Just another fad

My French Journey - Part Two

This blog post carries straight on from My French Journey - Part One

A Few Years Later....

In early 2020 my partner and I planned a holiday for later that year to travel via train to Barcelona. This included a few days in Paris on the way there and back to break up the journey. I decided it would be a good idea to brush up on my French and in February 2020 I came across the French Uncovered course run by Ollie Richards which uses his StoryLearning ™ method. The whole idea is that you learn the language naturally by following a story, first by listening and then by reading the story in French first and finally in English. This is followed up video explanations from a French teacher about basic points of grammar and pronunciation and some more traditional exercises to practise the concepts.

Of course any tale that begins with "In early 2020..." can only end one way, and sure enough the Covid-19 pandemic completely disrupted our holiday plans and, initially at least, any enthusiasm I had for learning French. I didn't actually make use of the French Uncovered course until October 2020 when I found myself working part time due to cut backs at my work.

All The Things!

I completed the French Uncovered course over the space of a month and it refreshed a lot of the basics for me and expanded my knowledge in some areas. Over the next year and beyond I began to explore a lot of different applications, podcasts, YouTube channels and methodologies for learning foreign languages in general and French in particular. I won't go into all the details but rather just list some of the things I tried to varying degrees of success:

Though I made some good progress I also did what I often do when starting something new: spent more time looking for the best, most efficient way to do something rather than actually just doing the thing itself in a less than perfect way.

It was supposedly the famous French writer Voltaire who came up with a neat way to describe this phenomenon:-

Perfect is the enemy of good

Though he apparently referred to an Italian proverb

Il meglio è nemico del bene

Which more literally is "Best is the enemy of good". Anyway that is a topic for a whole other blog post some time.

The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis

Over time I came to be more and more convinced of the ideas of Second Language Acquisition (opposed to "learning" a second language) as promulgated by Professor Stephen Krashen and the key concept behind SLA, The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis often shortened, mistakenly in my view, to just The Input Hypothesis

The comprehensible input hypothesis says that people acquire the ability to understand, and subsequently use, a second language by large amounts of comprehensible input. That is, exposure to the language in spoken or written form at a level that is just above the person's ability but where there is enough context for inference and crucially enough interest in finding out the message in the input that the person's brain will activate to understand the message. This is sometime explained by saying the input needs to be compelling and you become so interested in finding out what is happening that acquiring a working model of the language is secondary to that.

There is a lot more to say around this whole topic but it certainly chimed with my experience of being most engaged and "learning/acquiring" more of French when I was listening or reading something that was interesting and at a level I could mostly understand already.

Hours not Years

Before I explain where I am now on my French journey I think it is useful to reflect on how much time I have spent learning French (or should I say acquiring French?).

Since picking it up again in 2020 can I say that I have spent three years learning French? No not at all. Firstly there is a reason this blog is called Just Another Fad, my interest and enthusiasm for French has waxed and waned over the years and there have been periods where I have not studied French at all and longer periods where I have kept it in a maintenance mode by just listening and watching content that I can understand fairly easily just to "keep my ear in" but not actively looking to improve.

Even when I have been fully committed to French it has amounted to about 60-90 minutes per day on average. Though there is no hard and fast way to say how long it takes to learn/acquire a language to functional fluency, estimates in the range of 1,000 to 1,5000 hours are not uncommon especially for people following the comprehensible input hypothesis. (Yeah those learn "French in three months", or 30 days courses and apps... not really a thing. Not to be able to understand real native French at least).

I don't really know how many hours I have spent with French in the last three years. I have gone through periods where I have recorded every minute I have spent through apps like Toggl Track and Polylogger but that can become a bit onerous and I stop doing it before it puts me off French itself.

I have about 350 hours logged when I look back over the last three years and if I had to guess I would say I've actually done somewhere between 500 and 700 hours in total.

Where am I now and where am I going?

In terms of my ability now with French I am at the point where I can fairly easily understand most of any scripted factual content like news bulletins or documentaries or scripted YouTube presentations. I can also read a newspaper like Le Monde fairly easily and have read a few novels in French, some translated from English authors like Ann Cleeves and others from native French authors. If I was to rate myself on the CEFR scale I would say I am at the B1/B2 level for written and oral comprehension.

As for my speaking ability I can communicate fairly easily with someone who is motivated to understand me and I can express my thoughts, albeit often in a simpler way than I would normally do in my native English. Around a B1 on the CEFR scale for oral production.

Writing ability? Ha! Have you seen French spelling and grammar rules? It's not something I have spent a lot of time on as it does little to improve my acquisition of the language and I currently have no real need to write in French.

I am pretty deep into what is often called in language learning circles the intermediate plateau .

Where I want to get to is to be able to do is understand any French content easily. In particular films and TV series where the dialogue is fast informal French with lots of slang and argot and, thanks to modern production aesthetics, is mostly mumbled, screamed or said through wracking sobs.

It feels like I am a long way from being able to understand that sort of content at the moment but I can look back to a time just 12 months ago when I could only understand French made for French learners and then like a magic trick (aka hours and hours of listening to comprehensible input) I could understand the news on podcasts like Les Actus du Jour.

I am confident that if I keep applying the techniques of using comprehensible input I will get to where I want to be. I may not get there in this current iteration of my French fad but that doesn't matter because I am enjoying the journey for its own sake and I know from experience now that my understanding is at a level such that coming back after a break I can pretty much pick up where I left off.

Bon courage, mes amis!

#French