French Courses I have taken – Part 2 of 1-Year Progress Report

In the first post in this series, I have talked about the goals I have set for myself and whether I have achieved them. Now, in this post, I will talk about all the French courses I have taken with brief comments about how helpful they have been for me. As of now, I am listing the courses – in the course of the next few days, I will add my commentary about each of these courses.

The top 2 courses which have been of tremendous help to me are

• Michel Thomas French – I have completed all 3 courses – Total, Perfect and Master Class. This is the best value for my time and money of all the courses that I have looked at so far. Michel Thomas is a genius teacher and his methodology is a breath of fresh air in the market overcrowded with long-hours-of-learning-grammar approaches. There are 4 different aspects to learning a language – reading, listening, writing and speaking. I have written those 4 aspects in the increasing order of difficulty. Michael Thomas tackles the most difficult part right away from the first 5 minutes. He does not overwhelm you with lot of details, but builds up the details gradually. I am surprised at how much grammar he has managed to teach in around 12 hours of audio.

  There are a few disadvantages to the course like his French with a heavy Polish accent, the mistakes made by his students, and of course the high price tag. But all of these disadvantages pales in comparison to the tremendous value you get out of this. This would be my top recommendation if you are starting on French or struggling with French. Please click here for a more detailed review of Michel Thomas.

• Assimil French with ease (first book in the Assimil series) – This is my next favourite. While Michel Thomas gives you a head start and gives you lot of confidence and speaking practice, he misses 2 other important aspects – Reading & Listening. You have to listen to lots of content by native speakers and you have to read a lot of content for your brain to get accustomed to French. There will come a point when your brain has gotten so used to French that it does not seem unnatural any more for you. But if you jump right into French content which is not devised for beginners, you might feel overwhelmed and might lose motivation, although there are some people out there who have managed to learn a new language this way just by immersion. But for the rest of us, Assimil is a great help.

  Assimil provides easy-to-digest and funny lessons which start off very simple, very easy and very slow talking style. The pace of talking and the complexity of lessons gradually increases and you reach native speaker pace in the last 10 lessons with really high levels of French. It is amazing what Assimil manages to achieve in such a short book. The vocabulary is extensive and the grammar becomes so much a part of you without you having to memorize anything by rote. All you have to do is stick to a routine and do 1 or 2 lessons every day – that means around 30 minutes to 1 hour. What is important here is not just reading and listening, but repeating aloud. Let me repeat it again so that it is not lost – Repeating the content aloud is the most beneficial and the most important part of learning with Assimil. Do not miss it!

Here are the other courses I have completed

• Babbel.com (Stage 1 of the 1-year-long course consisting of 4 stages) – Babbel has lot of fanfare and this was the very first course I have started on and I was pleased with it in the first few days. But soon I realized that the approach is very traditional and you don’t learn a language like this – at least, I don’t learn a language this way. This could be an excellent supplement to another primary course like Michel Thomas or Assimil, but I would not recommend it as the first and the only course that you take. I have written a longer review on Babbel here about 1 year back and yet this is the most popular post in my blog. 
• LiveMocha.com Active French (All 4 levels)
• Live classes for 4 weeks conducted in my office

In addition to these courses, I have also done the following which are not necessarily courses, but these materials have helped me to improve my French

• I have read 3 French books (2 of them on LingQ.com and 1 on Kindle)
• I have listened to a lot of Podcasts from NewsInSlowFrench.com
• 2 Audiobooks from FrenchToday.com – A Moi Paris 1 & A Moi Paris 2

In addition to these, I have sampled a number of other courses, but did not pursue them fully – I have done a few lessons in most of these courses to allow me to evaluate whether they would work for me. Here is the list of courses I have looked that I can recall

• Busuu.com
• LiveMocha.com French
• BBC French
• MangoLanguages.com
• French in Action
• TV5 Monde
• HelloHello.com
• Carnegie Mellon Elementary French course
• Easy French Step by Step book
• Easy French Reader book
• Smart French

Progress Report – 9 Months of French

I have just returned from a trip to Paris last week, which was the culmination of my attempt to practice my French. When we started learning French, I and my wife decided that we will visit Paris when we finish the French courses that we have bought and we are at a reasonable level of fluency. We are nowhere near to completing all the courses that we bought. Anyway, we took the trip to see how much we have really learnt.

It felt so good to be able to talk to people in Paris in French, to ask for directions and  to understand what they were saying. To my surprise, a lot of people in Paris spoke English. I was expecting that everyone would talk only French. So, I was a bit disappointed :). My listening comprehension has improved a lot, especially when it comes to listening to answers that pertain to situations in everyday life. I could read most of the materials that were available for travelers in French and to understand them.

