French in 6 Months
Hi, today I want to introduce you to my newest personal project, French. I am learning Chinese for a long time, for at least 3 years. I have tried every learning technique, tutors, school, flashcards, immersion, etc. But I am still not in a place where I wanted to be years ago, indeed I am well below it. Due to this wholesome thing, I felt like I was starting to lose motivation for learning Chinese.
So, I stopped. No, I didn't stop learning Chinese, but I changed my focus. What I mean by that is I am still learning Chinese, although subtly, with my private tutor, and my graded readers and I'm still doing flashcards in pleco (sort of, I haven't touched any flashcards on there for like 4 days, I know they are stacked up too much atp).
Apart from me looking for new ways of learning and remembering vocabulary without doing flashcards, I started a new journey. That journey is French, and I want to get to at least upper B1 in 6 months. Right now I'm 2 months in, nearly finished Refold Community 1k deck (70 new cards remaining, gone through the deck with 15 new cards/day pace).
It's way different than Chinese. First of all, language learning feels easy again, learning vocabulary is easy, I don't have to look up the 拼音 of the words, and there are so many available content! I can immerse and have fun while immersing! Who would've guessed that could happen in a language, right?
But why French?
Well, It has to do with the fact that the languages I know are really similar to French. Vocabulary and phonetics wise. For starters, my native language is Turkish, so I can pronounce all of the words I see, and a lot of the words are same. For example, valise and valiz, chauffeur and şoför (it may look weird but pronunciation is the same). And also, obviously, English. My best language. English has so many words commonly used in French, or they are similar at least.
Also, ease of content. When learning Chinese, I felt so many difficulties, for example, the hardness of creating a 抖音 account, or not having a 微信 account, not having the aid of dual subtitles in 哔哩哔哩 and Chinese people -on top of speaking really damn fast- speeding up their audios, really, what the heck is wrong with them?
So, I chose a language that I already had a lot of exposure to. With films, music, news and youtube (which is the holy grail for me if I'm starting a new language), finding fun, level appropriate immersion content is way easier than anything!
My opinions about flashcards have changed
Spoiler: I still don't like them, and I still use them because, well, for lower level learners, there isn't anything better than flashcards, and yes, for anyone asking, this will eventually be my 13th reason.
Anyhow, back when I was doing Chinese flashcards, I hated them, because they were so hard to remember and even if I remembered them while studying it, I would forget them in like 4 hours.
With French, I am learning 15 new cards per day, it takes ~15 minutes, compare that to 7 new cards per day with Chinese taking 1.5 hours.
What this project will bring to me?
Well, the first thing is, this changed my whole perspective on learning languages. From now on, I will add these core concepts to my language learning life:
- Learning 2 languages at the same time and changing focus whenever I feel like I had enough of either of them.
- Making flashcards my own and making them in a way that would assess my weaknesses when learning a language.
- Giving more attention to writing and speaking.
- Immersing in the content I love, no matter how hard it is. Now, this is a controversial opinion but I feel like I'm learning better when I'm doing this.
- Not minding statistics too much. Process of learning a language might be slow or fast, but at the end, the only thing we know is that this will take a lot of time so there is no need for counting our hours and damning ourselves over them, I'll admit though, clocking-in immersion hours is a great insight and it is something at the end to be proud of.
Some statistics <3
