The Epic of Learning French
No one was hurt in the process, much
Chapter one: tête-à-tête with French
Let us begin few years ago, when the consideration of learning another foreign language had finally settled in my mind as an ultimately achievable goal and not an arduous task without merit. Thus commenced my search for sources.
I began with the one that has the world of language learning divided into two bitterly opposes camps, as much as durian has the visitors to SE Asia, Duolingo. At the time they had a pretty extensive grammar backing up the exercises, laid out in a easy to follow manner to be noted down for those, who like me, feel the need to write things by hand to retain them. The beginner’s exercises were weird, as they often are, and this is how I found out that one my friends was using Duolingo, as well, because it is hard to contrive a normal setting in which people would talk of bears eating oranges. I’ve used it on and off for a year or two, it helped me out with the basics of the grammar, pronunciation and phrase construction. It did nothing for the speaking, however, even though they had the option to speak out loud into the microphone. This function had almost never worked for me, on top of making me appear even dafter than usual shouting “Les ours mangent les oranges” (The bears eat the oranges) at my tablet.
After a while I’ve contrived another tool, which I have already used to boost my English and which I heartily recommend to everyone. What you do is you take a book that you like and know well, that you’ve read in your native language and you start reading it, or even better if it is an audio book version, because it will finally let you in on the proper phonetics. It does not really matter whether you have enough of vocabulary or not, if you don’t understand almost, or even less than a half. Because you already know what’s going on in the book so you can make educated guesses by the context, and it not, just go with it and habituate your eyes or ears to the language. This is how you will gain that vocabulary (but restrain yourself from checking the dictionary every five minutes), phrasal structures in the wild (well, almost) and their usage. My choice fell once again on Harry Potter, or in particular “Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers”. I was fun, I barely understood the quarter, but I could follow the narrative. With time I’ve picked up some words that I did not know the meaning but which were used quite often such as “chouette”, “poulard”, “cou” etc. Admittedly, this being fantasy some of the words are not widely used in normal life, but as “chouette” was tied with Harry and messages, I surmised that it means “owl” in French and so it went for some words. Others I had to look up but ultimately not knowing them did not detract from the experience. Additionally, I am one of those people who enjoy reading and re-reading a thing multiple times, so with each re-read or re-listen I was able to identify new words or their usage. What was I doing with all the hours of potteriana? Mainly, I was using it as an addendum to weekly cleanings of the houses, but also as a way to wind down.
Thus for awhile my grammar, vocabulary and listening skills grew, but the speaking and writing did not progress much. When I arrived in Montreal it soon became evident that although I am not completely useless, I am not a worthy conversationalist yet. On top of my lack of practice came the slang, the local accent and the speed of most interactions, which required me to speak. So I’ve applied for francization course, which is basically and mainly French lessons with a side dish of an introduction into the local color, so to say. As I’ve applied just before COVID shot all the way through to being a pandemic, the processing of my application was delayed and the classes have begun in November.
