LingoSchmingo

I’m very keen to reactivate my French.  A while back I could hold my own pretty well in the language but it’s atrophied somewhat. Domage.  I’d like to get it switched back on and be able to say that I’m trilingual (that has a nice ring to it).

My first plan of attack it to use the tried and tested brace of Anki and Tatoeba – Tatoeba to look up sample sentences and Anki to get these phrases committed to memory.  At present, in French, this isn’t really taking up more than ten minutes or so of my time so I’m keen to start trying out shadowing – a language technique promoted by Alexander Arguelles.  The text that I’ll be using for shadowing is Assimil French With Ease.  This course comes with audio and bilingual texts – so far, the sound of the text is very clear and the content of the course seems very thorough, although perhaps a little too easy.  The content is surprisingly dark-humoured which pleases me no end.

One variation to the technique is that I won’t be doing this outside.  I’ve tried hard to justify whether I would be able to walk purposefully around talking to myself in East London – the answer is a resounding No.  There are plenty of other ways I can do this in the safety of my own home whilst moving around – making bread, doing the washing up etc.

My aim is always be running ten lessons in a row i.e. from lesson 1 to lesson 10 today, lesson to to lesson 11 tomorrow etc. etc.  If I have the time I may increase the amount I do every day.

In the meantime, I’m continuing to use Anki and Tatoeba to keep my French going and am watching perhaps two hours of German a week and speaking German for about two or three hours a week – perhaps not a large amount but hopefully sufficient so that I’ll be able to start concentrating a little more seriously on consuming a good amount of French content in my free time.