Progress Report – 1 Month of French

It has been a month now since we have started learning French.

I have completed 5  modules (35 lessons) in Assimil French course. The course has been very enjoyable and I was able to comfortably cover 2 lessons per day in the last week.

I wanted to check how much French we have learnt in a month and tried to read a paragraph from the French newspaper that we get at home – Voila! we were able to understand one full paragraph of French – we are so happy and so thrilled. We also picked up a few children books and tried to read them. We could get 70-80% of the story. What is amazing is that most of the words that we see in these books have all been covered in Assimil. Definitely Assimil has equipped us with lot of vocabulary and exposure to many grammatical structures without any explicit drilling or memorization.

In Easy French Reader, I have completed 13 lessons. The stories are very interesting. There were a few stories around a teacher trying to teach French using French from day 1 of class. There was an argument between Marc and July, where are trying to learn English and French respectively, as to which language has more exceptions and is more complicated. The stories are very funny and the vocabulary is kept very light. This is a very good supplement to Assimil course.

French pronunciation is not at all a mystery any more. Everything seems to make sense and I am more and more feeling at home with certain grammatical structures. Repeating the sentences aloud has really helped me to internalize lot of the grammatical structures easily. It has also helped in giving me the confidence to speak.

Visiting our local library is my time to put our French learning to use. I try to talk as much as I can using the structures and words that I have learnt so far. From the time that we started learning French, the library has become a very useful place for us. Before I started learning French, the local library did not have any place in my life as most of the books were in French. Now, library plays a dual role – one is obvious as a place to check out books; other is as a place to practice French.

Now, I have converted the reading time with my kids also into a time of learning  French. We got many bilingual story books and picture dictionaries from the library and it is fun to go through them with my kids. My son is learning English and I am learning French and we take turns in reading the respective languages.

We are very happy about the progress we are making in learning French with Assimil. In my next post, I will share the small victories we had so far.

Tagged: Assimil, Progress Report - French