Mastering French and German

[Eternal Foreigner]

Je suis actuellement en Bordeaux, c'est ma première fois en France.

I'm currently in Bordeaux. I'm traveling alone, so I've tried ordering things and speaking to employees and my airbnb host in French. So far it's been quite difficult, but I have to say I've been very pleasantly surprised by how I've been treated so far. Especially given what people sometimes say about speaking French in France.

It doesn't feel anxiety-inducing anymore, I guess I've done this enough times with other languages (Norwegian, Spanish, Portuguese) so now I'm just used to the struggle of trying to speak the local language in the country for the first time. I was kind of expecting that French attitude you hear about sometimes, but so far I haven't experienced it at all.

It doesn't feel like I'm pushing myself to speak French even when people speak English to me. I just smile and try my best. I felt so relaxed here that I got lost in my thoughts and missed my tram stop by like 3 stops. If anyone is here in Bordeaux this weekend let me know, we could grab a café.

[dubendorf]

Je suis actuellement en Bordeaux, c'est ma première fois en France.

I'm currently in Bordeaux. I'm traveling alone, so I've tried ordering things and speaking to employees and my airbnb host in French. So far it's been quite difficult, but I have to say I've been very pleasantly surprised by how I've been treated so far. Especially given what people sometimes say about speaking French in France.

It doesn't feel anxiety-inducing anymore, I guess I've done this enough times with other languages (Norwegian, Spanish, Portuguese) so now I'm just used to the struggle of trying to speak the local language in the country for the first time. I was kind of expecting that French attitude you hear about sometimes, but so far I haven't experienced it at all.

It doesn't feel like I'm pushing myself to speak French even when people speak English to me. I just smile and try my best. I felt so relaxed here that I got lost in my thoughts and missed my tram stop by like 3 stops. If anyone is here in Bordeaux this weekend let me know, we could grab a café.

I have heard from friends (who are native English speakers and speak French as a second language) who have visited Bordeaux that people there are especially friendly and willing to speak in French to non-native speakers. Nice to have a second data point that supports that! Enjoy your visit.

[Cavesa]

A wonderful city, I spent 6 months there as a student. It was a life changing experience. My studies were making sense for the first time, and I clearly saw my future outside of my country, and that I actually could do it. And I loved the city, it felt nice, no wonder it is more and more popular. While it is not that huge, it has everything you usually need, it is near the sea, it has very good weather (except for the strong winds at times), there is a lot of culture and stuff. And the people were overall really nice, even though my experience is slightly limited to mostly hospitals

Have a great time. It's perfect, that you get to practice the language, and so on. Btw don't forget to explore stuff to either take back home, or buy from abroad later. Mollat is a very good bookstore, just have a look and make notes. Especially if you are joining the SC.

[Eternal Foreigner]

A wonderful city, I spent 6 months there as a student. It was a life changing experience. My studies were making sense for the first time, and I clearly saw my future outside of my country, and that I actually could do it. And I loved the city, it felt nice, no wonder it is more and more popular. While it is not that huge, it has everything you usually need, it is near the sea, it has very good weather (except for the strong winds at times), there is a lot of culture and stuff. And the people were overall really nice, even though my experience is slightly limited to mostly hospitals

Have a great time. It's perfect, that you get to practice the language, and so on. Btw don't forget to explore stuff to either take back home, or buy from abroad later. Mollat is a very good bookstore, just have a look and make notes. Especially if you are joining the SC.

Thanks for the suggestions! What's the SC?

[Cavesa]

The SUPER CHALLENGE!!!
One of the best things that have arised from this forum! And ages ago one of the key parts to my C2 French

[Eternal Foreigner]

The SUPER CHALLENGE!!!
One of the best things that have arised from this forum! And ages ago one of the key parts to my C2 French

Ohh I wasn't aware of this. Seems like something to aspire towards.
Although I have to say, seeing that watching films with NL subtitles counts towards the challenge seems a bit strange to me. 5k pages of reading sounds pretty challenging though.

[Eternal Foreigner]

Update: I'm still in France.

When I was in Bordeaux, my airbnb host didn't speak English (or otherwise chose not to) so I was forced to try communicating in French. It seemed to me like he had quite a difficult accent, and honestly I had a really hard time understanding him. He didn't make any concessions, just full-speed French. Additionally, it started to seem like my primarily passive knowledge of French was insufficient since I frequently found myself frustratingly searching for words that I was certain I knew. It was just like my experience in the language exchange.

