I will be studying abroad in Paris for six weeks of next semester. I leave for Paris on January 7th, and leave Paris on February 17th. From this point, I have approximately two months to learn as much French as possible, not unlike the two months I had for my Hebrew challenge.

I’m aiming for around the same level I aimed for in Hebrew, “tourist” level. Using the CEFR as a reference, this is somewhere around the A2 level, with some modifications to focus on the things that are most important for me to know in French. These include shopping (buying things), transportation (getting to things), and food (eating things) as well as the obvious emergency phrases (Where is the bathroom? Help me, I am in pain, and “My hovercraft is full of eels”).

I’m going to use the same methods I used for Hebrew: spaced repetition with Anki, mnemonics to remember words, and speaking as much and as early as possible. However, this time I want to be more rigorous about the content I intend to learn and about setting more definitive checkpoints.

In the two weeks since I’ve last written, I’ve been learning Hebrew. At this point, I think the goals in my previous post are reasonable – I can achieve tourist level in the month I have left. However, I am doubtful that I can progress much beyond that, because of a lack of time.

I can ask simple questions (like what time is dinner?) and understand simple responses (7). I’m still at the point where any response I’m not expecting will throw me off, and I’ll have to ask them to speak slower, or revert to English. On Saturday night I went to a language meet-up hosted by Fluent TLV at the Abraham Hostel downtown. By the end of the night, I was able to have a 3 to 4 response exchange about where I’m from, how long I’m in Israel, and what I’m doing here.

Biking in the Golan Heights

I use whatever Hebrew words I know given the chance (I once asked for mushroom on a salad just because I was proud to have known the word for mushroom – pi-tri-yot). People on the program have also commented on my progress, saying I must be good at languages.

Shalom y’all.

When I was in middle school, I used to hide away in the mahogany lined study of my grandfather, reading blogs, forums, and books about learning languages. A particular influence was Benny Lewis of fluentin3months.com. He used to go to a new country for three months (the usual length of a tourist visa), fully immerse himself in the language (no English), and aim for fluency in the short time he had. He used language “hacks” such as mnemonics, memory palaces, and spaced repetition, as well as a relentless drive to use the language whenever he could.

Even when he fell short (like when he narrowly failed the German C1 exam), the level of achievement was mind-boggling for my 12 year old self. It inspired me to start learning Spanish outside of school, speaking to Spanish speakers every chance I got, and Skype-ing with people from other countries. I dreamed of all the languages I would learn and the dimly lit, smoky café back room I would visit on escapes from the gray, cold, western New York winters.

But just like everything else, I kind of got lazy and haven’t pursued that dream since.