week 2 — Français tous les jours
This is an entry in a series of posts where I am trying to improve myself. You can read more about it here.
This week I want to practice my French everyday on an app called Duolingo. Duolingo lets you do mini interactive lingual lessons at your leisure and is a great free resource for learning a new language. There are couple reasons why I want to do this goal:
- I want to learn another language. I really only know how to read/speak/write in English. Even though I come from a Filipino background, I never learned how to speak Tagalog since my parents never spoke it at home because they already spent a majority of their lives in the US. In high school, I took Spanish for three years, so I can recognize words and basic phrases, but I am no where near fluent. I also really really want to go to France one day and it would be litty if I was able to get around without much help.
- Doing these mini lessons is a lot different than my goal was last week. When I was avoiding major carbs I only really had to be conscious of my goal when I was eating, which for the most part, is pretty standardized and ritualistic throughout the day. It was a goal that required effort at very predictable times in the day. This goal requires me to either set aside time during the day or know when I can squeeze a lesson into a small break or period of boredom. I usually mindlessly fill this gap with checking Twitter, Instagram, or Reddit so it will definitely require me to be more conscious during unexpected hours of the day.
- I think I have a really dope French accent 😏🇫🇷
So my goal this week is: do two French Duolingo lessons everyday!
9/4/17 — W2D1
Today was Labor Day and I woke up early to go to dim sum with my cousins. Being a weird Filipino family, we always like to bring lemons 🍋 to dim sum and get funny looks, but it’s okay because we enjoy the food and aren’t getting in anyone’s way. I made some time for French lessons when we got coffee and just brushed up on the simple nouns that they teach in the first lesson. French is tricky because a lot of the words aren’t pronounced like they are spelled coming from an English context. For examples, “homme” is pronounced “ohm” not “hawm”. Weird stuff.
So far my favorite word is “chat” which means “cat”
9/5/17 — W2D2
Woke up super early to catch my flight back to the bay at 7AM. It sucked to be awake that early but it was the only flight option that would let me get into work at a reasonable time.
I did one French lesson while the plane was on the runway. It felt good to use that 20 minutes of downtime on something productive. The flight was short and sweet, but right when we were about to land, the girl next to me had lost her iPhone and was looking in every corner around her for it. I was helping her look for it, but when we couldn’t find it after a couple minutes I offered to let her use Find My iPhone once we landed. She (luckily) didn’t put her phone on airplane mode so it would just reconnect to some cellular service once we were close enough to the ground. We touched ground and she logged in and pinged her phone which happened to be in her purse the whole time!
7AM flights are just way too early.
We both laughed about it for a bit and chatted. She turned out to be a marketing manager at Adobe and had graduated from UCLA. I mentioned that I went to UCSD and the other person in our row chimed in and mentioned that he also went to UCSD! Small tech world. He was a Data Analyst and LinkedIn and we all had an interesting conversation about how techie the Bay is. I added the guy on LinkedIn (of course) and he invited me to lunch sometime if I was ever in the area! Cool stuff ~
The girl and I walked to the ride share area of SJC together and she mentioned that I was “the most sociable engineer” that she had ever talked to 😁. It’s always nice to get compliments from anyone and I do want to work on being able to talk to strangers + just being a friendly person, so this was great practice!
Did my second French lesson at work on a coffee break.
“Je’mange un croissant” -me
9/7/17 — W2D4
Went to see Vallis Alps tonight. They were super super good live and a band that got me through some tough times, so I was really pleased with how the whole night went. Going out on a Thursday was probably not the best idea but it’s okay because I have youth and money.
Did some French practice right before dinner and took BART to the city. It was a really fun night overall.
9/8/17 — W2D5
I woke up feeling pretty sick today — so I stayed home from work.
Did my two lessons scattered out throughout the day and ended up taking Betsy and Christina out to DTSJ at night. I stayed sober though, so that was really interesting. Guys at the club are super aggressive, they just latch on and start grinding on girls without asking or anything. It just doesn’t seem very… nice. Whoops.
Watched some dudes play Super Smash at night. Not very fun.
9/9/17 — W2D6
Did my French lessons while waiting for my bagel in the morning ! What a great use of 15 minutes :)
Went to the gym and did a French lesson there too.
Conclusion
French for a week was pretty easy. Learning a new language isn’t something you can do in 7 days, but hopefully being able to consistently do lessons at convenient unplanned times during the day leads to the development of this new skill.
I think I could keep this up and French is very cool ! ~
Again, I noticed that sharing your goal with others is one of the best ways to stick to a goal and help keep yourself accountable for things. I’m moving to SF in about two weeks and I’ve been thinking hard about what I want to do once I move there. I really want to find a community that I can do something wholesome and productive with. Maybe a sport? Or boardgames? Or maybe people who just like to nap and eat hot cheetos.
