The Journey Begins

I have recently decided to undertake learning French, mostly on my own and in my spare time. This blog will be a way to track my studies, post interesting things I find along the way, talk about what methods do/don't seem to be working out for me, and really anything else I feel like posting that is tangentially related to my learning process.

To give you some background, I have studied foreign languages in the past. The last real major attempt being 3 years of Japanese in HS (and oh how long ago that was now). I have also half-heartedly attempted to learn other languages, but always got sidetracked and lost interest soon after. I'm hoping if I can find the right set of tools to keep things interesting I can stay on track this time and that's part of what this experiment is about for me.

Now more than ever we have access to so many tools, both paid and free, to learn languages and I intend to try using a variety of them. To list some of the ones I've come across so far:

1. Audio Lessons
   The most interesting methods here seem to be the "Pimsleur method" and the "Michel Thomas method", but there are a variety of other audio-based lessons designed to let you learn on the go. These will probably play nicely into my learning process, and often be used during my commutes to/from work on the subway.
2. Computer Software
   The big one here everyone has probably heard of is Rosetta Stone, but there are a myriad of other options available as well in a range of qualities and price points.
3. Podcasts
   There are a ton of podcasts available to download, in a range of qualities. My initial impression is these will be more and more useful after someone advances through the more traditional audio lessons.
4. "iTunes U" Courses
   iTunes appears to have a number of courses from Universities through that portal of the iTunes store. I have yet to investigate them in too much detail but this is another source of free lessons and materials.
5. Blogs/Websites
   There are no shortage of internet pages devoted to teaching you all kinds of useful and esoteric language details.
6. Books
   Either in thinly sliced tree form, or as e-books, Amazon is chock-full of books promising to teach me French (some in 10 minutes a day!). But these are slightly less interesting, as I'm trying to also survey the recent technologies that facilitate language learning.
7. Online Communities/Learning services
   This is sites like LiveMocha which offer some services for language learning (often in exchange for monthly fees), which may have a community of real speakers to offer help along the way.
8. Twitter
   The tweets are in, and often they are in in other languages. Doing a search for a common phrase or word on Twitter can yield some interesting and colloquial example sentences.
9. Meetups
   You know, meeting real people. This may work better in big cities, but since I happen to be in NYC, this is an option for me.
10. College courses
    Universities and community colleges will often offer continuing education courses. I believe NYU near me offers these at various levels. Downside is they cost a fair bit and are only a couple days a week.
11. Private Tutors
    Probably the most expensive option, but options are options and I'm sure this would work well.
12. Apps
    Yes, there's probably an app for that. Though my impression thus far of the apps available for the iPad/iPhone are that none of them are particularly compelling, at least for French.
13. Google Translate
    While translations are not perfect, they can often be quite accurate for short/common phrases. In addition there are a couple new features to Google Translate that are particularly nice. The first is where if you hover over words in the translation it shows you what words were used to create that portion of the translation. You can even go farther and click on the word/phrase and it'll offer up alternative translations. This allows you to dig a little deeper if you suspect the translation was a little bit off. The other nice feature is the "Listen" buttons that show up, letting you have Google speak the sentence for you. It's not perfect either (and isn't an option for some languages yet), but it could get you 90% of the way there and let you verify how you thought the pronunciation might be.
    

The above was not even an exhaustive list I'm sure, but it gives you an idea of all the resources and tools that are available for language learning these days, many of which I may try along the way.

It is also worth noting that I have also studied some Linguistics in both undergraduate and graduate school, and consider my day job to be a mix of Software Engineering and Computational Linguistics. That being said, the Computational Linguistics I generally do is more shallow processing using Machine Learning methods, rather than deep language specific work. As a result though you may see nerdy computer science or linguistics references in this blog from time to time.

Let the learning begin!