Ben Murrell

In my last post, I promised to give the details of how I’m going about learning French. I’m studying independently, alone.

When I decided I wanted to learn French, I thought a bit about what the biggest hangups were for myself and for other people in my classes in school. In my mind, it boiled down to a few things:

• Unwillingness to learn the language – A lot of people in the classes were there because they had to be.
• Unwillingness to use the language – A lot of people were reluctant to speak the language. This was probably a combination of being embarrassed about not being able to speak properly and factor #1.

The preceding two factors probably apply to learning anything, be it math or chemistry or anything else – if you don’t have an attitude of wanting to accomplish something, then you’re not going to accomplish it. The next factor is more language learning specific:

• Spelling over speaking – After five years in Spanish classes, there were still people that were mispronouncing the “ll”, “j”, and “ñ”. People that couldn’t properly emphasize syllables with accents. I think this was because of the way the language was taught to us – my class was one of the first to be taught via the TPRS method. In theory, the TPRS method should have avoided this issue… but in school, teachers are all too eager to give out busy work style worksheets to give students something to do outside of class. As a result, pronunciation was being poisoned by seeing the words and trying to read them without having internalized the word already.

Going into learning French, I wanted to avoid these hangups. The first factor I already knew there wouldn’t be an issue with – I’m in it to learn it for myself. I knew that the second factor would be an issue – perhaps not out of unwillingness but just because of a lack of an environment to use the language where I live. I’ve resolved that issue by immersing myself in French material even when I’m not actively learning. To help with the third factor, I’ve chosen my learning methods carefully to focus on pronunciation and speaking over writing and reading.

Learning Methods:

• Pimsleur’s Audio Courses – Since I made pronunciation my number one priority in learning French, I decided that an audio course would be best to start off with. Pimsleur’s involves no reading of the words – there is a reading booklet, but I haven’t been doing the reading exercises yet. Occasionally in the beginning, the speaker would mention silent letters at the end of words and how they trail into words that start with vowels. This isn’t something I’ve considered consciously after the first week – I just do it. And I have no idea how to spell most of the words I’m saying. I think that Pimsleur has been working really well for me.
• Rosetta Stone – I had Rosetta Stone available to me, so I thought I’d give it a try. I don’t think it’s nearly as useful as Pimsleur – it doesn’t have me speaking and practicing as much. It has certainly boosted my vocabulary, but I’m not sure how much I would be retaining if it weren’t so similar to Spanish. The biggest advantage to Rosetta Stone I think is the writing portion – it does force me to consider the spelling of words. Also, there is no English at all in Rosetta Stone’s teaching method. This means they’re not explaining things like difference between le and la… they just keep penalizing you until you get it right. It also means they can only really teach you things that you can convey in a picture or series of pictures. In Pimsleur, they’ll cut in and say things like, “The French consider it more polite to ask ‘Would you like to …’ rather than ‘Do you want to …’ and for this, you would use the form of the word, ‘voudriez’ rather than ‘voulez’.” I’m half way through Rosetta Stone French I and nothing like this has come up yet.
• Easy French Reader – I bought a book called Easy French Reader. It is what it says it is – I haven’t had any problems reading it. There are notes in the margins when they introduce non-obvious new words… but the story isn’t very interesting. Every couple of pages, there is a question section with true/false, fill in the blank, and short response style questions along with the occasional crossword. I’ve been avoiding it because I don’t know how to pronounce most of the words properly and I’ve noticed monsieur go from a smooth (phonetic english) “messieur” to a more butchered “monseeur”.

