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!