Short Update: Refined Strategy and Goals

I've  continued to use Duolingo, Memrise, Podcast Français Facile and to watch soap opera with the same rules as before, but I've neglected other things. I also have a short-term goal to speak with a teacher on italki.

I won’t have much expectations towards speaking with my cousin, because I don’t even know if I will see her, let alone be able to talk with her, but she knows that I’m learning French for quite some time, so still... there’s some hope. However, I strongly believe that I will be able to speak in a year with my cousin’s son and his family. I want to reach at least B1 level by that time.  It will be a great opportunity to speak because my cousin knows just a little Serbian, and his family doesn’t speak it at all. J So, that would be my medium-term goal. My long-term goal is to spend some time in France someday, and to feel and act like a native as much as I can.

By the way: I’ve started to use Bliu Bliu to maintain my English, and I want again to have a language exchange with a native English speaker

I've finally made my own learning style!

After spending hours of reading language blogs, thinking which methods and resources would suit my personality, finding the right resources,  I’ve  finally came up with my own “perfect” language learning strategy. I want to share everything with you and to be honest, so I want to admit that the lack of money forced me to do that. That is an interesting thing because I thought previously that all good language learning resources are not free. J Also, my cousin from France is coming to my country in 20 days, so I wanted to prepare for that as much as I can without spending any money, though I wish to spend a little money around June 13th, because I want to start having  few conversations with a native speaker. Firstly, I will do 15 minute sessions, twice a week, and then 30 minutes next week, twice.

Every day, I commit to these things:

I’ve started to focus intensively on my pronunciation by practicing because it is an essential aspect of speaking a language.

I’m constantly adding new words, phrases and sentences to my personal course on Memrise, from the texts which I encounter.

I use Duolingo every day with the “Insane” daily goal.

Français Facile is currently my favourite language course. I save audio and text to my computer and revise them every day and I am trying to reach at least 500 words of reading there every day.

I listen as much as I can.

I am doing also other little things which mean a lot, like writing short sentences and post them to italki or Lang-8 to be corrected and learn from my mistakes, I use Forvo when I need to know how a specific word is pronounced, etc.

The most important thing is to do every intentional learning activity throughout the whole day, divided into smaller parts.

The things I do when I am not actually studying:

Listen to the radio, watch television programmes, watch soap opera, listen to other podcasts without transcript. I don’t try to understand all these things. I just want to be surounded with a language as much as I can, and switch my daily non-productive activities with the similar things, but in French.

The reason I wrote this is because I wanted to share with you my immense happines because of that and that I’m feeling accomplished . Thank you for reading this post. I appreciate it a lot! 

How does your learning go right now and which language(s) are you studying? What is you own method? Feel free to share!