Immersion Methods:

• French Music – I have acquired quite a bit of French music. For me, it was hard to find music that I could actually pick words out of at first, so maybe this short list of French music will help someone out there find it more easily than I did. “Un Jour Noel” by Marie-Elaine Thibert (Christmas music that’s easy to follow). “Donne-Moi Quelque Chose Qui Ne Finit Pas” by Stephanie Lapointe (Slower music with mostly simple words). Traditional Quebec music is folk music that is pretty easy to follow and pick words out of, and that’s pretty easy to find. There’s a Quebec group called Les Cowboys Fringants that have a more modernized folk feel – it’s pretty fun to listen to and (again) it’s easy to pick out words and phrases. I haven’t found anything else that I’m to semi-understand and listen to passively while at work, but I’m sure that there is more out there. I’m still holding out for some Raffi style songs!
• French Movies & TV – I have Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain. I’ve watched the first half but haven’t found time to watch the whole thing. The first time I tried, I didn’t understand much. The second time, I was surprised at how much I understood. I also have a couple of seasons of the Friends tv show that are dubbed in French, but I haven’t tried watching those yet.
• LiveMocha - A cool website where you can get feedback from native speakers on your writing and speaking. I haven’t submitted anything in French yet, but I have given feedback on English submissions.
• LibriVox - LibriVox is a website that is in the process of recording people reading books that are in the public domain (much like Project Gutenberg, except for audiobooks). I have downloaded Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Les Trois Mousquetaires, and I’ll be listening to them at work – initially I won’t be listening for content, but just to build the ability to listen to French and be able to break the steady flow of sounds into words and sentences, even if I don’t know their meanings.
• The Kansas City French Connection – This is a meetup.com group that is based in Kansas City. I went to my first event last Saturday at a French cafe called Aixois. There were seven of us ranging from beginners like myself to a few native speakers from Belgium and Quebec. Basically it’s a French conversation group, and based on my first meeting with them, it’s going to be great. I’ve already learned of a new source called “TV-5″ which is a French channel that I can get here.

I built up the basics of my plans for learning French from this website: How To Learn Any Language. The creator is a Swiss man who loves languages – it’s full of interesting information like how similar certain languages are and the relative difficulties of learning different languages. There is also a forum component where people give advice on how to learn languages and where to find resources to learn languages.

I spent a few hours typing out the journal entries leading up to Barcelona last night. Phew… almost done! I decided to hold off on Barcelona because my interest was waning and I didn’t want it to bleed into Barcelona’s entries – I loved Barcelona and I really want to leave you with that impression. Once I’m done typing all of the posts up, I’ll go back and add pictures to them – that’s another time consuming process, but worth it. It really makes some of those boring, short entries worth looking at at least (I’m looking at you, Berlin). Also, if you’re friends with me on Facebook, you should be able to see the pictures I have put up on there. Even if you’re not, you should still be able to see them… it’s just a matter of finding them. I’ll post links to the albums once I’ve put up pictures from the whole trip (I’ve done pictures on Facebook up to and including Prague).

And the French bit from the title – about half way through the trip, I decided I wanted to learn another language. I was split between Italian, French, and German. I’m hesitant to say I “know” Spanish, but I can definitely hold my own in a conversation… this pushed me towards the romance languages. I knew my knowledge of Spanish would help out with Italian and French, and I decided I wasn’t really that into German… so I had it narrowed down to French and Italian by the time I got back into Germany when I visited Munich.

When I landed in Spain, I was elated to finally speak the local language. For a while, I resolved to just improve my Spanish and not pick up a new language. Then a flurry of things happened that lead to French. On my first day in Seville, I met two guys from Paris – they were really cool guys. By then I was used to being told that I don’t come off as the typical dumb American, but hearing it from two Frenchman (from Paris at that!) came as a surprise. Anyways, the conversation eventually got around to women, and women loving French accents in English. Thihaud and Matthew then dropped this one on me: French girls love American accents in French. On my second night in Seville, I ended up eating dinner in the middle of a French conversation between a large group of people. So here I was eating shrimp with their heads attached… and listening to French. I felt left out, for sure, because they were speaking way too fast for me to be able to pick up anything – even the words I could usually pick out because of Spanish. I gave up on understanding and just listened. I decided then that I really liked the way French sounds.

