A test of will

I have always been a fairly strong-willed person.

As a kid, I used to get a free cookie when I went grocery shopping with my dad, but unlike most, I wouldn’t eat the cookie in the store, or on the way home, or all afternoon. I’d leave it on the kitchen counter all morning and all afternoon until my mom came home from work and I could show her my prize. Then, and only then, would I allow myself to eat it. (Oh, the strangeness of children.)

When I started on this project, I knew I’d need the same willpower – not to keep from eating cookies, but to have the motivation and determination to continue learning French every day.

Learning a language on your own through new media, as opposed to a course through an institution, means a lot of responsibility now falls into your hands.

The curriculum, for one thing. Instruction, another.

Until now, I’d never realised how much easier it is to learn something when the student’s job is simply to attend class and do what the instructor tells them, trusting that the person guiding the lesson is organized and knowledgeable enough to help their students learn.

Without the teacher acting as a sort of prompt to encourage learning, you’re left up to your own initiative, which is both positive and negative. Being in charge of your own personal classroom is a lot of work!

Going to class

Voici ma classe!

Learning whenever and wherever you want is one of the best things about learning French through new media. It’s also one of the worst things.

With institutional learning, class occurs at a set time and place. If you attend, you learn; if you don’t, you luck out. With independent learning, you have all the time in the world to go to class, and sometimes even that isn’t enough time.

When was taking spring courses, I treated my IPP just like any other course and set aside an hour at a certain time of day to listen to my French lessons.

Now that its summer, I decided a needed a break and scrapped the strict schedule – and I’ve been paying for it. Summer is the time for visiting relatives, spontaneous beach trips, and evening drinks on the patio. Suddenly, it’s midnight and I’ve an hour of lessons to slog through.

Take it from me – you need a schedule. But if you want to take it easy, pair up your lessons with one of your already regular activities and listen on your evening walk, during dinner, or your exercise routine. Just make sure it’s not too mentally taxing so you can concentrate on learning!

Participation

I’ll be honest – sometimes it’s embarrassing and awkward to be learning French the way I’m doing it.

Podcasts, online videos, virtual flash card games, and other new media resources bring an interesting context to learning, especially when what you’re learning requires you to say phrases out loud.

Sure, talking to yourself in public can get you weird looks, but try talking to yourself in French in public – especially poorly-accented, beginner French. Needless to say, it’s often tempting to remain silent when the podcast pauses to give you a chance to repeat a phrase in French.

Unfortunately, you won’t learn anything without trying to say it yourself. Because of this, I try to do my lessons somewhere private, but even then, it’s often easier just to sit and listen, or reply in your head, rather than actively engage with the lesson and speak aloud.

To get over this, I’ve found it helpful to imagine myself in a classroom-like setting, sitting with the people on the podcast so it doesn’t feel quite as uninteresting as talking to your walls. Luckily, those I’ve used so far (Michel Thomas and Coffee Break French), are formatted like a lecture, or small group lesson, so it's not hard to envision.

It’s even easier when you know what the podcasters actually look like!:

Getting help

When it comes to asking questions or solving problems, raising your hand won’t do the trick. The person on your podcast, video, or CD may be acting as your teacher, but they aren’t nearly as accessible as an instructor in a classroom.

Some resources, like Coffee Break French, offer online support where listeners can post questions to the community. In most cases, however, getting help will mean doing some Googling on your own.

There is an abundance of French language help on the Internet (be sure the author is credible and always cross-check another resource) so this likely won’t be a problem. Actively taking the time to do it will be.

It’s easy to disregard something you don’t understand when there isn’t an instructor or final exam to catch you for it. And when you’ve got a long list of podcasts to go through, it’s tempting to move along to the next lesson instead of replaying what you just heard.

Like anything, however, it’s important to clear things up as soon as possible – it’ll only catch up to you later. And with learning French, ‘later’ could be when you’re trying to converse with that attractive Parisian boy (or girl), in which case, you won’t want to make a linguistic error!

“English is all French, badly pronounced”

Review: Michel Thomas For Beginners CD set

Contains: 10 CDs (two of them for review), 1 hour each

Affordability: best to borrow from a library if you can. 10 CD sets go for about $100 in stores, but can be bought in smaller packs off iTunes.

In looking for audio CDs to try for this project, the two that consistently kept popping up were Michel Thomas and Pimsleur, often with comparisons and the pros/cons of each.

