This is my final blog post for this project. I've learned a lot during this project. Not just about French, but about languages in general. I've discovered what it takes to learn a language, the hours you have to put in, the schedule you have to keep, the patience you need, the logical thinking you need to utilize, etc. This project was more than just about learning a language, it was about making a plan and sticking to it. This project is an important milestone in my life as it taught me what it means to be dedicated to something. For this project I didn't set many goals for myself because I was afraid I would cut myself short. That being said I plan to continue learning French even after this project is over.
I have finally decided on what to do for my final project presentation. I plan to create a slideshow that shows my journey through this project from the day I decided to learn French. I will display to the class what I did, as well as what all I learned. I also plan to teach the class a few things throughout the presentation. I made it to the 3rd checkpoint on Duolingo and even went past that a little bit. I reached my final goal for this project. Reaching the third checkpoint may have been the stopping point for this project, but I plan to continue learning French through Duolingo and other sources. I may follow up with a post in the distant future on the progress I make, if I make any at all. For now, Au revoir!
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My project is coming to a close fairly soon, so I'm starting to wrap up my French lessons. I've decided to stop after checkpoint 3. There are 13 modules left until I reach checkpoint 3 so I'll do those modules for the last week of the project. I still haven't decided exactly what I'm going to be doing in order to present this project but I've got a general idea.
Throughout this project I have been able to use my French skills in real life. I honestly never thought I would use French until I went back to Canada or if I were to go to France, but I've been able to decipher words that I had never considered to be French. Recently, I went to a lacrosse game betwwen UNC and Notre Dame. As I was looking at the team rosters I recognized "Notre Dame" as some French words I had recently learned. Their school name meant "Our lady." This last week in civics and economics, we were talking about capitalism. I happened to recognize the phrase "laissez-faire" I knew that the two words meant "let do" which makes sense because laissez-faire capitalism is an economic system where the government does not get involved. One thing I like to do now when listening to music is to translate the lyrics to French and see if I can still ing the song. The song I worked on the most was "riptide" simply because one of the phrases I learned on Duolingo was "courant de retour." It literally translated to "current of return" but we call it a riptide. I was able to translate most of the beginning of the song. I did have to look up some words like dentist and magician. Next week's blog will be the final one, so with this being the penultimate blog post it will probably be the last time I get to teach you some French. The French word you may see a lot is "je." this means "I." You may seen this word on shirts or other apparel that might say "je t'aime" (I love you.) This word may also appear in the form of " J' " such as "j'adore France" (I love France.) In a conversation you will often hear "Je suis ____." This means "I am ____." I hope you learned a bit today. because je suis fini. a bientot! I've made a good amount of progress this week in my duolingo modules. It may seem strange but, as I complete modules it gets both harder and easier in different ways. The reason I say it gets harder the further along you go is because the topics you learn about become more specific and complicated. It also gets easier the further along I go for a different reason. As I complete modules I learn words and how to use them. I'm also able to create methods to figure out new words from the experience I gain. In other words, the words get more complicated, but it gets easier to figure them out.
I would like to continue the trend of teaching you, the reader, some basic French. In this blog I would like to teach some simple phrases that would be used in typical conversations. First you must know how to begin the converstaion. When greeting someone you can either say "salut" (pronounced sahloo) which means hello or "bonjour" (pronounced bahnjore) which means good day. One of the most important things in a conversation is knowing how to answer a question. The most frequent answers to questions are yes and no. A lot of people already know how that yes in French is "oui", but most people incorrectly spell it as "wee". To say no in French you say "Non" (pronounced nahn) Pretty easy to remember right? If you wanted to say please just say "s'il vous plait" (pronounced see voo play) or if you wanted to say thank you you could say "merci" (pronounced mairsee). I hope you learned something. a bientot! This week I made a lot of progress on my lessons from duolingo. One day I managed to knock out about 15 modules. There are so many modules in the entire French course. It just goes to show that learning a language is not something that can be done overnight. It takes a lot of time and dedication. One of the promises I made at the beginning of this project was that I was going to help teach my audience some French. Looking back, I see that I haven't done a very good job of keeping that promise. For the next few weeks I would like to teach some words and phrases that I've learned along the way. Below is a guide with some common phrases that are spoken in French. This list shows you some of the things you might say in a conversation. When I first started learning French, in Canada, I memorized some of the phrases I heard and what they meant. It wasn't until later that I tried to learn French online that I could truly break down these French phrases and understand what each part meant. When you learn a language on duolingo it teaches you individual words. Then it takes those words and puts them into sentences that would be commonly said. This was helpful because I was able to interpret each individual word in the sentence instead of just understanding the general meaning of the sentence. This also taught me how word structure is used in French. I encourage you to look at the list above and try to break down each French pharse word for word. A bientot!
I've been working on my French skills slowly but surely. It's been pretty long and annoying, but I can see myself improving indefinitely. I use french at least once a week. Every once in a while I'll see something written in French or I'll hear something spoken in French. I can make out a suprising amount of it too.
