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.
One thing I found helpful about the Hebrew challenge is that I did provide some sort of “end”, and I could point to specific phrases that I would need to learn before I could say I reached that end. For example, one of my goals was to shop in Hebrew. So it was easy to know I had to learn the numbers to reach my goal. But there was still some ambiguity. Did learning the numbers mean I could shop in Hebrew (was it necessary and sufficient to learn the numbers in order to shop in Hebrew)? Or were there additional necessary conditions I had to fulfill before I could shop in Hebrew.
I don’t want to be in the same situation with this challenge, and I want to set some more concrete requirements based on how I intend to use the language, that are exhaustive. Once I hit all the requirements, I should be able to do the thing I set out to do. For example, I want to be able to order food in French. I could break this down into the types of restaurants I could eat at (fast food, street food, fast casual, sit down restaurant). This would give me a list of words and phrases that should be similar amongst all eating establishments (I want __, please bring __, do we order at our table? where should we put our trash?). I would then go further and think about the type of foods I would eat (Spanish, French, German, English), and the types of vocabulary that would go along with it. These would all be necessary words and phrases I would need to learn, and it’s similar to the thought process I tried to use with Hebrew. But unlike Hebrew, I would add more conditions for the use of the language, to see if I’ve achieved the aim of the original desire. For example, a “finishing” condition is to eat at a fast food restaurant, fast casual, and sit down restaurant without using English.
In this case, the original desire was to be able to order food in French. Thus, fulfilling those conditions would be a non abstract way of realizing an abstract desire. I hope to use this process to provide more structure to my language learning.
However, I acknowledge that in many ways, this is an arbitrary process. Perhaps I fulfill those conditions, and can order off the menu in French, but I may be unable to ask for substitutions or understand an explanation of a particular dish. Someone could make a rational argument that I haven’t really learned to order food in French, because being able to do both of those is something necessary to order food in English (think about going to a new restaurant and asking the wait staff what they enjoy. This language probably doesn’t fall under the vocabulary or the finishing conditions I outlined above).
I fully admit that there are some shortcomings in this approach as far as correctness is concerned. Fundamentally, this process attempts to break down language learning into compartmentalized boxes which can be learned independently and then assembled to form an understanding of language. I’m not a linguist, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how language works and I accept that. The point of this compartmentalized approach is to try to provide a solid base for the language by focusing on the most probable scenarios. The 80/20 principle says this should probably be good enough for the uses I want. When I don’t explicitly learn a word or phrase, I should be able to figure it out using context.
I will be tracking my progress on a separate page, but here are generally what I want to achieve before I leave France:
- use and understand Emergency phrases (finding a bathroom, I am allergic to __)
- basic language difficulties (what do you call this, I don’t speak much French, can you repeat what you said)
- ask and understand basic questions about where someone is from, where they live, what they study, where they work, and some basic interests
- shopping, including the numbers, asking for price reductions or deals, asking for specific things I want, and asking about the quality or background on a product
- after fulfilling this, a further step is to learn the names of certain goods
- asking for and giving directions to a location, asking and answering questions about public transportation, names of important landmarks and general names for locations (pharmacy, convenience store, clothing store etc.)
- ordering food and understanding what certain foods are (it’s like ___, it has ___). Names of ingredients.