While both have equally good reviews, I went with Michel Thomas – not because he taught French to celebrities (!) – but because I was intriuged by his method.

In the introduction to the CD set, Thomas states that he discourages his students from taking notes, or memorizing concepts; instead, those learning from him are told to relax and trust that the teacher will be responsible for their learning.

At the time, I was in school every day, juggling two spring courses and a part-time job, so I felt assured by Thomas’ promise that I’d learn French “without drill, without textbooks, without taking notes, and without homework, without any mental homework”.

In this sense, Michel Thomas was ideal for my situation; in fact, if you’re accustomed to the sort of lecture teaching style of post-secondary institutions, you’ll find Thomas’ format similar and quite familiar.

Effectiveness:

1. Learning

Thomas guarantees that students of his will have a practical and functional use of the French language after 10-12 hours of instruction. Surprisingly, he’s right! This is achieved in two ways:

a) Using your English vocabulary to expand your French vocabulary. Thomas begins the CD set with some fun facts on the similarities between English and French. Mainly, that almost 2 out of 3 words in english come from french and in most cases the difference between the two is merely a question of accent. As the French author Alexandre Dumas noted, “English is all French, badly pronounced”.

Vocabulary becomes vocabulaire; liberty, liberté. In this way, you’re easily able to express yourself in simple sentences immediately, and learning vocabularly becomes a matter of knowledge, not memorization.

b) Focusing on structural understanding, not situational learning. Many of the programs I came across in my research take a categorical approach to teaching French, in that you learn handy phrases to say in certain situations – like ordering food – without actually tackling how sentences are formed by how nouns, verbs, etc. fit together. This is all fine and dandy until you find yourself in a situation you weren’t prepped for and spoon fed conversational pieces.

Michel Thomas explains why French is spoken the way it is spoken - how it is structured so that you are able to form your own sentences through understanding, not memorization.

c) Also of note: The difficulty with this method is that it is so drastically different from what you may have been taught in school. As memories start coming back, you may have to mentally restrain yourself from asking why Thomas is teaching you differently than how you were previously taught.

Depending on your old French teacher, one of these differences might be learning to speak French as the French do, with all their shortcuts, conjunctions between words, and tricks of meaning, which Thomas introduces right from the start.

For instance, “that’s not what I mean”, is said “c’nest pas ce que je veux dire” (it isn’t what I want to say).

“Ca ne va pas” (it isn’t going) is pronounced as “san va pas” – contracting “ce” and “ne” like native speakers would– instead of “sa ne va pas”, which is how many beginners are taught to say it.

2. Performance/Operation

a) Pause for listener's response: The first few times Thomas asks “how would you say...”, a short buzzer sounds and a pause is left for the listener to think out their answer and respond outloud in time before Thomas gives the correct response.

After a few turns, it becomes obvious the pauses aren’t adjusted depending on the complexity of the response; even worse, pauses are eliminated completely after the first CD.

This significantly affects where and how you can use the Michel Thomas CDs, as I frequently had to quickly pause the lesson to give myself enough time to respond before the other two students on the CD or Thomas himself gave their answer.

This makes it difficult to listen to while exercising – unless you have a free hand – and nearly impossible (and dangerous!) while commuting if you're behind the wheel:

b) Lesson pace: Thomas’ speed of instruction is fairly relaxed and professor-esque; he sometimes takes the roundabout way of explaining things.

My main issue with the program, however, was the female student also recorded in the lessons who learned at a slower pace than me and the other male student.

My guess is that the producers wanted to accomodate both quick and moderate learning speeds, but I felt her difficultly at grasping concepts often slowed down the lessons.

c) iPod/mp3 capability: Like any other CD, you can download Michel Thomas onto your computer or iPod, with each CD having approximately 10 tracks.

The downside is that you may have to do some tweaking to make sure you listen to those tracks in order:

As you can see, the track titles aren’t consistent, and when downloading the CDs through iTunes, I lost the track numbers and had to put them in manually. The tracks are divided (loosely) by topic, and would benefit from beginning each one with “track __ of __”.

d) Review option: The beginners set I received from the library came with two review CDs that are extremely helpful for when you need to refresh your memory, or want to test yourself.

These are done at a more faster, drill-like pace, with Thomas asking “how would you say...”, with a pause for your response. The other two students and Thomas’ explanations are cut out for these CDs.

The bottom line:

Quality program with some operational setbacks. You will be speaking practical, conversational French by the end, and have a structural, not situational or memorizable understanding of the language.