I have been trying to learn french for seven years. Every couple of months I get this huge burst of motivation to do it. It lasts a couple of months, my vocabulary grows, and then I lose focus. I stop whatever consistent effort I was previously partaking in. I go a couple of months without any form of practice. I regress. That’s the cycle.
In the last two years, I have redefined what consistency means to me. Consistency doesn't solely mean that I don’t miss days or I don’t fall off the bandwagon. Consistency means I can take note of when I fall off and I can get back.
In a bid to rediscover my ability to focus deeply on work, I read Hyperfocus by Chris Bailey. I, unfortunately, rated the reading experience of that book 2 stars on Goodreads but I can’t deny that certain ideas were worth writing. One of those ideas was this.
The main action of focusing is noticing when your focus wavers and just realigning. Your focus will waver, that’s inevitable. I believe in the book, Chris went as far as postulating how often your focus will drift. But the action of focusing isn’t just clicking a button and suddenly zoning in. It is a practice of noticing your distraction, taking note, and gently refocusing.
That’s everything consistency is. It is the practice of noticing when you miss a day and just simply getting back to it. So here I am, trying to take on French again.
I have only one goal with this particular cycle. In my life this year, I am not setting any hard goals. I am simply trying to cultivate habits. So my goal is to cultivate the habit of practising french. I will be doing so with these resources
Coffee Break French
(a podcast of short french lessons featuring conversations and guidance)
The plan is to listen to at least one episode of coffee break french a day. So far, this year, I have listened to about 40 episodes and finished their first- I guess you can call it- module.
Michel Thomas
(an audio series of English-french translating classes )
I have been using this resource for a few years now. I don’t plan to listen to a class every day but 4 times a week will be a good frequency for me.
Duolingo
(language learning app)
I turned off most of Duolingo's prompts that are meant to encourage you to learn. I don’t let it show me the competitive tables and I care very little about keeping a streak going. Duolingo has proven a good way for me to learn new words so I will try to do a couple of classes every week.
Apart from all these resources for picking up words and structure lessons, I think something that has really been missing in my life has been the opportunity to practise. That’s something I think I need to invest more time into doing.
Reading: I don’t yet have a set plan for doing this regularly but I recently bought a french copy of Chimamanda’s Note on Grief that I will read very slowly and with some help from google translate.
Conversation: I also don’t yet have any plans for getting conversational practice right now but I am currently dreaming of living in Dakar, Senegal for a month at some point in time in the not too distant future. It will depend on my ability to improve my earning capacity and to work fully remotely for a month.
This will become a series of updates following this cycle of me trying to learn French yet again. Wish me luck.
Ps
This series is inspired by Onyekachi’s series on 3D modelling.
