300 Days of French

Published on Sunday, January 31 2021 • 2 minutes read

It's been a weird year. Quarantine started sometime in March last year, right? 🤷‍♂️

I started learning French as one of the activities/hobbies that I picked up last year. Surprisingly, without making a resolution, I continued doing this and today, we're here at the 300 day mark.

Apparently, it takes 21 days to make a habit. Not sure if I'd agree, but I think even if you miss a couple of days, that could be true. But, for me, I didn't want to miss even a single day. So the three hundred day mark today, is a streak. Didn't miss a single day. So how was it? I learnt something or the other every single day. And I think if you want to keep learning every single day, like a habit, it's still a constant every day effort. Sometimes, you feel really good to learn something new; but there are days where it's just too difficult to continue. Yes there were a lot of days like this and I just finished one lesson on Duolingo.

So what and how did I learn?

I have also made a YouTube video about this - 300 Days of French, but writing things in detail here..

Duolingo

I started with Duolingo. When you start off any language, only lessons - topics with 5 levels - are available to you. Here I learnt basic nouns, pronouns and verbs.

Now I could say things like

• j'apprends le français..

• je parle l'anglais

The lessons started to get a bit more complex and I learnt topics like adverbs, prepositions.

• je suis à la maison

Language Exchange Apps

Language exchange apps are really cool. You can talk to and help people who are learning languages. You can also talk to people who know the language you're learning. That'll really help with conversations. Because, really, the spoken languages are really nothing like how they appear in literature. Still doing this and this is great.

YouTube and other Streaming Platforms

I started watching content that focus on French. So the set of what I can watch has increased drastically.

There are extensions which you can use to see subtitles in both English and French, these help in understanding that the actors are saying as sometimes it's just too difficult to understand because some people speak so fast. (at least for me)

YouTube Channel recommendations:

• Street French
• Manonb travels
• Learn French With Alexa

Netflix recommendations:

• Da Vinci Code
• Emily in Paris
• Lupin

Books

Nowadays, I'm doing this; basically trying to find a good book that explains tenses well. Also helps understand the rules of the language.

Other misc stuff

Learning about accents - aigu, grave, etc,.

Future Work

At some point, when I am able to speak to myself in French and hopefully think in French, I'd want to focus on pronunciation - actors like Omar Sy and Audrey Tautou.

Yeah, so that's pretty much it for the language journey so far. Let me know what you've been upto. You can check out what's up on Instagram - @mrsauravsahu

Bonne journée et à bientôt.