But now I'm at an airbnb in Brittany and again my host doesn't speak English. This time though, her accent seems pretty standard and she was slowing down a bit for me. So now I'm understanding, which means the conversations are sustainable, which in turn helped me find some great momentum. We've already chatted quite a bit about a good range of different subjects, and I only just arrived here this afternoon! I still got caught up on certain words of course, and had to look a few up on my phone. But I'm really starting to see the benefits of building a strong passive foundation, because as long as I can understand the person I'm talking to, the conversation is sustainable. If the person I'm talking to gets the sense of what I'm trying to say, they'll just finish my sentence for me and I can just say "exactement !" This is so much better than the alternative, where I can say pretty much whatever I want to say, but can't understand the response and the conversation dies there. It sounds obvious but I struggled with that for years and it was always a roadblock for me. So to me, this is exciting.

[Eternal Foreigner]

I spent the majority of last week in France, now I'm in Germany. But unfortunately I caught a cold while traveling and now I'm trying my best to recover.
Just wanted to make a post really quick to make some observations about the significance of the difference between traveling as an intermediate speaker of a language and as a beginner. In France I had so many nice moments. I walked into a butcher shop in a town in the middle of the countryside because I needed something to eat for dinner. The first thing I did was inform the worker that my French isn't very good, and he reassured me that it's no problem. Then I ordered everything I wanted in French and checked out with no issues, and then walked out of the store with a smile on my face. Similarly, a few days ago I went for breakfast in some city near Paris and told the waiter my French isn't very good, and he also said it's no problem. This time too, I didn't need to use English at all. These were easy interactions, but still made me feel really good. Not just about my French, but in general it made me feel very comfortable being anywhere in France.

I arrived in Germany a few days ago and my initial plan was to just rely on English since my German is just not good enough yet. Sadly I caught this cold. Now, I'll ask if someone speaks English, even if they say yes or "a little" I ask them for whatever I need and they don't understand due to my voice being so screwed up from this cold. I imagine if I could say what I wanted in German I'd be understood even with a raspy screwed up voice. Yet another reason one can't simply depend on English. It definitely makes me feel a bit more anxious than I felt in France. But I view this as a good thing, because it's increasing my motivation to practice German.

[Eternal Foreigner]

Last day of April, so that means it's time for me to see how I did these past 2 months.

I listened to approx. 30 episodes of Inner French, which is 10 more than my goal. Definitely happy with that, but also not that surprised since I've had plenty of opportunities to put on a pair of headphones and listen while doing other things.
But it looks like I only watched 16 out of my goal of 20 episodes of the animated series that I'm watching. I'm definitely going to need to make a better habit of this if I want to finish the series this year lol. I stayed on top of anki though, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this month, my comprehension has noticeably improved.

As mentioned earlier this month, I got halfway through Olly Richards short stories in German before dropping it, since I found it to be better to just play video games in German. The only downside is that it's harder to track and make concrete goals for this. There's no easy way to measure how much text I'm reading, but I definitely stayed consistent these past 2 months. And I've noticed progress, so that's a success.

Tomorrow I'll set my goals for May and June, they will probably be similar to the previous goals though.

[Eternal Foreigner]

I'm currently in a small town in Germany staying at a really nice air-bnb. The nicest one I've been in, I won't say where but there were a few I stayed in previously where the hygienic standards seemed pretty low-- maybe how I caught this cold.
Anyway, I have another nice story to tell. I spent last night coughing so I decided to go to a pharmacy to try to find some cough medicine, but apparently today is a holiday so all the pharmacies are closed. I came back to the air-bnb and these friendly old Germans were chilling outside drinking coffee. They offered me some, and even though I normally don't drink coffee I sat down with them and had some. They didn't speak English, so I had to use my extremely basic German. It was cool but I was kicking myself for being still at such a low level. But it really made me think about how often I hear stories where people are complaining that everyone is speaking English to them. The moral of the story would be to venture outside of the bigger cities if you want to speak German a lot.

Anyway, goals for May and June:
French:

20 episodes in anime series + anki cards
Intensive listening of 5 Inner French interview episodes + anki cards

German:

Continue video games in German and looking up unknown words and grammar if needed