Progress Report – 8 Months of French

The last month was the most rewarding month in my French learning. Though I could spend very little time in studying any of the courses that I have purchased, I was able to use what I have learnt  in a lot of practical situations while I was in France. I have traveled to France a few times in the last month and I am so happy that I could manage moving around in France using French. Now, I am able to understand more and more of what the natives are talking back to me when I ask them a question and it feels so good.

Progress Report – 7 Months of French

This month, I have been able to spend very little time in learning French compared to previous months, due to other priorities taking over. I am well on my way into reading my second full-length French book – The Linguist by Steve Kaufmann who started the LingQ service. I have read about 10 chapters so far and I understand most of what I am reading and my confidence in understanding written French is increasing. LingQ website provides a facility to mark unknown words in every passage I read and then it calculates a statistic of how many words I know based on the texts I read and the unknown words I mark – as of now, it says that I know 3213 words in French.

Progress Report – 6 Months of French

I have completed reading my first full-length book in French and it feels so good. Based on the advice given by Aaron of Everyday Language Learner in his Guide to Sustaining, I have picked up a book on a topic that I am very interested in reading about. Though there was lot of new vocabulary and there were parts that I could not fully make sense of, I understood most of the contents.

Progress Report – 5 Months of French

In my last progress report, I mentioned that I will see  you again with my report of how I have fallen in love with French again. Fortunately, the forecast turned out to be true. Now, I am enjoying learning French all over again. The trick is to keep at it even in the in the face of loss of interest. What goes down comes up and what goes up comes down – this is a fact of life. We have to use the moments of high interest to achieve what we want before our interest wanes, but you can always get it back if you stay at the process for enough time – the key is persistence.

Michel Thomas French Total: Learning French can’t get easier than this

Most people who have tried learning French have a common complaint about French: French is very difficult to learn; the pronunciation is very difficult, the grammar is extremely hard, and for every rule, there are so many exceptions and so on. I also had the same impression when I started learning French. The few online courses I tried including LiveMocha, Babbel.com and even my favorite Assimil course served to reinforce the impression that French is a hard language to learn.

Enter Michael Thomas. I discovered Michael Thomas after I have completed about 30-40 lessons in Assimil.  When I completed my first hour of the Michel Thomas audio course, I had a question to myself: ‘Is the French language so easy to learn?’.

Progress Report – 4 Months of French

Technically, it has been 4 months now since I have started learning French. But I have not studied French much in the last 2 months. Hence, I have not moved much beyond my last progress report at the end of 2 months.  My vacation took the toll on my French learning.

In fact, it has been about 6 weeks since I have touched my Assimil French book. Though the actual vacation itself was around 2 weeks, preparing for the vacation and settling back from the travel took more than 1 month. When I came back, I have lost all my interest in French. In a way, it is very ironic – when I was in my vacation in Saudi Arabia, each time I opened my mouth to talk something in Arabic, French sentences were about fall off from my mouth. I had to stop myself and realize that I don’t need to talk French here but Arabic. I was very surprised that every time I thought of a situation to talk, French words and sentences were popping into my head on their own. I thought that this was a clue that I am hooked to French, but Alas, on my return, I realized that I have lost all my appetite for French.

Progress Report – 2 Months of French

It has been a month of tremendous progress both in completing the Assimil lessons and in applying what I have learnt in real-life situations. From 35 lessons last month, I have completed 96 lessons now. In another week, I hope I can complete Assimil French with ease.

Unlike last month when I felt that the lessons were becoming easier, this month I felt that the complexity of lessons have gone up tremendously. I have increased the time I put into studying my lessons, but despite that I was making less progress than what I expected to make. The speed of the audio dialogues have gone up – that is part of the reason, I guess. Then, all the tenses are now introduced – future, past imperfect & subjunctive. In the first 50 lessons, when I finish the lessons and do the exercise, I used to get all the exercises and fill-in-the-blanks correct. However, this time, I was getting most of the fill-in-the-blanks wrong. But it is not a problem. I look at my mistakes very positively as they are stepping stones to reach where I wanted to reach. The more mistakes I make, the more I learn.

