🥐 Relearning French

Why I decided to relearn French and how it's going so far | 70 hours of French

📜 My History With French

In many countries, students are expected to take a language class in school. Here in Canada, that language is often French.

I took French classes until my first year of high school. While I did well in every class and got good grades, I didn’t speak or read any French aside from what I had to do in class. This is typical of language classes in school. Students are either uninterested and do poorly or do well but are unable to use the language.

Once I no longer had to take French classes, I knew I wanted to find a way to actually learn French. This lead me to discover Duolingo and try self-learning french. I only did about 3 units on the French Duolingo tree before I gave up.

I believe the problem was that I wasn’t actually interested in French. Duolingo may have also not been my thing. Even now that I’m learning multiple languages, I rarely use Duolingo.

Since that experience of failing to learn French with Duolingo, I had not thought about learning French. I instead spent my time learning Cantonese and Mandarin. Learning other languages helped me realize I can actually learn a language if I’m interested in the culture and media made in that language.

In November of 2022 after barely spending any time learning my target languages, I decided to relearn French. It’s been 4 months, and I’ve spent ~70 hours relearning French. In just these few months made more progress than I have in all my years of French classes.

🔁 How I’ve Been Relearning French

When I first started, I thought that this time around I would use Duolingo and maybe even complete a Duolingo tree. That didn’t last long because I quickly lost interest in Duolingo. It was a nice way to get back into relearning, though.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing my study logs where I write about any challenges or accomplishments I have in language learning. For French, I’ve been using the textbook Liberté. Although it’s not the French textbook I used in school, the classroom exercises reminded me of my experiences learning French in school. Although I initially liked the textbook, my excitement wore off after the first 2 months as the textbook started to feel too geared toward classroom instruction.

I was eager to learn French through reading and watching native material as I do in my other TLs. Being in Canada, finding materials to read or watch hasn’t been too difficult. Through my library, I’ve been able to find comics to read. Comics have been great for me to build my vocabulary while shows have been helpful in improving my listening.

To learn vocabulary I have been using the Memrise French courses. A lot of the vocab in the course has also been in my textbook. With the Memrise course, I’ve been able to hear how words and phrases are pronounced while I learn them.

📅 My Plans for French

French has been a challenge since it is not like Cantonese, Mandarin or any other language I’ve self-studied. This challenge has been making relearning French interesting and a nice change from my other TLs. Since I’m splitting my time between another focus language, Mandarin, and 3 other secondary languages, I know my progress will be slower than if I were only focused on French. I’m okay with this because I’m intentional with how I study and with the resources I use.

My 2023 goals for French are to reach a lower intermediate level. I essentially want to be able to do what I can do in Mandarin, in French. This means being able to read and listen to content comfortably and become conversational.

❓ What are your experiences relearning a language?

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