Every year for the last ten years AT LEAST, I've been trying to learn the French language. I have an audio cd course, tried several free language education websites, subscribed to France magazine....
And I haven't made any measurable progress, to speak of.
Part of the reason is the way the lessons are set up.
(I understand the creators of the courses are trying for high success/high retention, but...)
One of the first words you learn is "cat" (chat). Truly. In almost every course that I've started, chat is right up there in the first 10 vocabulary lessons.
Now, there are a lot of words I can think of that should take higher priority in my opinion.
"Bathroom" being one of them. (If EVER you needed a high success/high retention word to leap to mind in a situation where French is the primary language, I would think this would be one of the biggies.)
"Police", "thank you", "help", "nice shoes", "more wine, please"....any of these would be more useful right away.
I'm using an application on my phone right now and it's been very good in leading me along, keeping my interest and success high. But it, too, has this crazy hierarchy of words I need to know right away!
I'm on Level 6, which means I have a French proficiency of approximately 1% I was informed today. This is very good news.
I can, as of today, discuss sharks eating black chickens with anyone should the topic arise in conversation. (Les requins manges des poules noire!) I have the linguistic skills to note in passing that the woman has a red dress. (La femme a robe rouge...). I would be able to ask an elephant about the sugar. (I'm SERIOUS. Apparently, the French converse a disproportionate amount of time about things that are black and red, are quite concerned with elephants, sharks, and cats, AND feel the need to comment on one's dress at any given moment.)
I'm one who tries to figure out meaning in context, but these lessons are killing me. Today, I had to translate the French sentence "The men ate a whale." I knew all the words, but kept second guessing the word for "whale" because the sentence didn't make any sense at all the way I was reading it. It turns out, that doesn't really matter when you're speaking French....or perhaps just learning it. There was also a sentence about the women having cold soup, a chicken and a mouse eating a strawberry, and the sandwich being red.
I'm hoping there will be a section soon that teaches me to hail a whale's red cab, ask where the black bathroom for chickens is, and how to order wine for la petite chat.
You know, really useful things.
(All humor aside, I really am making good progress with the application Duolingo. I do 20 minutes a day, generally at the bus stop in the afternoon waiting for the kids or right before lunch. Any learning is good and it's a fun break from War and Peace which I'm happy to say has a bookmark between pages 121-122. Only 1100 pages to go!)
3 comments:
You know what they say--go to France where you are forced to speak and understand. Let's see...I guess Farmer could sign up to go to France and teach the natives how to increase farm production and you and the kiddies can tag along to help,and everyone would suddenly be immersed in the language. See what he says.
And if Farmer says, "No," then I guess we will have to figure out how we are all going to bundle up and go there without the men!
This is also a wonderful post! And I'll tell you cat and elephant can come in handy. They have these great little chocolates called langue de chat. You'll need that. And Babar is so popular, you'll need to know that, too. Or at least Ellie likes those books in French. Have you tried that? Reading children's books in French? That's how Ellie has learned. Babar is great, but so is T'choupi.
But, shark? Nope. Rosie is right - let's go!
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