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.