Apart from Assimil, I have started listening to Michel Thomas French as well. Michel Thomas course is very impressive and his approach is very innovative and refreshing. I will write a post about it once I get through all the 10 hours. I was able to blaze through the course almost answering all the sentences he asks the students to build. Definitely, Assimil has equipped me with all the grammatical structures and vocabulary. But some of the aspects of spoken french that I took a long time to figure out through Assimil were presented very well in Michel Thomas. If you are starting with French, I recommend that you start with Michel Thomas or do Michel Thomas along with Assimil. They are 2 different approaches with advantages on their own. But Michel Thomas will give you a feeling that French is very easy and he will get you talking much much faster. To me, easy or hard is in your mind and to the materials/approach that you take in the initial days to learn the language. Michel Thomas will definitely give you the feeling that French is an easy language to learn.

I also started watching French in Action by Pierre Capretz produced by Yale University in the 80s. It is an immersion-based approach to learning French and it has a cult following. I watched about 7 lessons so far and I thoroughly enjoy it. I was able to understand most of the lessons. If you want an enjoyable way to learn French, you should check this out. The videos are available for free in the US at http://www.learner.org/resources/series83.html. If you are outside the US, check them out on youtube – http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL505B8B9F38FDB303

Overall, I am happy with what I have been able to achieve in in 2 months with Assimil. I surprise my colleagues often by uttering some perfect french sentences in the middle of our conversations in English – these phrases almost jump out of my mind at the right time – that is the biggest benefit I see in Assimil.

In the next month, I intend to reduce my focus on learning more vocabulary or grammar. I have to apply what I have learnt before taking on much more. I will check out other courses that i have bought to reinforce what I have learnt. I will look for more ways to practice French. If you have any interesting ideas, please share them with me.

I did it – Moments of triumph in my french journey

Today, I had to visit the social security office and the tax office of Geneva. It was during my last visit to the tax office that I got my resolve to start learning French – I could not get my way around with English and it was frustrating to go around and talk to different people without understanding much.

So, with 2 months of French learning, I was confident that I would be able to at least have a better experience compared to last time. I resolved not to talk a sentence in English and to try to get by using French only.

So, on the way to the social security office, I thought about what I wanted to talk and prepared the sentences. So, I entered the room ready to utter out a few French sentences.  I was a greeted by a gentleman who talks fluent English who was usually called in to talk to me during my earlier trips. Alas, an opportunity lost.

Then, I got my opportunity again, but this time I had no time to prepare as it was unplanned meeting. I had to meet another officer for getting some clarifications. So, with no time to even think about what I had to say, I entered the room with a resolve to try to talk as much French as I can. I explained to her the problem in broken French and she was able to understand. Then, she did some research and answered me – I understood what she said perfectly. I wanted to ask a few additional clarifications, which are just nice-to-have information and I was a little hesitant whether to ask them or not, as the sentences were a bit complex – However, I decided to take the plunge and uttered out my sentence. To my surprise, she understood and she replied to me smiling. I apologized for my bad French and I told her that I am just learning French – she smiled and was very graceful.

Then, I went to the tax department and I asked directions at the reception even though I remembered where to go. She asked me for some information and then she gave me the direction – I had some difficulty in understanding some of what she said. But after 2 repetitions and a little of guessing  based on context, I understood her question.

On my way back to office, I was feeling so good that I was able to get by without using any English. My confidence has really soared after these 2 meetings. Then, I went to the usual restaurant that I visit, but decided to talk in French. The server was asking me questions in English but I was answering in French – it was a bit funny. He must be wondering what happened to me 🙂

Then, I came to my office and received a parcel from Assimil. I ordered the next book in Assimil series as I am about to complete the French with ease. But I received a Russian book. So, I had to write to Assimil. So, rather than writing in English, I decided to write in French. I first typed the French sentences in Google translate to see how Google is translating my sentences into English and with a bit of lookup to fill the gaps in my knowledge, I sent the mail. It was not a long mail, but I am feeling great that I am able to accomplish little tasks in French.

For those of you who know French and who are curious, here is what I have written – you are welcome to point out errors in my sentences.

Bonjour Madame Valerie.

malheuresement, il y a un problème. J’ai reçu le livre qui s’appelle “Russian with ease”, tandis que j’ai commandé duex autres livres: “Using French” et “l’arabe sans Peine”. Alors, comment puis-je retourner cet envoi et recevoir les bons livres?

excusez-moi pour mon français. j’apprends le français maintenant avec Assimil et je veux utiliser ce que j’ai appris.

Small victories for 1 month of Assimil French

Last week, in about a month since we started Assimil French, we have completed the Passive phase which corresponds to 49 lessons. From 50^th lesson onwards, we have to go back to Lesson 1 and should translate from English to French. We have covered 10 lessons now in Active phase – I must say that I am surprised at the ease with which we are able to translate from French to English.