Just the other day I searched for an "article de journal en francais" (newspaper article in french) on google. What I found were multiple links to French websites with articles on current events. Every website was entirely in French so I knew I wasn't going to recieve any aid in trying to decipher these articles. However, in my opinion the best way to learn to swim is to be thrown into the deep end. And so I browsed across articles that I could understand such as economie, sport, culture. I came across one article in particular about foreign events. I've put the link to this article at the bottom. From what I could gather, the article was about terrorism in the peninsula of Sinai. It discussed the tribes of Sinai taking measures to combat terrorism on the peninsula. It truly was a difficult article to read but I did it without help so I know I'm learning. https://savoirs.rfi.fr/en/apprendre-enseigner/langue-francaise/journal-en-francais-facile-26112017-20h00-gmt As I mentioned in my last blog post I went to Italy and Greece over Spring Break. I was able to use my French skills in Italy. I was able to understand some of the basic words and phrases being used by the locals like "buongiorno" (good morning), "buonasera" (good afternoon), and "buonanotte" (good night). I was also able to recognize all 7 days of the week written in Italian. I recognized a lot of other Italian words that were similar to French, I just can't remember them at the moment. I did however learn that Italian is more closely related to Spanish. For example: Thank you in Italian is "grazie" and please is "per favore". yes in Italian is "si" and you ask someone how they are by saying "come sta". Do those words sound familiar?
Surprisingly the only times I ever used actual French was in Greece... where they have a completely different alphabet. The Greek language is a really unique language as it doesn't use the same alphabet as any other major languages. Therefore, Greece caters to many languages other than Greek. As a matter of fact 51% of all Greeks speak English in addition to Greek. This means nearly all menus, maps, and signs were written in multiple languages. I challenged myself by only ordering from the French menu. I was surprised to find that I knew every word on the menu or I could figure out every word with context clues. Duolingo has actually done away with their fluency percentage system and exchanged it for levels. Since I can't see my fluency rating I will no longer be reaching for the goal of 100% fluency. I haven't yet figured out what kind of crown level I should be shooting for, but once I do I'll keep you updated. During Spring Break I will be traveling outside of the country to a place where my French skills may be useful. No, I'm not going to France, I'm actually going to Italy and Greece. You may be wondering "how would speaking French in Italy or Greece be helpful?" It probably won't. Chances are I'm not going to meet a French person to talk to or have to read a menu, written entirely in French, at a French restaraunt. However, I can use some of my language learning skills to help me in Italy.
You see the lexical similarity of French and Italy is 85-90%. This means about 90% of the 2 language's words are similar. For comparison, the lexical similarity of English to French is only 27%. This would be really helpful for reading things in Italian. Already having an understanding of some basic French words will be beneficial in understanding menu items and road signs written in French. This is further proof that learning a foreign language can help you in situations you wouldn't normaly expect it to. I'm at about 45% fluency on Duolingo. I've started to realize that the lessons get harder and your fluency goes up less and less. I still believe that if I get down to business and knock out modules one at a time I will reach my goal of becoming 100% fluent on Duolingo. I missed three days of learning French on Duolingo, so although I've been studying and working on French modules for hours this week I'm only at 37% fluency of French on Duolingo. If you are interested in learning French or any other language on Duolingo, I strongly advise you to create a schedule and set aside time to complete lessons. I decided to dedicate 30 minutes a day to learning French, but sometimes I will have a busy day and won't have time or I'll simply forget. I would also like to advise you to question everything that seems strange. Duolingo is not 100% accurate and will sometimescount your translations wrong even though they're correct.
I've learned that it's a lot harder to speak French than it is to read and write it. Every once in a while, when I tell someone about my venture into the French language, they'll ask me to say something in French. Sometimes it can be difficult when they ask me to say a certain word or phrase, because I don't know every single word in the French language. It's a lot easier to translate French to English, because I can usually use context clues to discover words I haven't learned. Also, in English we typically have one word that can be used to describe anyone or anything. For example: In English you say "I eat, you eat, we eat." In French you would say "Je mange, Tu manges, Nous mangeons." Each action verb has different spellings depending on who is performing the action. Right now I am 3 weeks into this 12 week project. That means I'm 25% of the way through with the project. Conveniently, Duolingo says I'm 24% fluent in French. So I decided to set a new goal. I plan to be 100% fluent in French on Duolingo by the end of this Genius Hour project. I'm also looking to have some sort of end product to show what I've learned throughout these 12 weeks.
I've learned that French can be very confusing. The sentence structure always baffles me. Sometimes a 2-word French phrase will translate to be a 3-word English phrase and vice versa. The prununciation of letters is completely foreign. To give you some examples: J's and G's are supposed to almost sound like Z's; consonants at the end of words are often silent; you might as well throw out any knowledge you may hae had about vowels because they can make any sound they want to in French. And then on top of all that you'll have accent marks sprinkled throughout words. I have spent many hours on duolingo arguing and yelling at my screen. I do believe that if I stick with it I can learn a great deal of French. Maybe if I make it through this ordeal I'll recommend it? One of my greatest passions is lacrosse. Lacrosse is a sport created by Native Americans. It originates from Eastern Canada and Northeastern United States. French settlers discovered the Native Americans playing this sport and dubbed it "lacrosse" meaning "the stick" in French. I never really thought of the French having any involvement in the game until I met a Canadian lacrosse team.
I was at the Dick's Sporting Goods Tournament of Champions when I noticed there was a team from Ontario competing. They all had very thick Canadian accents and being from Ontario most of them spoke French. This was the first time I met anybody that fluently spoke French. I was curious if there was an actual lacrosse league in France so I googled it. I found the following website and began to look into it: www.france-lacrosse.fr/ It was a struggle, but using my current knowledge of French and some logic I was able to understand most of it. There is indeed a lacrosse league in France called l'Association Francaise De Lacrosse. Word for word, this translates to "the Association French of Lacrosse". This may not make sense to an English speaker, but that's because word patterns are different in French. It might make more sense to you as "the French Lacrosse Association". From what I could piece together the "AFL" as it is called is a small, privately funded organization that has only been around since 2008. It was really something else to be able to test my French abilities. I was able to link together French words to find the meanings of sentences or at least a faint idea of what the sentences meant. a bientot! |
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