Study New Languages

I haven’t been pursuing French as aggressively as my Spanish studies. The nature of French writing and pronunciation makes proceeding with a big push of reading to acquire vocabulary a lot trickier. You see, part of the trick is that reading activates the audio-centric areas of your brain. So, to your brain you are really listening to the words in your head as you read. Now, if you’re thinking about the wrong pronunciation then it means that you’re progress is going to be slow and you’ll have many false starts and learn many things incorrectly. So, try to get a good grounding in French pronunciation first.

My suggestion is to not worry about rapid progress of hundreds of pages in a book or articles a day. Write down a list of words you don’t know in an article, get the definitions, include them in your note card software (mnemosyne, anki or some other spaced repetition learning/memorization process.) The bottom line is to remain steady and consistent.

Wikipedia Francaisl - How many hours did I spend reading the encyclopedia when I was growing up? I know it was easy to look up one thing and get sidetracked. Even easier to do so online. Thanks to the Wikipedia we have many languages available at our fingertips including French.

Project Gutenberg has made a concerted effort at putting out of copyright books online. They’ve done this with books from many languages as well.This link connects to their current listing of French language e-books/e-texts that are available for download.