In a couple of minutes, I will go back to my daily French studies and tackle the transcript to an intermediate level podcast I'm listening to. It has been two months now since I decided to go back to French - the language I was most happy to drop from my school schedule some 10 years ago. To clarify this, I never spoke French to any level of fluency, I just endured three painful years of French in high school.
For its comeback, I wanted to make it as plain and simple as possible: No grammar studies, no Anki and no textbooks. My only resource for the first month was the Mini-stories course at LingQ. So I just spent the time walking the dog or doing housework listening to these easy stories. And I didn't allow any distraction from this, no youtube videos, basically no other resource at all. I noticed how my Spanish, English and Portuguese helped with the comprehension (I am still not sure if this is really an advantage) and how therefore I soon felt that I was ready for more advanced content. Hence, after finishing the Mini-Stories and two additional short Beginner courses at LingQ (Who is She, Eating Out) I began listening to the AMAZING podcast InnerFrench. Each episode is about 30 minutes long and deals with genuinely interesting topics. The presenter Hugo has a really nice voice and just makes it easy to understand him. I don't plan anything more but to listen to his podcast for the next weeks. I'm already at three thousand "words" at LingQ and I can see how more difficult content like the Netflix series Lupin gets more and more comprehensible (dropping new words statistic).
I want to share this experience because my revelation is that if you found a resource you like and that somehow keeps you making progress (comprehensible input certainly does) then just push through, even though there might be better resources or methods. What will happen with my French-speaking and writing skills? I honestly don't know more than that my potential to write well and to speak fluently will be eventually higher than two months ago. By the end of the year I expect to be at a decent level of comprehension and then I will reset probably my methods to incorporate more deliberate practice and include speaking and writing in my routine. Doing this being already comfortable with the language will make the process a lot smoother, I reckon. So, on y va!
Very good post and initiative. Vas y!
Thanks a lot for your corrections! A lot of my mistakes in English seem to come from missing commas. Unfortunately, I have the same problem in German and Spanish (both languages I'm a bit more comfortable with) and still didn't manage to fix it. Commas save lives (at least that's what they told me at school), so I should do some deliberate practice.
Yes, punctuation is very important. One thing that may help you (which is what I do whenever I correct a post) is to read your posts aloud. Whenever you see that there's a pause, consider whether there shouldn't be a comma there. You may also find that some parts are too wordy - like "I soon felt that I was ready for..." This isn't incorrect, but it's not as succinct as "felt I was ready" and you may appreciate that only when you actually speak the words. But you're English is amazing, AC, make no mistake! My corrections are only to fine-tune what's already brilliant)))