Lianne's 365 Days of French

[Lianne]

Bonjour Lianne,

I've been following your progress since I joined the forum maybe a month and a half ago. I am learning French too I know you do a lot of reading and you certainly get your speaking in with Pimsleur. I am curious if you have attempted any iTalki sessions or practice any speaking at your current level? If so, what do you feel is your biggest challenge at this time?

Oh, er, speaking. Yes, that.

I have issues with speaking. Sure, I talk to myself in French (and I think my pronunciation is pretty good!). I say random sentences to my husband in French. But I can't actually converse. I don't know why. Maybe part of it is that I don't have the right active vocabulary? Like, the stuff I'm typing right now, I couldn't say any of this in French. But there's a pretty good chance I'd be able to follow someone else saying it, if they said it slowly and clearly.

iTalki is a struggle for me. Even in English, I hate talking on the phone, and Skype is worse in some ways, because of the lag. I'm autistic, and struggle with auditory processing and also with just things like knowing when it's my turn to talk.

I could just talk to the people around me in French, but they tend to speak quickly, in dialect, and laugh at me when I have no clue what they're saying. So, yeah. I don't get a lot of speaking practice in.

[Lianne]

Day 277:
1 hour Pimsleur French IV, lessons 8 and 9
1 hour Duolingo

Latest challenge in Pimsleur: verbs that are conjugated with être. Obviously I was already aware of them, but suddenly a lot of them are being thrown at me!

[Fortheo]

If speaking isn't a huge priority for you right now, then I wouldn't stress it too much at the moment. I didn't start really trying to speak with others until about 2 or 3 years into my French journey, and even now I rarely speak French-- I mostly just enjoy french media and I'm fine with that. Just stay true to what your goals are.

Keep doing what you enjoy, and when the time comes that you decide you want to focus on improving your speaking, you'll have a solid base to work from.

That said, don't be afraid to send audio recordings of yourself reading a few French sentences to some native speakers so that they can give advice on your pronunciation. That way you can prevent fossilizing prononciation errors while you mostly stay in a silent period.

Keep doing what you're doing. It looks like you're making good progress.

[Lianne]

If speaking isn't a huge priority for you right now, then I wouldn't stress it too much at the moment. I didn't start really trying to speak with others until about 2 or 3 years into my French journey, and even now I rarely speak French-- I mostly just enjoy french media and I'm fine with that. Just stay true to what your goals are.

Keep doing what you enjoy, and when the time comes that you decide you want to focus on improving your speaking, you'll have a solid base to work from.

That said, don't be afraid to send audio recordings of yourself reading a few French sentences to some native speakers so that they can give advice on your pronunciation. That way you can prevent fossilizing prononciation errors while you mostly stay in a silent period.

Keep doing what you're doing. It looks like you're making good progress.

Speaking is a huge priority for me, but I guess it isn't really a time-sensitive one. I'm pretty much happy as long as my French is making good progress overall, and I hope that everything I'm doing is laying a good groundwork for my speaking.

But yeah, my goal is definitely fluent conversation with the francophones around me. Sometimes that goal seems impossible. So I just try to work on steady improvement.

Perhaps I will make a video of me reading from a book or something, and share it hear. Like I said, I don't think I have any glaring pronunciation problems (definitely an accent, but I don't think it's terrible). But it would be good to get some feedback, for sure. Thanks for the suggestion, and the encouragement!

[Lianne]

Day 278:
30 minutes Duolingo
1 hour, 20 minutes watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (first half)

Day 279:
50 minutes Duolingo
1 hour, 10 minutes watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (second half)

Woohoo! Made it to the obsidian league in Duolingo! I even came in #3.

Watched the second Harry Potter movie this weekend. I don't have quite so much of the dialogue committed to memory as I do for the first movie, so it required a little more effort, but I still feel like I understood most of what was said! I actually noticed some interesting use of tu/vous, which I discussed with some of my francophone cousins and friends, but which continues to puzzle! Perhaps someone here will have input?

Lucius Malfoy addresses both Harry and Hermione with vous! This despite the fact that 1) he is an adult and they are children, and 2) he does not respect them, particularly Hermione since she's a muggleborn. The best suggestion I heard was that perhaps this is a way of him distancing himself from them. Lucius does use tu with Harry at the end of the movie, when he gets very angry with him.

