Learning French

We are now 1 week into our new adventure, and the different pieces are starting to fall into place. I got my new french phone number, the bank will be fixed at the end of the week, and today we finally found a gym. It is a fun process, and thank higher powers for the fact that we speak some French. Most of the people we have talked to speak some level of English, but where they dont know the English word in a sentence they simply put in a French word as if it was the English word. They have all been very helpful, but when getting my new sim card I had to use a machine, where French was the only option, so without my basic level of French it would have been harder to choose the right subscription.

For now, the way we have chosen to learn French is by using the language app "Memrise" daily. It is a great app to learn basic words and phrases in a language. I also read a French grammar book, in addition to read French online newspapers such as lefigaro.fr and lequipe.fr.

As most other people in the age of 20-30 we watch Netflix quite a lot. We have French subtitles on when watching English speaking shows or movies, this helps us recognize the words we have learned and see what new words we should learn. As I am a huge Friends fan I know most of the episodes in and out, and I therefore watch Friends dubbed, and with subtitles. Though the problem with this is that the subtitles are for the English lines, and where they might not have translated the lines directly in the dubbed version (in order to make jokes work), the subtitles and the lines do not match.

The final thing we do in order to learn the language is to sound like a couple of 5 year olds when talking to people. We might know the words, but we have no idea how a sentence should be when we are in a normal conversation. The meaning comes through, but people for sure know that we´re not French. But I think that´s what it takes in order to get better. So we´ll see how far we get. 

Photo: Pinterest