When we got the first lesson perfectly correct, my wife was saying that it was because we might have unconsciously memorized the first lesson. Being the first lesson, I have listened to  that lesson so many times that I could repeat the entire dialogue from memory. However, now that we have completed 10 lessons in active phase, I am realizing that is not pure memorization alone. It is not possible to memorize so many sentences and new words in such a short period of time. There is something else at work – I can’t nail down what it is exactly. May be, this is what the Assimil team calls assimiliation.

The objective of learning a new language is to memorize words and phrases and the grammar rules so that you can form sentences on your own. I always felt that memorizing sentences is easier than memorizing individual words. When I learnt English vocabulary in school days, I always learnt an example sentence for every new word that I studied – this made the memorization easier. Now, with Assimil, when I listen to the dialogues which consists of 10 or more sentences many times, most of the words in the entire dialogue are etched on to my memory because there is a story line and it is easy to learn many new words when there is a thread running through them. Also, in most of the lessons, there is some fun element which makes the memorization process even easier. This is why most of us can recollect entire stories without much conscious effort. Assimil has taken that concept and applied it to language learning, I guess. The process is so easy and so enjoyable.

What is surprising is that many grammatical structures which were introduced in the first 10 lessons seem so natural to me – this would not have been possible if I sat with a grammar book and tried to consciously learn new rules and example sentences for each new rule. Assimil’s claim is very true – your mind assimilates lot of information quite easily if you present information in a certain way. I try to remember the key advice from Assimil’s introduction – ‘if you accept rather than analyse, which is the problem of most adult-learners, you will learn a lot more and you will enjoy the process’. Every once in a while, I get an urge to analyse the sentence structures, but I resist the temptation and try to follow the advice. And it has worked quite well so far.

There are lot of small victories I had in this 1 month. Here are some of them:

1. 2 weeks back, we went to Val Thoiry, a town in France, which is very close to Geneva for shopping. We could understand most of the notice boards on the shops that we visited. I managed to even order coffee and sandwiches without talking a word in English. I and my wife felt so good that we could reach this point in just 1 month of studying.
2. Last week, I also visited Lyon for work-related reasons. Like a little child on the road, I was trying to read every road sign that I came across. I tried to read everything I came across in the office that I visited and I was able to understand lot of things after reading them a few times over.
3. This week, we visited Ikea and I was able to read most of the notice boards and understand them fully. I remember my first few visits to Ikea when I struggled to purchase a pillow and blanket without knowing French.
4. I tried to talk in French as much as I can when I visit a restaurant so that I can put to use what I am learning.

Overall, it is such a great feeling that we are able to progress so much without much frustration. We have been very sincerely putting in at least 1 hr every day in learning French. And it is paying off. I am looking forward to completing my Assimil book to see what level I can reach.

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.

Completed 3rd week of Assimil French

I have completed all the 7 lessons in the 3rd week in 3 days. It feels so good now. I was not moving forward until I feel that I have mastered a lesson completely. In the first 2 weeks, there were some lessons which I did not feel fully comfortable even after listening to the audio for 30-35 times. Now things seem to have gotten easier. I am able to recognize some sentences even without reading the French text and the pronunciation now feels a bit easier and more intuitive. Now I am able to see patterns in sentence construction and in pronunciation of words. I am surprised at my own progress. Rather than proceeding to the next week’s lessons, I decided to revise all the earlier lessons to solidify the concepts.

Without much effort, I am becoming more and more comfortable with the French sentence structure. Like the tune of a good song, the sounds of the dialogue are lingering on in my mind. The way Assimil has structured the lessons is beautiful. There is lot of variety in the lessons. Revision is built into the lessons; you don’t have to sit and memorize anything. Important constructs are repeated again so that they become natural to you in a few days. I really love the fun element in most of the lessons. The whole dialogue is easy to recollect and once I think of a lesson, the dialogue just seems to flow in my mind on its own. This is the probably the easiest learning method that I have seen in my life. I have to wait till the end of the course to see how effective it is, though.

Learning from the children to learn French

One of the methodologies that we, adults, most often adopt to learn a language is to get a list of words and start memorizing them. And to make things worse, we also get a grammar book and start memorizing the rules. Abstract lists of unconnected words and abstract rules of grammar are not a treat for our brain – so, the whole process is a chore.  We get bored and discouraged quickly and start complaining about how difficult the target language is, how ridiculous the grammar rules and the pronunciations are or how bad a learner we are.

