/comprehension part of learning a language is arguably the part which takes the most time. I didn't do a whole much of it with French, for example, so now, a year and almost 3 months after having first started learning it, I still have no idea what people are saying in French. When Sara was here, the final 2 days of her voyage Down Under were spent with both me and 2 French people we met at the zoo. One day we went to Bondi beach together, and the final day we went to the city, to the museum. They spoke French to each other the whole time, and I would speak in French as well, which I can do easily. But trying to understand what they were saying to each other? They may as well have been speaking Greek. So now with Spanish, French, and any future language I learn, I'll dedicate a good chunk of my time just to 'listening', which is fun anyhow.

My aim is to be able to pass a B2 exam in French by the end of the year, even if I don't actually sit one until later... it depends on various factors. With Spanish, I'd like to be able to pass a B1 exam by the end of the year, although I don't think I'd bother taking an exam which isn't B2 or higher, to much bother and money in my opinion.

Ok, well I'll keep this blog updated. I've got a lot more to talk about, but for now I'll say 'cya later'.

Liam