Huit Semaines de Francais: Ça va bien!

Another productive week of learning French! I had my first conversation and am feeling much more confident with my new language. However, this also means that I am becoming less of a pure beginner and will have to begin moving forward with a serious plan based on my strengths and weaknesses. In this article, I spend some time meditating what these are and how I will overcome them.

Mon Objectifs Pour Cette Semaine:

This week I wanted to familiarize myself with more French grammar. I concentrated on passé composé and conditionnel présent tenses as well as some familiarity with indicatif futur simple (I will speak, you will run, et cetera).

I managed to procure more Pimsleur material from the local library and have been continued on the same program of two lessons a day as I previously had.

I also took the advice of Charles Chu’s “The Cookie Effect: How to Learn Languages Faster With Simulated Immersion” and aimed to make my learning experience with French a more immersive one. My internet browsing is in French and I use French instead of English when I can.

Observations:

My understanding of written and spoken French far exceeds my ability to use the language. I followed Tim Ferris’s observations from learning Japanese grammar from judo books:

The most pertinent questions will be “What will you spend your time doing with this language?”

If necessary, the most closely related rephrasing would be “What do I currently spend my time doing?” It bears repeating: do not read about something that you would not read about in your native language. Use the target language as a vehicle for learning more about a subject, skill, or cultural area of interest. Poor material never produces good language.

My obsession is marathon running so I found myself reading some blogs on course à pied. To my delight, I could grasp what was being written in articles!

I also found my listening comprehension improving. While visiting with some acquaintances at the local French meetup, I was able to comprehend small talk without too much clarification. I actually had my progress complimented and had a very enjoyable (but limited) conversation with a returning member of the group.

Responding is still a major problem of mine though. Its basis, I think, falls into three categories:

Un-Chunked vocabulary

You can only have a limited number of items in your working memory at one time. In math, languages, video games (or practically anything else) you often have to put together several fairly complex ideas simultaneously. We work around this by chunking information we have stored and compartmentalizing several ideas into one which then makes it possible to work quickly with increasingly complex information.

In the case of French I have words, but I have very few phrases at my fingertips. As it turns out, most of what we say on a daily basis is not some completely new construct based on a template of what we have said before. For instance, when you order a drink anywhere it’s unlikely that you carefully compose a new sentence. You have a template, something like:

Could I get a [drink here]?

Thankfully, the solution to this is simple: Just drill vocabulary and phrases until I’m blue in the face!

Puis-je avoir un [boisson ici]?

Mispronunciation:

Mispronunciation is interesting because hypothetically, you could comprehend a written language be unable to speak it due to mispronouncing everything. There isn’t much to say about this: It’s a failure to practice and internalize the language you are learning.

I am handling this problem by asking for feedback from people I speak with and by repeating words I understand. Since the quality of your pronunciation is decided by the person listening, and it is purely verbal, immediate feedback is critical. I am looking into hiring a pronunciation tutor from iTalki to address this problem.

Lack of Confidence

This one is purely psychological and isn’t limited to language learning. If you stammer during public speaking, then you have had this problem. The issue is stammering or losing your train of thought while speaking in a new language exacerbates your problems greatly.

Conclusion:

This coming week I am going to pay special attention to verbal and written drills. Developing templates for how to respond to different situations in my new language is critical to actively using it. I also will look into engaging the help of a tutor so that I have immediate feedback on any grammar or pronunciation mistakes I may be making.