[Lianne]

Day 280:
1 hour Pimsleur French IV, lessons 10 and 11

Day 281:
1 hour Pimsleur French IV, lessons 12 and 13

Making great time on Pimsleur IV! I'm already almost halfway through. Also, the subjunctive has arrived! It's easing me into it in a way that makes it not terrifying, which is nice. First there were several lessons that included a lot of "il faut que", but with verbs that don't change forms in the subjunctive. Then, one by one, I was introduced to verbs that do change. Then "il vaut mieux que" was added. So, so far so good!

Side note: Honestly, though, this course should come with a content warning for people with eating disorders. The amount of time spent talking about "having to be careful" because something is fattening, and then just getting a small green salad, while agonising over the possibility of a chocolate mousse, is a bit off-putting.

[Lianne]

Day 282:
30 minutes Pimsleur French IV, lesson 14
37 minutes Duolingo

Day 283:
30 minutes Pimsleur French IV, lesson 15
34 minutes Duolingo

Crappy weather means nice coworkers giving me rides home which means half the Pimsleur time.

[Lianne]

Day 284:
30 minutes Pimsleur French IV, lesson 16

Day 285:
7 minutes Duolingo
25 minutes reading Moi, Simon, 16 ans, homo sapiens

[Lianne]

Day 286:
30 minutes (at least? I forget) reading Moi, Simon, 16 ans, homo sapiens

Day 287:
1 hour reading Moi, Simon, 16 ans, homo sapiens
1 hour, 10 minutes watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (first half)

Day 288:
1 hour Pimsleur French IV, lessons 17 and 18
10 minutes reading Moi, Simon, 16 ans, homo sapiens
1 hour watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (second half)

Pimsleur has introduced the relative pronouns que and qui. I'm glad I already knew the difference between them, since you're expected to just pick it up from the examples!

I passed the halfway point on the movie half of the Super Challenge! Getting to 100 movies will be a stretch but is still technically doable! My goal of making it to a half challenge on the book side of things is similarly challenging but doable, especially with how much I've been enjoying my reading lately.

[Lianne]

I'm starting to think of some short term goals. Specifically, I want to have some goals for French tasks that I finish or make good progress on before the end of the year, and then I want some goals for both French and my start on Italian for the first four months of 2020 (the time before the next Super Challenge starts).

Fall 2019
For French this fall, I would like to get through some resources and make some real progress on others, so that when I add Italian in January my time doesn't feel too fragmented. Here are my current French activities:

• Pimsleur French IV (in progress)
• Pimsleur French V (to do)
• FSI French Basic (in progress, neglected)
• Duolingo (in progress, long way to go)
• Memrise - French Nouns 1 (in progress, neglected)
• Memrise - other courses by eunoia (to do)
• Bescherelle (to do)
• Reading (ongoing)
• TV/Movies (ongoing)

Here's what I think. I can definitely finish Pimsleur French IV, and probably also French V, by the new year. This has the huge benefit of freeing up my walking time for most likely Pimsleur and/or Michel Thomas Italian. There's no way I'll finish FSI French Basic or Duolingo, but I could at least try to get into a habit of FSI (honestly I don't dislike it; it just hasn't made it into my routine), and make good progress on Duolingo. Same deal with Memrise. And of course reading and TV are ongoing, but are big focuses right now in my attempt to meet my Super Challenge goals. As for Bescherelle, I put that on the list because I have a set of three Bescherelle books, in French, and I think that reading them could be really good for my grammar/language learning vocabulary, and could therefore be really helpful when learning Italian using French resources.

Winter 2020
For January-April 2020, I think that maybe my French work will shift slightly away from extensive reading and listening (in the gap between Super Challenges) and slightly more towards course work. Then again, maybe the course work in Italian will wear me out and I'll just wanna read and watch movies in French. I guess we'll see! For Italian, my goal is to ride that beginner high, and try to learn as much in four months as I can, hopefully to where I can leap right into the Super Challenge in both languages!

Prep to do in advance of this:

• Pick resources to use.
• Seek out Pimsleur Italian.
• Check the library to see what Italian books they have (sadly they aren't fully catalogued, so I have to physically go to the big branch to get Italian books).
• Identify L-R opportunities, where the library has the book and I can get the audiobook for free or cheap. (I found some free audiobooks of classic books here!)

More on this, as it develops!