It has really been awhile since I have had the time to blog, the last couple of months have been incredibly busy for me, and this alone merits its own blog post, but we shall put that off for another day.

As busy as the last few months have been, I have not neglected my language learning 😙. I have been religiously improving my French 🇫🇷!

How have I been learning 📚?

When I first started my new job, there was one thing about it that I absolutely hated, i.e. the commute 😥. Each trip to my work place requires about 50 minutes, a round trip takes up slightly more than an hour and a half each day! And one does not usually do anything productive during a typically uncomfortable train ride, besides we can’t really achieve do anything useful in that short period of time, no?

But one day I decided to try something new…

It is typical for people to spend their time during daily commutes watching YouTube videos. But one day, I decided to take a leap of faith and started to learning to French podcasts on YouTube. In the beginning, I was not completely sure if I could have really pulled it off. Because at that time I was incredibly new to the language, my understanding of the 🇫🇷 grammar was mediocre at best and my vocabulary was even worse.

And then the most miraculous thing happened, I started enjoying it!

Did I understand everything I heard? Of course not, I spent half of my time looking up the new words on Google, I was truly learning on the fly. But the most important thing was the fact that the podcasts were interesting! I was learning about things that were happening on the other side of the world, such as the war against Airbnb in Paris and the French education system.

The Fruits of My Labour 🍋🍊🍇🍐🍏

By virtue of how entertaining and amusing I found the entire exercise, it eventually became something I did everyday. And with that, I was being exposed to the 🇫🇷 language for about a 100 minutes each day! And boy do those hours add up, it is safe to say that I have improved a great great deal since I first started off 6 months ago 😄.

Nowadays, I am still doing what I was doing previously, the only difference is that I am now way more confident that I was before. I feel like I am finally beginning to enjoy the fruits of my hard work. Watching French YouTube videos has indeed been an incredibly illuminating experience1. I spend of my most time nowadays watching videos that discuss recent world events, this of course kills two birds with one stone as not only am I able to keep myself up to date with the affairs of the world, I am also able to expand my vocabulary.

The Secret Has Been Revealed 🙊

People have been asking me about how go about learning a language and just how in the world am I able to pull it off. Donc voici mon secret pour apprendre une langue, il faut vraiment utiliser la langue dans la vie quotidienne 😉. Immersing oneself in the target language is a no-brainer, but what we really need to do is consume content that really interests us. This then makes language learning a fun experience, and the motivation to learn just comes naturally. And of course, listening to native speakers speak truly accelerates the learning process. This allows us to learn the language in a truly natural way, and this is precisely how we all learned our mother tongues, i.e. by listening (and speaking) to others.