Thursday, February 19, 2009

I'm Learning French.

So after ALMOST a month of being here I finally decided to dive into the whole french thing.  I'm very motivated to learn a language while I'm here because I'm not sure when I'll get another opportunity to learn a language in a native environment again.  I've been frustrated with myself since I got here just because I haven't been able to make the time to fit in the french.  THUS, I will add my french language time to my weekly report on my "working out."  Not only will you know how many sit ups I do in a week, but how many hours/minutes I spend trying to learn french.
For those of you that are interested, I'm doing two things to start.  I'm trying to spend half an hour to an hour on Rosetta Stone every day to get a weird basis of vocabulary.  Rosetta stone is really good for vocabulary because they never give you English words just images and you pick up the language through context.  I haven't gotten far enough to see how useful it is for conversation or grammar just yet but hopefully I get there soon.  In addition I've downloaded a "coffee time lesson" set from Itunes.  There are almost 60 lessons and they're around the range of 20 minutes.  This is perfect for me because I can listen to one going each way on the Metro in the morning and sometimes I can repeat them during the day for reinforcement.  The podcast is free and I'll let you guys know if I like it soon.  Know this: If you follow the same program, you will also be taught French by a Scottish guy.  Think about that accent.
Once I work up the courage, I'll start embarrassing myself in the name of education.  It won't be hard, I can already guarantee embarrassment.  The hard part will be making sure I learn something from ever occasion.  
If anyone has tips on learning sources leave them in the comments or send me an email.  I'll share how well I deal with them.

2 comments:

  1. Bon jour mon ami !!!

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  2. I listened to a learn German podcast for awhile that was taught by a Scottish woman. Maybe the Scottish are very multilingual. OR maybe they just think it's funny to torture us through teaching another language with a thick Scottish accent.

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