Bonjour Fatima, C'est un bien beau programme que tu te prépares là ! Les audiobooks sont une excellente idée. Pour la lecture, as-tu pensé à une traduction d'un auteur américain d'un livre que tu aurais déjà lu. C'est assez pratique au début. Pense aussi aux poètes (Hugo, Villon, La Fontaine, Baudelaire, Prévert, ... la liste est longue) qui offrent des textes assez courts que l'on utilise à l'école pour apprendre le français. Tu devrais essayer. Molière et Racine sont aussi les auteurs qu'on apprend à l'école. Si tu en as l'occasion, cherche sur Paris une librairie de vieux livres d'école et regarde lles livres de cours de français "Lagarde et Michard". Il y a une quantité de texte qui devrais te faire plaisir et t'aider dans ton objectif. Juste pour me présenter rapidement, je suis un Français de 61 ans et qui a eu la chance d'avoir un accès à la culture depuis tout petit. Je comprends ton enthousiasme et te souhaite de le conserver tout le temps. Joyeux Noël et bonne année 🥂🥳🎉
Merci beaucoup pour votre message et vos conseils. Je n'ai jamais entendu parler de la collection littéraire de Lagarde et Michard. Cela semble assez essentiel pour m'aider à me renseigner sur la culture générale française. Je compte à passer par une librarie pour m'acheter un livre. C'est aussi une très bonne idée de lire un livre anglophone que j'ai déjà lu en anglais mais cette fois-ci en français. Merci et bonne année à vous! Cdlt, Fatima
Yo' what up? A looooong time ago I saw one of your videos--in your, let's say, more kinetic days when you were kinda bouncing off the walls. Now you're all business! Nah. I guess youtube felt it was time I saw you again, so I just wanted to drop a note and congratulate you on all these years abroad--and still motivated to dig into that hard, hard language. The whole video I was like "I wonder what her 'official' level is?" Because in other videos, you've inserted clips of you on news programs, so I figured you must be way past C2. And it was fast, but I think in this video you said your mother and father speak French too, jeez! But then at the end you said what test you're prepping for. Well you SEEM very able, but you've laid out a pretty heavy duty game plan. I'm only on my first couple of years. But I gotta tell you, I lived in Tokyo way back and I met people who had been there DECADES with pretty much zero ability to speak or read. I had taken a couple of years uptown in NYC at Columbia, so I was good to go. And this might surprise you; I find French HARDER! I dabble in German and Italian, and like Japanese, (for me) they come easy to my mind; consistent easy rules and sounds. But the reasons I struggle with French are the same reasons my 6 month experiment with European Portuguese was tough; in MY opinion making those sounds don't come natural to a native English speaker, hard to reproduce. And, again to me, with FR and PT it's hard to separate words you hear for...damn...at least 2 years. So I read WAY better! It's a "cliché" mais, c'est la vie! hahaha...
Hi Bob! Thank you for your comment! Don't worry, I am still very much in my kinetic days. I have videos for various themes. 🤗 Some days I like producing videos about the day in the life of a foreigner experiencing France (whether it is for something minute like grocery shopping or something extraordinary like visiting a French "rodeo") and some days I like to talk about learning learning languages. It ranges because I like to keep myself entertained with the types of videos I produce. As for languages, both my parents speak 3 languages fluently. They have taught me the importance of education and the spirit of continuously striving to learn more. 🤗 Heck, I still try to work on my native language! I will occasionally pick up an English grammar book meant for natives and I have subscribed to a "word of the day" newsletter. Today's word of the day is "cavil" by the way. While I feel okay with my level of French, I know there is room for improvement, hence my perhaps overly ambitious language learning goal for the year. 😅. As my level grows, I am able to read books that I once found challenging, I am able to breeze through TV shows that I once found exhausting to watch, and I am able to skim through newspapers that I once found impossible to cypher. However, I am still growing and learning new things which why I believe that learning a new language never actually stops. 😅 If there's one thing I've learned from living in America and then in France, it's that the number of years spent in a country doesn't necessarily correlate with fluency; rather, it reflects one's duration of survival in a particular place.
Jeez, so 2 parents speaking multiple languages. So, I'm guessing NOT born in the good old US o A. hahah, well, you're certainly motivated. And a big part of my "inspiration collage." I've had you in my youtube folks in France, with Tiffanie (now in LA, where I also lived), Patricia down south, Roman, Jalen and Marie. Even a little Jay Swanson and that other guy whose parents just moved there too...Natahan! That's it, had to do a quick search. All of you helped me make my decision, I'll be South of you, but I'll be watching. Trying to navigate the language! I'm also kinda/sorta messing with Arabic too for that South location, but hard focusing on French. But it's people like yourself that, I think, are RARE. The move, the decision to stay, figuring HOW to stay. All these things are big, big deals, and help people like me. So I appreciate it. Well I stayed up all night to watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith and normally I try to do a French show like Astrid, but this one was too good to "miss."
Congrats and best of luck with your move! Hope you enjoy it! Just started Mr. and Mrs. Smith too. If I am compelled to watch American TV, I try to add French subtitles. I don't know if it helps but it's definitely fun.
Hey thanks, we'll see how it goes. (my original arrival this past Oct got screwed, so I'm open to failing again, BUT, super determined/committed). And interesting tip! I normally do the opposite; watching French stuff with French subs (because I read better). But yeah, I can see that, watching English with French subs...yeah, like "how would you say such and such in French?" Yeah, that's a wild idea. Thanks again.