I decided to take a break from this approach and try something new looking at the way a child learns a language.  A child is constantly listening – he is soaking in all the words that adults around him are using. Over time, because of the context, the child is able to understand the meanings of most of the words without anyone telling him their meaning. In some cases, they ask an adult if they don’t understand a word. A child is also very curious – curious about everything he is hearing and curious to speak/apply what he has learnt.

So, for learning French, I decided to avoid any vocabulary lists stripped of context. I am keeping my eyes and ears open to soak in as much French content as possible. I have changed my iPhone interface to French and I am using Amazon.fr to do my shopping and I am trying to read every notice/announcement in French  – in the tram, in the supermarkets, in the coffee shop and in the office.  So, I am flooded with new vocabulary, but I don’t look all of them up immediately. I look up some important items immediately, but others I look them up after I have seen them a few times. I can guess the meaning of  some words after seeing them a few items in different contexts. Then when I look up, my mind immediately absorbs the meaning of the word as my brain has  lot of associations with the word – the word is connected to me in some way – this is the most important point when it comes to learning vocabulary. The more you are connected to the word in some way, the easier it is to remember the meaning. At this point, I enter the word and its translation into my SRS software on my iPhone (Flashcard Deluxe) and then use the systematic repetition to etch that word into my memory permanently.

When it comes to pronunciation and grammar, you should not start with rules, but start with content first and build enough connections in your brain. When you see members from any population, be it words, people or things,you start to notice patterns. The 80/20 rule applies to most populations. 80 percent of the population fits into a certain pattern and the remaining 20 percent can have many exceptions. If you are exposed to the members of the population and then you are introduced to the patterns, then the patterns seem intuitive and the exceptions don’t seem daunting. Instead, if you start with a list of rules and a list of exception to the rules, you will surely be frustrated.

When I started learning French, I wanted to know how each letter of the alphabet is pronounced. So, I picked up a grammar book and I read the rules of pronunciation and the exceptions to the rules and you can guess the outcome – I was very frustrated and I was not learning much. Then, fortunately, Assimil came my way and I forgot all of these rules and focused only on learning individual words and their pronunications without trying to analyze too much how the sound is formed – I listened and repeated. And I listened and repeated. Now, after having listened to 15 lessons in Assimil, I am starting to see patterns in pronunications and in grammar rules and the process is very enjoyable. When grammar rules are introduced, they seem very intuitive and they stick in my mind immediately.

So, the next time you are learning any language, try these 2 tips and let me know whether they work for you.

Progress Report – 2 Weeks of French

It has been 2 weeks since we have started learning French seriously. Here is what we have achieved so far.

Courses

• Completed Stage 1 of Babbel.com’s yearlong course which corresponds to A1 level. Though officially we have a certificate from Babbel.com that we know the material for A1, this course has not really given me the confidence and intuitive understanding of how the language works. It has equipped me with a good set of vocabulary along with some helpful rules of grammar.
• Completed 2 modules (14 Lessons) of Assimili French courses. I started this only 10 days back after trying many online courses and by far, this is the best course that I have seen. I revised the last 2 weeks’ material yesterday and I am beginning to understand intuitively how the language works. Without the need to explicitly sit and memorize word lists, I have actually learnt a lot of words in their proper context.
• Completed 5 stories in Easy French Reader. It is a joy to read this book as it is very easy and has very little vocabulary exactly suited for our level now.
• I completed 2 lessons of Livemocha’s Basic French, but discontinued it after I found Assimil. My wife has completed the Level 1 of Livemocha’s Active French and she plans to complete all 4 Levels in that course. We decided that we can try different courses to see how they measure up.

Results

• French pronunciation is not a mystery anymore and it is not as daunting or frustrating as it seemed to be in the first 2-3 days. Now, I am able to recognize a few words when I listen to a live conversation.
• We had 2 outings where we tried to use what we learnt successfully. I was able to ask some basic questions in the market. It was such a great feeling last week when I was able to coin a question in French to ask ‘Do you have grapes without seeds?’. We are trying to actively apply whatever little we know so that we get into the habit of using the language, thanks to the advice of Bennie Lewis in his Language Hacking Guide.
• We are trying to actively read the notices/billboards on the way and we are trying to decipher any French material that we get – it is an enjoyable process now as we are able to understand some sentences.

So far, it has been a wonderful ride. The best thing that has happened to me in the last 2 week is finding the Assimil course. It has been such an enjoyable course. It has taken all the frustration out of learning a new language. Thank you Assimil Team for such an incredible job.