reprend la langue française

[I’m going to go ahead and write about this in English, since I wanted to find a review before a never have…]

I broke down, spent my hundred bucks and bought Rocket French. I know that eventually I’ll have to take a class to really iron out the kinks in my grammar and get more comfortable speaking in front of actual French people [horrors!], but I figured something was better than nothing. Since my boyfriend cut me off a few months back, I haven’t gotten back to really working on verbs and grammar and I’d also like an audio course that I can carry around and listen to while I walk home.

This program isn’t meant for intermediate level speakers. However, it looks like it has all the pieces to get someone who honestly wants to put in the effort to learn French. It may not be as intensive as a face-to-face course, but if you’re willing to put in the time, there are lots of components that will help you along. The majority of the course is a textbook with embedded sound effects that speak out the French words. There are also a series of audio lessons that are roughly 20-30 minutes. In these, they go over a simple dialogue and break it down into its component parts. This course is not immersive and you read their lessons in English [all of the speakers on the audio tape are New Zealanders, which is actually really cute…]. It’s a little annoying for me as a French speaker who’s always been taught in immersive classes, but it also means that I’ll get through it more quickly and anyone who doesn’t speak French well will absolutely understand what’s going on with the grammar. Most language courses are immersive these days or switch when students are ready to understand basic commands. I actually have a hard time switching and translating so I don’t know if this will help or just be confusant. Even the verb form names are translated—apparently passé composé is called “past perfect” in English.

I was looking forward to the software that helps with verbs and vocabulary, but the vocabulary games are pretty basic [spring! 13!] and the verb game is pretty crappy. I have a mac, and the verb game forces my computer’s processors to spin all the way up and stay there. It takes a good five seconds between questions, which is long enough for my mind to wander pretty far from learning verbs. It didn’t understand “vous êtes” no matter how many different ways I typed it in and it also marked me wrong when I added a space to the end of an answer. Pretty crappy all round. Neither of them track your progress or remember which words you can’t do well. I didn’t expect My French Coach to be best of breed here. I was looking forward to the vocabulary builder and verb games, and I’m disappointed in both. I remember seeing a french verb quiz game that I downloaded a while back, so maybe I’ll think about using that more.

My plan is to read through the “textbook” out of Rocket French and start doing the homework when I get to the things that I don’t do well [namely, conjugating verbs, remembering to add an “e” or “s” to things…]. For some reason, the people who wrote the PDFs neglected to make the fill-in-the blanks parts fill-in-able, but I’ll manage.

Je n’ai plus de faire au travaille juste maintenant, et puis j’ai surfé sur l’internet pour un peu du temps. J’ai lu le nytimes ce matin, et c’est un jour sans beaucoup de nouvelles, sauf que la guerre en Géorgie or les JOs. J’ai décidé de venir sur Wikipedia et voir ce que je pourrais voir. L’idée m’est venue que je n’ai jamais trouvé un journal français ou francophone sur l’internet, et ça va être une bonne chose pour moi á rechercher. Je n’était pas certaine que je le pourrais lire.

Je suis venu a le site pour Le Monde et bien que je ne savais pas toute les mots là, je pourrais comprendre le sens de les articles et des phrases. Il y a plusieurs mots de vocabulaire que je ne pourrais comprendre, mais pour le plupart, ils sont des mots qui viennent de latin et le pourrais comprendre dans la contexte de la phrase.

Je me débats plus si je veux acheter le logiciel. Je ne suis pas certains si je le veux vraiment.. ou pas, actuellement… Quand j’ai surfé, encore je n’ai jamais trouvé un revue vrai et sans biais de ce logiciel. Il y a un garantie, mais il faut que je réfléchirai plus.

My French vocabulary game is getting a little boring and I haven’t been using it much. I like the feature that lets you hear the words, especially since French is a lot like English and totally medieval and tricky in the way they spell and pronounce things. The game itself is not very well set up, although I did buy the Spanish version at a stoop sale. [We don’t have yards or garages in my neighborhood.]

