Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
This week has been a really slow one in terms of learning French.
I’ve been busy. I’ve been lazy. I’ve had a lot of excuses.
But at the end of the day, I think I’m being forced to take a bit of my own medicine, because, despite all of my ranting and raving about learning another language independently, it’s been pretty tough to get the ball rolling.
I think that there was initially a bit of a weak personal answer to the question of “why.” Why do I want to learn French? …I guess it just seemed to make sense as the next one to learn…? That answer wasn’t too helpful in giving motivation to get the ball rolling. And the result was that my head wasn’t really in the game. But the story doesn’t stop there. I’ve had to remind myself again of how to get started. Once I stepped back and thought about it intentionally, I had a clearer picture of what I needed to do.
“I Need a Tutor”
Since I was having a hard time getting moving, I decided that I would schedule a tutoring session through italki.com. The thought behind this wasn’t really complex at all; I just figured I’d need someone to give me a couple of tips and options for starting points in my learning. The actual process was pretty simple – I actually wrote about my criteria in picking a tutor last week.
Something rather unexpected happened, though. Where I thought a small dose of structure would be helpful (and it indeed was, though I was careful to be very clear with my tutors to plan what I wanted to discuss), there was another benefit of taking a one-on-one tutoring session that I hadn’t thought of before: I had to speak French.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t carrying on a conversation – not at all! But I was presented with a couple of basic phrases and drilled on repeating them. And something really strange started to happen: I found myself really liking the simple act of making new, weird sounds. I was speaking French! And it sounded really cool!
That excitement became enough for me to want to learn more French words and to work towards stringing together basic sentences (though I’ve got to get a bit more background, grammar-wise before I’ll be able to even have a “hello, how are you” conversation).
The Ball Got Rolling
That initial excitement was enough to overcome the up-front inertia that I faced when I actually sat down and tried to start studying the language. And since I liked the way the language sounded so much, I found myself naturally self-talking throughout the remainder of the week.
In fact, I probably annoyed my coworkers and roommates with my incessant muttering of the same two or three French phrases.
“C’est ma voiture” (This is my car)
YES ADAM. WE GET IT. THAT’S YOUR CAR. PLEASE SAY SOMETHING DIFFERENT. PLEASE.
But the point behind all of this is that, one step forward in one small way gave a bit of fuel to the fire to get me going, even if I’m not ready for that one step forward to be a conversation with a native speaker.
What’s Next?
Now that I’m picking up a bit of momentum, I’ve got a better idea of the next two steps I’m going to take (in addition to continuing to schedule tutoring sessions).
The first is to grab a frequency list of the ~600 most commonly spoken French words, and the second is to learn the conjugations of the verbs that are included in that list. With those two things in hand, I should be able to begin having basic conversations within the context of my tutoring sessions within a few weeks.
The point here is to maximize the impact of the steps that I take. Like most people, I don’t have the momentum, discipline or motivation to keep learning on my own. But the solution isn’t Rosetta Stone (that’s usually just a medication for the problem). The solution is to learn in such a way that each step makes me more passionate about moving forward. When I am able to string together a few words into a halting sentence, I’ll get a ton of momentum simply from stepping back and seeing that I’m speaking another language!
Sure, at later stages when my learning plateaus, I’ll need to have a different approach. But for now, the real focus of my learning needs to be building my passion and getting small wins along the way.
I’ve gotten some really fresh perspective this week on what it’s like to start from scratch. How has your language learning been? Do you feel like you’re stuck at square one? What have you done to get going when it was hard to get started?