In Granada, I met Margeaux from Paris. She didn’t really speak any French in front of me, but I really liked her accent. This was the start of me deciding that the French accent is the sexiest I’ve heard. On my second night in Granada, there was a group of three French Canadians staying in my room – two of them barely spoke any English. That was interesting, but then I met another French Canadian couple when I went out that night. Again, really cool people. I had a great time with them and everyone else that went out for tapas and sangria that night.

Finally, on my second night in Barcelona I met two awesome Quebecois girls. I ended up spending two more nights with them after that – at one point I brought up my interest in learning another language, and how I’d narrowed it down to Italian and French. Audrey had plenty of practical reasons for learning French over Italian, including that Italian is only spoken in Italy whereas French is spoken in Black Africa, France, Sweden, Belgium, and Quebec. Then she went on about how I should learn French because France played a huge part in the settlement of the Americas – she couldn’t believe I didn’t know about Jacques Cartier… among other things. Pretty hard to say no to I told her I’d learn French in six months, and that was that. On this front, I’m unfortunate because I now spend one to two hours a day learning and practicing French and inevitably I’m reminded of her. I think some of my friends can attest to my inability to get this girl out of my head, and my efforts to learn French certainly aren’t helping!

So, on top of all of the immediate (and somewhat shallow, yet still valid and driving) reasons for learning French, there are some fundamental reasons for learning a new language. I like languages – I think Elliot rubbed off on me. I’m having a great time learning French. The trouble with Spanish is that I don’t ever see myself living in Spain or Mexico (perhaps there are more promising countries further south…) so I don’t ever see myself using Spanish more than for basic travel communication. The thing with French now is that I could see myself visiting France for an extended period of time, and having the ability to adventure into Africa is also intriguing. Finally, there is just some intrinsic value to knowing a language. It makes me more happy and satisfied with myself – probably because I’m picking up more than just a language, but a whole new culture and set of possibilities. In a sense, I’m expanding my view of the world, and I like this.

Anyways, French is coming along nicely. I feel like my French after three weeks is comparable to my Spanish after three months. I think my attitude and motivation behind learning the language is probably partially responsible for this, and already knowing another romance language is definitely helping out. I’ll throw up another post with my methods later for those interested. I’ll just let you know for now that I can speak with (in my opinion) relatively good pronunciation and speed, I can kind of read, and I can hardly write. I’ve been avoiding reading and writing in French for now because I have a feeling that seeing the words is going to poison my pronunciation… which in my mind was going to be the big sticking point for French.

I just spent the last few hours typing up entries – I made it through June 10th, or day 21 of my adventure. I started adding pictures to the first few posts, but it’s pretty time consuming so I’m going to wait until I have the whole journal transcribed, then go back and add pictures. Just a heads up – if you read everything now, you’ll miss the pictures! Don’t worry though, it’s a good journal, and you won’t mind looking through it again

If you don’t want to wait on me to go through the pictures and add them to the journal (where they’re in context and make sense / have stories behind them…) you can head over to my picture site and see them all! My pictures are located at http://pictures.benmurrell.com – check it out! Quick warning though: I took a lot of the same pictures, especially in dark places. This is because I didn’t figure out the high-ISO setting until about half way through the trip, so I was struggling with holding the camera really still during long exposure times. I’d just keep taking them until I was happy with the picture… which is why you’ll see several of the same basic picture in a row. Also, it took me a while to perfect taking pictures of myself Enjoy!

I started transcribing my travel journal yesterday – for the most part it’s 1:1 with grammatical/spelling issues taken care of. When I come across confusing stuff, I elaborate or expand a bit without making any comment about it. Things in [[]] are my comments looking back, and a few times I’ve written out some reflections at the end of a post. I’m through 11 days so far, and I have 28 left to transcribe – I’ll probably finish up by the end of the week.

The transcriptions are backdated in the blog – I’ve set the publish date for each post as the actual date I wrote the journal entry. This just means that you’re not going to see the transcriptions showing up at the top of the blog – they’re more towards the bottom. For a quick listing of all of the entries, you can view the EuroTrip 2009 Journal category.