For fluency's sake.
Per my recollection I started learning the French language in the 7th grade. I believe all grade had to suffer through mandatory Latin classes before enrolling in a language class of choice. Having returned a few years earlier from a Spanish speaking country and wanting to be able to connect (historically) with my Haitian roots I'd long decided the next language I was interested in learning was French. I continued on with the language into high school and university, where I'd major and evaluate graduate with a degree in the language.
But my fluency has flowed and ebbed. Having the linguistic background of another romance language meant I was often farther along than my junior high school classmates and at some point my interactions stagnated. High school French was initially and mostly rehash, but of course did build my foundation further up. Being exposed to another teacher meant another accent and it never hurts to re-cement basics.
Actually, I think high school was probably when I started speaking French in classes. Towards the end of junior high school I was pushing my self-learning, but really high school is when it took off. I'm aging myself but I remember watching Zidane's last World Cup on France 24 which aired over-the-air on surplus channels in NYC. I'd come home from school and plop down on the couch, pushing my comprehension limits. Borrowing foreign films from the library for comprehension (and presumably in my teenage mind, culture) was a foregone conclusion.
College came and that was probably the first time I was challenged to the point of feeling like I was struggling, something that had in all likelihood been a great boon. The challenge came during a class (the name of which I do not remember) where we studied, I want to say, 18th century Francophone communities in North America? A few classes involved reading historical colonial or imperialistic, anti- or pro-, accounts. Speaking in classes pushed my pronunciation. And it was at university that I was first introduced to music as a supplement for language learning. That really changed the game.
Whereas I was immersed in a French learning setting in college, upon graduated that dissipated. I was no longer speaking French or writing French semi-regularly for class. I didn't have to read French classics or watch artistic French film staples. My exposure was completely dependent on me. Since graduating my writing and speaking skills have gone from (in my opinion) my masterful best to generically working. But thankfully there's Twitter. And it's half weird saying that, but it's completely true. I maintain my connection to the Francophone world through social media sites.
I joined Twitter during my last years of university and it's usefulness as an information resource was immediately apparent. I remember reading about the 2011 earthquake in Japan in class and seeing the real-time updates. Twitter's usefulness has been reiterated time and time again since, but ever since then the site's been my primary source of international news. Eventually I started following a lot of French news publications and after many paragraphs that's what I want to talk about.
Whenever I see a news article of interest pop up on my feed I click it. In this instance, with respect to French publications I click (usually it has to be some political drama) I struggle read. Sometimes the articles are shorter and relatively easy to comprehend, sometimes I spend a bunch of time looking up words and their translations. I was inspire to write this post because within the last hour or so, such an article came across my Twitter Feed. The global trend towards xenophobic autocracy is something I try and stay abreast of, so when an article about the would-be filial impropriety of one such aspiring autocrat was linked I clicked.
In the International News section, subsection Brazil, the Le Monde article is about a new incidence of suspected corruption surrounding the son of Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro. The article is sweetly short and the estimated reading time is one minute. It did not take me a minute, but it probably took me less than six. Probably. I think I took a break at some point to do something in the kitchen.
When I read these articles I read them aloud. I get to hear my pronunciation and sound out words I might not know. Sometimes those words are new but they sound similar to words I know in Spanish and I'm able to suss out the meaning. I struggle read the article to the degree of comfortable comprehension. Sometimes I toggle between the Google translation of the page and the original text but usually I copy-paste the article, or paragraphs at a time, into Google Translate to check what I understood and the correct pronunciations. But I do it all for fluency's sake.
Recently Twitter, I think on mobile but I'm sure one could go to the settings on desktop as well, prompted me to choose what languages I wanted to received tweets in on my feed. I selected all the available languages that I'm currently learning (for instance, I don't think Swahili was an option). I don't think I've yet seen too many articles or tweets in any of the other languages (besides French news I also follow several Spanish language news outlets and a few official Russian accounts) but I'm hopeful for what my feed my bring to my erudite doorstep. I might have more success with other social media sites, YouTube's great for French and Spanish as well, not to mention how Instagram connects me to Turkish and Russian speakers, but Twitter for French is a mainstay in my life. I just wanted to share that with you.
