Podcasts

I've been listening to the first few lessons of Coffee Break French lately and have found it to be a good podcast for learning. One of the weak parts of Michel Thomas' CDs was the pronunciation, but they spend a bit more time in this series pointing out details of the pronunciation in this podcast which is good.

I haven't gotten the "premium content" for CBF, just the free podcasts from iTunes, but I don't think I will since these are primarily being used during my commute anyway where I just want audio. They also look relatively pricey (especially given the current exchange rates), and I'm not sure there's a ton of value in it the additional materials.

I've also found some useful aids/materials recently. The first is a compilation of the 681 most common verbs in PDF form. The other one is a dictionary plugin for Chrome that lets you double click on words to look them up (or even Google Translate them), which I recommended to anyone who wants a bit of help in reading articles in French or any language you're learning.

8 Hours of Audio Lessons Down

I have been primarily listening to audio lessons on the way to/from work on the subway, as that is my big block of unoccupied time in the day. I started with the Michel Thomas Foundation Course, which is ~8 hours of lessons covering a variety of topics. It is overall quite good, and teaches you a lot in a fairly short period of time. That being said, it is somewhat all over the place in terms of what material is taught, but it is a reasonable introduction.

The one reason I may not have gotten as much out of it as I could have was because they don't give you a lot of time to think of your answer before telling it to you, assuming you can hit pause to think it out. That is somewhat less ideal when on the subway with my mp3 player in my pocket, or walking around NYC - I can't really have it out constantly to hit pause/play without it being very inconvenient.

I'm trying to decide what to do next, both in selecting more audio to listen to as well as additional supplemental options (time/energy permitting). I am looking at some Podcasts on iTunes as a way to get some fresh potentially more 'real world' lessons in, as what I've heard of Pimsleur seems somewhat geared toward tourists.

If I do want to go with the more traditional lessons there are some more Michel Thomas CD sets I could get such as the Advanced course, the Vocabulary Builder, etc. I could also try out the Pimsleur CDs. Also as a result of my point above about not having ample time to respond/think on my first run through I may go back and re-listen to the Foundation Course too to see how much I've retained.

I'm not sure how much I know of the language yet, but my interest has been piqued and I'm ready to keep learning more.

Flashcards with Anki

Last night I came across an interesting program called Anki. Not only is it a free application which let's you create flashcards lists and incorporates review scheduling, but there are a number of pre-made flashcard lists you can download and search for right from within the application. It is available for all the major platforms, including an Android app, and says it allows for syncing between different installations (I have not tried this option yet, though).

Overall it looks to be quite a nice application for doing flashcard reviews, and I downloaded a number of French lists to try out. It can be a bit hard to know which lists are higher quality from the search results, but it does give you information on number of downloads of any given list which may give a rough indication.

Once I get a chance to play with it more I'll report back on my longer term impressions.

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!