I’m debating buying a French program to work through on my Mac. One of the ones I looked into was Rocket French but… I know this is an odd thing, but I felt like I couldn’t find a review of it that I really believed was honest and unbiased. There were a lot of people who set up websites and had bought URLS to review their copy of Rocket French, but it’s not available on Amazon and I haven’t found someone’s personally written, long-term review where they used the program for a month and told everyone about it. I’ve read lots of things that are very general and positive, but very little that seems like it’s unbiased. Since I already sorta speak French and want something that will help me drill verbs and build vocabulary, I want to make sure that I buy something that’s on grade level for me. I could always just buy it and see what it’s like, but… Anyone got some free time to Google around and see what comes up? I don’t know that the people who’ve made these programs have actually stacked the deck, but it sure looks like it… I fully expect that once I post this every single ad by the side of the site will have “Rocket French review!” as its title.

Every time I think about posting on this goal, I think it’ll be too hard to update it in French… I’m going to let myself post in English too.

I’ve been playing My French Coach for pretty consistently for the the last few weeks. I don’t know if it’s the best thing ever, but it has at least kept me doing something, which is good. It’s pretty lightweight as an educational tool, but it does have pronunciations for every word and lets you compare your voice with the actress’s. I have been learning new words and reviewing old ones this way, and I’m about half-way through the lessons. I think it’s most useful as a dictionary and pronunciation tool, honestly.

I was talking to my boyfriend about my schedule in general, which goes like this: get up, study or knit on the subway, go to work, study or knit on the subway, go to the gym, eat dinner, study French for an hour or so, relax for that last hour before bed, go to sleep. It kinda feels like my schedule from high school. A little less hectic than when I was in school, but it’s not… fun or flexible and I don’t have time to relax or goof off. When I was studying Spanish last semester, I had a definite goal: get ready before I go to Ecuador. I studied an hour or so each night and put in a ton of effort to get up to speed. I don’t have a vacation to a French speaking country planned, I just want to be able to speak and write better. I have all the time in the world to do that…

The upshot of my conversation with my boyfriend was that he confiscated my ring of flash cards and told me to relax. I can’t have twelve all-consuming hobbies and expect to be sane. Instead of cramming in a bunch of grammar into my schedule, I’m going to drop the French class I was planning on taking and do the studying that I’d rather be doing. I have all these French books I’ve never had the time to read [Le Petit Prince, James et la Grosse Pêche!], and I bought a video game that I haven’t had time to play. I don’t have to jump into formal studies or spend hours with La Grammaire à l’oeuvre to reprend…

I promise myself that for each book I finish, I can go buy one more at la librairie française. I still need to brush up on my grammar, but I’m not planning on doing three pages out of the work book a night.

J’ai acheté un cahier et un livre pour étudier une fois. J’ai lu le livre et il est très ennuyeux, mais le cahier est très utile. Hier soir, j’ai essayé un peu de les exercices et ils sont pas mal… Ils sont un peu faciles pour moi, mais maintenant, il va. Il faut que je fait deux ou trois exercices du jour si je veux être prêt pour ma classe. Ce cahier et mon livre de grammaire sera les deux livres que je vais utiliser avant de ma classe.

As it turns out, I had a workbook already and I’ve started working through the lessons in it. They’re pretty easy, but they will do for now. Between that workbook and my old grammar book, I’m all set! That other grammar book was a great cure for insomnia, but I’m glad the workbook turned out to be useful…

Now, I need to:

Drop by the bookstore and see what they have for my class.
Get through at least two pages a day in that workbook, more if I want to really catch up.
Go over more of the grammar in my grammar book—at least a half-hour a day, no matter how sleepy grammar makes me.

Something is up with the site today—it keeps eating my entries! I had a nice one written, with a good chunk of it in French, but… sigh.

This is a year-long goal, I think. I can produce French, just not good French, and I don’t always know where things are coming from. I don’t expect to become fluent, but I do want to be better at this by the end of next year. I start a course [French 4!] in February and need to get my act together before then. Eventually [just to warn you guys], I would like to write most of my entries for this goal in French, although I plan on giving a summary or translation in English so you can all keep me honest.

My mini-goals for this goal:

Review French grammar and verbs in my two grammar text books.
Practice with my vocabulary game.
Buy a good workbook.
Figure out what I do and don’t know.