But my fluency has flowed and ebbed. Having the linguistic background of another romance language meant I was often farther along than my junior high school classmates and at some point my interactions stagnated. High school French was initially and mostly rehash, but of course did build my foundation further up. Being exposed to another teacher meant another accent and it never hurts to re-cement basics.
Actually, I think high school was probably when I started speaking French in classes. Towards the end of junior high school I was pushing my self-learning, but really high school is when it took off. I'm aging myself but I remember watching Zidane's last World Cup on France 24 which aired over-the-air on surplus channels in NYC. I'd come home from school and plop down on the couch, pushing my comprehension limits. Borrowing foreign films from the library for comprehension (and presumably in my teenage mind, culture) was a foregone conclusion.College came and that was probably the first time I was challenged to the point of feeling like I was struggling, something that had in all likelihood been a great boon. The challenge came during a class (the name of which I do not remember) where we studied, I want to say, 18th century Francophone communities in North America? A few classes involved reading historical colonial or imperialistic, anti- or pro-, accounts. Speaking in classes pushed my pronunciation. And it was at university that I was first introduced to music as a supplement for language learning. That really changed the game.
Whereas I was immersed in a French learning setting in college, upon graduated that dissipated. I was no longer speaking French or writing French semi-regularly for class. I didn't have to read French classics or watch artistic French film staples. My exposure was completely dependent on me. Since graduating my writing and speaking skills have gone from (in my opinion) my masterful best to generically working. But thankfully there's Twitter. And it's half weird saying that, but it's completely true. I maintain my connection to the Francophone world through social media sites.
I joined Twitter during my last years of university and it's usefulness as an information resource was immediately apparent. I remember reading about the 2011 earthquake in Japan in class and seeing the real-time updates. Twitter's usefulness has been reiterated time and time again since, but ever since then the site's been my primary source of international news. Eventually I started following a lot of French news publications and after many paragraphs that's what I want to talk about.
Whenever I see a news article of interest pop up on my feed I click it. In this instance, with respect to French publications I click (usually it has to be some political drama) I struggle read. Sometimes the articles are shorter and relatively easy to comprehend, sometimes I spend a bunch of time looking up words and their translations. I was inspire to write this post because within the last hour or so, such an article came across my Twitter Feed. The global trend towards xenophobic autocracy is something I try and stay abreast of, so when an article about the would-be filial impropriety of one such aspiring autocrat was linked I clicked.
In the International News section, subsection Brazil, the Le Monde article is about a new incidence of suspected corruption surrounding the son of Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro. The article is sweetly short and the estimated reading time is one minute. It did not take me a minute, but it probably took me less than six. Probably. I think I took a break at some point to do something in the kitchen.
When I read these articles I read them aloud. I get to hear my pronunciation and sound out words I might not know. Sometimes those words are new but they sound similar to words I know in Spanish and I'm able to suss out the meaning. I struggle read the article to the degree of comfortable comprehension. Sometimes I toggle between the Google translation of the page and the original text but usually I copy-paste the article, or paragraphs at a time, into Google Translate to check what I understood and the correct pronunciations. But I do it all for fluency's sake.
Recently Twitter, I think on mobile but I'm sure one could go to the settings on desktop as well, prompted me to choose what languages I wanted to received tweets in on my feed. I selected all the available languages that I'm currently learning (for instance, I don't think Swahili was an option). I don't think I've yet seen too many articles or tweets in any of the other languages (besides French news I also follow several Spanish language news outlets and a few official Russian accounts) but I'm hopeful for what my feed my bring to my erudite doorstep. I might have more success with other social media sites, YouTube's great for French and Spanish as well, not to mention how Instagram connects me to Turkish and Russian speakers, but Twitter for French is a mainstay in my life. I just wanted to share that with you.
Comments
Post a Comment