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Bonjour Fatima,
C'est un bien beau programme que tu te prépares là !
Les audiobooks sont une excellente idée.
Pour la lecture, as-tu pensé à une traduction d'un auteur américain d'un livre que tu aurais déjà lu. C'est assez pratique au début. Pense aussi aux poètes (Hugo, Villon, La Fontaine, Baudelaire, Prévert, ... la liste est longue) qui offrent des textes assez courts que l'on utilise à l'école pour apprendre le français. Tu devrais essayer. Molière et Racine sont aussi les auteurs qu'on apprend à l'école.
Si tu en as l'occasion, cherche sur Paris une librairie de vieux livres d'école et regarde lles livres de cours de français "Lagarde et Michard". Il y a une quantité de texte qui devrais te faire plaisir et t'aider dans ton objectif.
Juste pour me présenter rapidement, je suis un Français de 61 ans et qui a eu la chance d'avoir un accès à la culture depuis tout petit. Je comprends ton enthousiasme et te souhaite de le conserver tout le temps.
Joyeux Noël et bonne année 🥂🥳🎉
Merci beaucoup pour votre message et vos conseils. Je n'ai jamais entendu parler de la collection littéraire de Lagarde et Michard. Cela semble assez essentiel pour m'aider à me renseigner sur la culture générale française. Je compte à passer par une librarie pour m'acheter un livre. C'est aussi une très bonne idée de lire un livre anglophone que j'ai déjà lu en anglais mais cette fois-ci en français.
Merci et bonne année à vous!
Cdlt,
Fatima
Yo' what up? A looooong time ago I saw one of your videos--in your, let's say, more kinetic days when you were kinda bouncing off the walls. Now you're all business! Nah. I guess youtube felt it was time I saw you again, so I just wanted to drop a note and congratulate you on all these years abroad--and still motivated to dig into that hard, hard language. The whole video I was like "I wonder what her 'official' level is?" Because in other videos, you've inserted clips of you on news programs, so I figured you must be way past C2. And it was fast, but I think in this video you said your mother and father speak French too, jeez! But then at the end you said what test you're prepping for. Well you SEEM very able, but you've laid out a pretty heavy duty game plan.
I'm only on my first couple of years. But I gotta tell you, I lived in Tokyo way back and I met people who had been there DECADES with pretty much zero ability to speak or read. I had taken a couple of years uptown in NYC at Columbia, so I was good to go. And this might surprise you; I find French HARDER! I dabble in German and Italian, and like Japanese, (for me) they come easy to my mind; consistent easy rules and sounds. But the reasons I struggle with French are the same reasons my 6 month experiment with European Portuguese was tough; in MY opinion making those sounds don't come natural to a native English speaker, hard to reproduce. And, again to me, with FR and PT it's hard to separate words you hear for...damn...at least 2 years. So I read WAY better! It's a "cliché" mais, c'est la vie! hahaha...
Hi Bob!
Thank you for your comment!
Don't worry, I am still very much in my kinetic days. I have videos for various themes. 🤗 Some days I like producing videos about the day in the life of a foreigner experiencing France (whether it is for something minute like grocery shopping or something extraordinary like visiting a French "rodeo") and some days I like to talk about learning learning languages. It ranges because I like to keep myself entertained with the types of videos I produce.
As for languages, both my parents speak 3 languages fluently. They have taught me the importance of education and the spirit of continuously striving to learn more. 🤗 Heck, I still try to work on my native language! I will occasionally pick up an English grammar book meant for natives and I have subscribed to a "word of the day" newsletter. Today's word of the day is "cavil" by the way.
While I feel okay with my level of French, I know there is room for improvement, hence my perhaps overly ambitious language learning goal for the year. 😅. As my level grows, I am able to read books that I once found challenging, I am able to breeze through TV shows that I once found exhausting to watch, and I am able to skim through newspapers that I once found impossible to cypher. However, I am still growing and learning new things which why I believe that learning a new language never actually stops. 😅
If there's one thing I've learned from living in America and then in France, it's that the number of years spent in a country doesn't necessarily correlate with fluency; rather, it reflects one's duration of survival in a particular place.
Jeez, so 2 parents speaking multiple languages. So, I'm guessing NOT born in the good old US o A. hahah, well, you're certainly motivated. And a big part of my "inspiration collage." I've had you in my youtube folks in France, with Tiffanie (now in LA, where I also lived), Patricia down south, Roman, Jalen and Marie. Even a little Jay Swanson and that other guy whose parents just moved there too...Natahan! That's it, had to do a quick search. All of you helped me make my decision, I'll be South of you, but I'll be watching. Trying to navigate the language! I'm also kinda/sorta messing with Arabic too for that South location, but hard focusing on French. But it's people like yourself that, I think, are RARE. The move, the decision to stay, figuring HOW to stay. All these things are big, big deals, and help people like me. So I appreciate it.
Well I stayed up all night to watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith and normally I try to do a French show like Astrid, but this one was too good to "miss."
Congrats and best of luck with your move! Hope you enjoy it!
Just started Mr. and Mrs. Smith too. If I am compelled to watch American TV, I try to add French subtitles. I don't know if it helps but it's definitely fun.
Hey thanks, we'll see how it goes. (my original arrival this past Oct got screwed, so I'm open to failing again, BUT, super determined/committed).
And interesting tip! I normally do the opposite; watching French stuff with French subs (because I read better). But yeah, I can see that, watching English with French subs...yeah, like "how would you say such and such in French?" Yeah, that's a wild idea. Thanks again.